The DeSantis campaign has attempted to turn Covid into a wedge issue. But payback is the Trump brand, even though he’s the least likely to deliver it.
“He is guilty of lying before Congress,” Florida governor Ron DeSantis told radio host Clay Travis last week when asked if his Department of Justice would seek to prosecute Dr. Anthony Fauci. Being as details-oriented as he is, DeSantis launched from there directly into the minutiae of how to ensure that jurisdictional or venue-related complications wouldn’t stymie the prosecution. In the process, however, the governor glossed over the case for seeking a legal remedy to the perjury in which Fauci is alleged to have engaged.
As Caroline Downey noted, the DeSantis campaign has attempted to turn this into a wedge issue by highlighting Donald Trump’s apparent reluctance to make a (literal) federal case out of Fauci’s mendacity. But in an intra-GOP contest between Trump and DeSantis over who is more likely to mete out satisfying vengeance against the Right’s many enemies, DeSantis isn’t likely to win it — much less to win it with a detailed plan to transfer the prosecution of federal officials to areas of the country with more neutral jury pools.
As frustrating as it is, a Covid reckoning is not in the offing. When the pandemic and the miseries the policies designed to mitigate it unleashed were still relevant — say, for example, the 2022 midterm elections — it might have been possible to rally voters around the need to convey to policy-makers that they had committed the country to a disaster. We deserved a fight over the prolonged school closures, the “strategic investments” in congressional pet projects shaken loose by the national emergency, the theatrical mitigation measures, the efforts to encourage neighbors to view one another with suspicion and hostility, and the racial hostility that took root in a landscape suddenly purged of dissenting voices. But we didn’t get it, and the moment has passed.
All that is left of the pandemic now is gratitude that it is behind us and an amorphous desire for revenge — or “accountability,” for those who prefer something more antiseptic. Having presided over the pandemic’s first year, Trump is not going to lead an inquest into his own administration, and Republicans won’t demand it of him. He won’t be the instrument of that particular retribution. But he is the “retribution candidate.” It is too fine a distinction for voters that the retribution he seeks is against those who slighted him personally — Trump’s brand is payback. And because his renomination, if not reelection, would infuriate all the right people, that prospect suffices as a substitute for the comeuppance owed to those who conspired to rob your children of an education and steal from you precious moments with friends and loved ones.
For better or worse, the space for a retribution candidate in the 2024 race has already been filled, even though it’s by the figure least likely to deliver the kind of requitals he’s promising.