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You know things are bad when even liberals are despairing at DeSantis' poor performance. I think her analysis is mostly correct. Voters don't really care about issues so much as who is the strong candidate. Trump is funny but also strong. DeSantis is neither - despite being the actual principled conservative by comparison.
Given Kamala's own exposure as a weak air-head, it seems almost inevitable to me that we will see Biden vs Trump once again in 2024. I try not to be ageist but American politics is really becoming a gerontocracy. The refusal of Dianne Feinstein to step down is par for the course.
That said, while I believe the author is right about the primal nature of Trump's appeal, it's probably a mistake to ascribe his popularity entirely to it. I suspect many in the media still haven't understood that he rose as a consequence of structural changes that will outlast him. Seeing the GOP as the more anti-war party would never have crossed my mind during the Bush era when accusations of insufficient liberal patriotism was rife. Now it appears to me that the veneration of the CIA, Pentagon and FBI are all highly liberal-coded.
Why is Trump a stronger candidate than DeSantis? It seems to just be a matter of charisma.
Trump can't make things happen. Even if he wanted to, which is dubious, he doesn't have the ability to manipulate the organs of state and get things done. DeSantis does. DeSantis is younger, smarter and more capable. DeSantis just isn't so exciting. For example, I could get behind this policy platform from Trump: https://twitter.com/loganclarkhall/status/1631725952395878416
But I know that he doesn't have the ability to implement it. Consider that in the first part of his presidency they had both parts of the legislature and executive. He got nothing done with all that! He tried and failed to build a border wall. He succeeded in lowering taxes and assisting Israeli foreign policy goals. He failed to win culture war battles or break the power of the US administrative machine. It looks much more likely that the deep state is going to break him.
As you note, he made a major tax reform which eliminated loopholes that funnel money to high income Democrats. He ended the PATRIOT act. His supreme court hit rate is 100%, resulting in ending Roe vs Wade, compared to the 50% hit rate for all Republicans since the 80's [1]. He started 0 wars.
He also made Operation Warp Speed happen, saving millions of lives by routing around the regulatory state.
Now I'd prefer DeSantis to Trump. But lets not pretend Trump did nothing; he certainly did far more than I expected, and far more good things than the swamp dwelling Republicans he was running against.
And realistically speaking he also made other Republicans better. In a world without Trump putting wokeness on our radar, would DeSantis be anything other than a generic Republican?
[1] Bush Jr: Roberts and Alito. Bush Sr: Thomas and Souter. Reagan: O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Kennedy.
Trump's tax cuts for the rich weren't especially great for rank-and-file Republicans. His SCOTUS appointments could have been accomplished by any R president with a heartbeat. The fact that they're more reliably conservative is more thanks to McConnell and negative partisanship leading to fewer compromise candidates. Trump actually seethed about how "disloyal" his SCOTUS appointments were, as he would have preferred lapdogs rather than principled legal scholars, but thankfully McConnell outmaneuvered him.
I definitely agree that Trump made other Republicans better though, as their MO before him was essentially "chain-surrender on cultural and social issues in order to fellate transnational corporations as much as possible". Trump wasn't as much of a break with that as some people imply, but he at least moved in the right direction.
This is one of the great ironies of the religious conservatives on the Trumpist right. They hate McConnell for not being a loyal Trumpist and for being a DC insider, while also praising Trump for not fucking up the culmination of McConnell's patient long-term project of assembling a philosophically anti-Roe court. The way Roe was overturned is why we need systemic politically savvy game-players like McConnell. Trump just happened to be there when it hit the tipping point (to Trump's credit, he stayed out of the way).
Now, it looks like Trump might have one more problem on this front, with his squeamishness on the issue raising the hackles of at least one venerable pro-life group: https://nypost.com/2023/04/23/trump-touts-pro-life-record-to-iowa-voters-after-criticism-from-anti-abortion-group/ If this creates a schism in his base, DeSantis looks like a safer pro-life bet.
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