Two weeks before Wallace-Wells was in Iowa watching Ramaswamy make DeSantis look generic, I heard DeSantis and Sen. Tim Scott use a similar metaphor about the border (houses being raided) at events 18 hours apart. If we don’t control the border, it may not be our country, Scott said. “We will repel the intrusion with force,” DeSantis said. We will finish the wall, they said.
“That’s why you see these things as the militarization of agencies, because no one has held them accountable,” DeSantis said. “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired of watching the Department of Justice become a weapon against its political opponents, against pro-life activists,” Mr. Scott said. On Day 1, DeSantis said, we will have a new FBI director. The first three things we have to do, Scott said, are fire Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray. “There will be housecleaning at the Department of Justice,” DeSantis said. “We should actually eliminate every single political appointee throughout the Department of Justice,” said Scott, who wants to “purge” the department’s politicization for the benefit of all Americans. They came off stage to the same song (Darius Rucker’s version of “Wagon Wheel”).
It can be hard to remember what made Trump different eight years ago, because he has become the texture of our lives. The sensational dimension of his 1980s language (weeping mothers, blood and carnage, rot and disease in institutions, brutal actions) crushed the antiseptic piety and euphemisms of the post-Bush Republican Party. The creepy, fallen view of American life that implicitly casts critics as naïve fools or involved in corruption is the one we still hold on to.
Now they all sound something like that. Politicians’ impulse to simplify and flatten major policies and controversies is eternal, but it’s not just that they use similar words. The way these politicians talk takes Trump’s old and once novel themes of aggressive energy and promises and packages them into indoctrination and administrative status.
At the July event where DeSantis sounded so like Scott the night before, he was in the middle of a period the campaign had signaled would be a reset. Early on, speaking to a midday crowd in Iowa, DeSantis ventured into different territory, talking about economic concerns, the cost of things and debt. But he ended up talking about woke ideology, the administrative state, Disney, and everything else. If you spend a few days in New Hampshire, watching Mr. Ramaswamy here and Mr. DeSantis there, or the entire field at something like the Lincoln Dinner in Iowa, you can imagine almost the entire Republican presidential field, hands joined, heads turning at the same time and saying with one voice: “End the militarization of the Department of Justice.”
