Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a master at trolling (or, as one political scientist terms it, “shitposting.”) But unlike social media trolls, he has opted to use human beings (who have legally applied for refugee status) as props in his quest to own the libs, one-up his MAGA competition, and garner celebratory coverage on Fox News Channel and lesser organs of conservative media. (As is often the case with today's Republican Party, conservative media was the source of this provocation; in this case, FNC's Tucker Carlson.)
An agent of DeSantis duped – with prefabricated lies – 50 migrants (most of whom were fleeing Venezuela, where an authoritarian regime is in place) onto a pair of chartered planes and flew them from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard. At a press conference, the governor eagerly boasted of his caper.
“We’ve worked on innovative ways to protect the state of Florida.” By scooping up migrants in Texas.
“We take what’s happening at the southern border very seriously,” DeSantis intoned, referencing illegal entry, deadly fentanyl, and criminal aliens threatening Americans. He explained that he was looking out for Florida: since “everyone wants to come to Florida,” this group was in all likelihood headed there as well.
His staff and supporters, standing behind him, gleefully laughed and grinned at the chief executive’s cleverness.
As Jonathan Chait noted, earlier in the week DeSantis had related how Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been sending busloads of immigrants to Washington, D.C. Chait writes of DeSantis, “His envy was undisguised.” And by week’s end he had managed to horn in on Abbott’s theatrics, while doing the Texas governor one better: he gave Fox News the story along with ample footage (from a videographer DeSantis bought and paid for either from Florida tax revenues or from his record-setting campaign funds) that FNC presented as the network's hosts read the governor's talking points.
This much is indisputable:
● The immigration system is broken.
● "The Cruelty Is the Point."
● "The need to be seen publicly owning libs is so profound for ambitious pols in the GOP that we're seeing an escalatory dynamic in which the ante keeps being raised - dumping migrants in blue states, performatively arresting people who were told they could vote, etc."
As I noted a year ago, "one critical strand of Republican public policy commitments has become clear: to employ the coercive power of the state to own the libs." That post focused on the power of the state within a state. With the malicious theatrics of Governors Abbott, DeSantis, and Arizona's Doug Ducey, MAGA pols have reached further, tormenting the leaders and constituents of blue states.
They have callously ignored the basic humanity of migrants who have risked their lives to travel thousands of miles to seek freedom. Not so long ago, we might have expected Christian congregations in Texas, Florida, and other red states to rise to the occasion to comfort the afflicted. That's not the story nowadays. In an earlier era, the Republican Party (led by Ronald Reagan, for instance) would have cheered on folks fleeing oppression. Not after the Trumpification of the party.
Nor is this stunt especially egregious. It is not a new low. It hardly touches as many people as does the state of Mississippi's neglect of the water system in its capital city. It hardly touches as many people as Florida's gutting of a constitutional amendment to grant felons the vote. It hardly touches as many people as the refusal of twelve states to adopt Medicaid expansion (Florida and Texas, among them). It hardly touches as many people as does the heartless rush to enact abortion bans across the country that harm women's health.
The Martha's Vineyard stupidity is cynical political theater that garners attention in the media, conservative and mainstream. It's click-bait, circa one week in September 2022. We've seen this before in a deluge of other, more far-reaching, outrages. And we can expect such shameless performance art, as Brendan Nyhan suggests, to escalate. Denying the fundamental humanity of the other has become a well-worn pattern with MAGA Republicans.
While it's sad to think of staged cruelty as a winning political strategy, DeSantis and his brethren are convinced of it. It will be up to the rest of us to prove them wrong.