There are many republicans who are looking to Ron DeSantis as a normal, mainstream leader who can harness the Trump energy without being Trump.
Sorry, he is Trump 2.0:
You read that right. He wants to prosecute Dr. Fauci for what he calls “medical authoritarianism.”
The demand rests on the flimsy pretext that Fauci supposedly lied to Congress when he testified that the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research. Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, two other Republicans in the DeSantis wing, have claimed a subsequent NIH letter disproved this testimony. As Glenn Kessler notes in a careful fact-check, that’s wrong: “No such admission appears in the letter, and NIH officials continue to insist that the EcoHealth work using NIH funds did not constitute gain-of-function research.”
Even if Fauci did mislead Congress, of course, the notion of throwing him into prison would be ridiculously disproportionate to the offense. Imprisonment is not how fact-checking of congressional testimony is enforced in this country. DeSantis’s call to jail Fauci is a pure echo of the Trumpian call to lock up Hillary Clinton over her violation of State Department email protocols. The thinnest pretext of a scandal is a sheen to cover the raw authoritarian ambition to imprison any figure who angers the right-wing base.
Whether DeSantis is a genuine authoritarian maniac or merely pretending to be one is immaterial. The structure of the party is such that it incentivizes these positions and rhetoric. He may be less unhinged than Trump, but DeSantis points the way toward a future in which the cancer that has consumed the Republican Party continues to grow.
DeSantis is just as bad as Trump, probably worse, because he isn’t as stupid or as psychologically disturbed. I think he would figure out how to actually get this done.