She is something else. Her speeches are as inauthentic as his are — her motor-mouthed delivery of anecdotes about their little kids using permanent markers on the walls of the Governor’s mansion ring hollow especially since she delivers them in a Kari Lake-esque voice as if she’s reading from a newscast teleprompter. (She used to be a broadcaster and it isn’t helping her.) She’s pushing DeSantis’ “heroic” fighter image and it just isn’t sticking. And she keeps wearing costumes which are as inauthentic as her speeches.
This piece in the Daily Beast by Katie Baker is just brutal. But I think she’s right:
The First Lady of Florida showed up on the campaign trail in Iowa this weekend wearing a ghastly black leather jacket—American flag on front, an alligator and the silhouette of her state on the back, with the sneering words, “Where Woke Goes to Die”—that brought to mind nothing so much as the racks of a Red State big-bin store where it would be retailing for $24.99.
To be fair, Casey DeSantis wore the bomber to a charity biker rally and I’m sure the campaign intended it to be a viral moment, like Melania Trump’s infamous “I Really Don’t Care” coat that the former First Lady donned to check out the border crisis.
The message on Melania’s coat, like the one-time model herself, was sphinxlike. Was it a sign to the outside that Melania dreamed of escaping her boorish husband, the stuff of a thousand Resistance Twitter fever memes? Was it the physical manifestation of the Trumps’ casual cruelty? After all, Melania was flying down to where the administration locked up little kids in cages and tore them from the arms of their desperate parents. Did it mean nothing at all, like her spox insisted—maybe like Melania herself, a cipher whose eyes seem to betray an inner emptiness, like the infinite refraction of mirrored light off of all those gold-plated Trump Tower bathroom fixtures?
By contrast, Casey DeSantis’ coat is just like her husband Ron DeSantis’ campaign: Crude. Grasping. Saying the ugly part out loud. Whereas Trump would wink-wink at the fascists—who can forget his dog whistle to the “very fine people on both sides” at Charlottesville—DeSantis wants to peel off Trump’s base by being even more explicit about who he intends to target. You can see it right there on his wife’s jacket: DeSantis’ Florida is where the woke go to die—and a lot of other people die as well.
It’s hard to say one is reading too much into a coat that’s so explicit—and anyways, as The New York Times noted in a fawning profile, Casey DeSantis is definitely trying to make a political statement with what she wears, with her aspirations of “Camelot-meets-Mar-a-Lago.” But while Casey may be trying to position herself after Jackie Kennedy (good luck) and even Melania, if this weekend is any indication, she’s falling far short. It doesn’t matter how many times she wears that ice-blue Badgley Mischka cape-dress. The DeSantis’ will never be Camelot. Jackie and JFK symbolized the opposite of vulgar pettiness—they embodied youth, energy, a commitment to moral progress in the struggle for Civil Rights, a country fresh with idealism. Not an America that was obsessed with banning books about male seahorses and rainbows, or nuking the latest Disney movie.
Ron and Casey will also never be the Trumps. For one thing, the Trumps have all that wealth to retreat into, not bothering themselves with the lives they wrecked along the way. Like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, just over in West Egg, not East Egg. For another, Trump manages to command attention naturally, whereas the governor’s attempts to make headlines always feel forced. Whereas Donald Trump is terrifyingly, inexorably himself, the DeSantis’ are more like poseurs. Fake Birkins. Mar-a-Lago imitators. They rail against the elites but Ron went to Harvard. They wear black leather jackets to a biker rally—regular folks!—but they really prefer to be mingling with Elon’s tech bros and wearing those designer duds. They want it way too much and it shows. Why else would Ron whine so bitterly about his wife being jilted by Vogue?
Still, as they appear on the campaign trail, we are seeing clues to who the DeSantis’ are at heart. We’ve got a Sunshine State Lady Macbeth, in her green cape and white gloves, with her middling husband and her thirst for the crown—and we’ve got a guy who wants to be sitting in a corner, mumbling about the Federalist Papers and gobbling pudding off his fingers.
Trump would never eat pudding with anything other than a gold spoon—while pressing the button for his 20th Diet Coke of the day and trying to bomb Iran on a whim. Put another way, Trump is the danger of raw, chaotic id. DeSantis, meanwhile, is the little jerk who’s going to make all of us pay for how he had no friends in third grade, or whatever his particular villain origin story is.
Whether the GOP’s base will respond to DeSantis and his wife trying to imitate Donald and Melania—whether they’ll be happy buying the knock-offs—is an open question. I’m sure many MAGA-types love a jacket that so blatantly sticks it to the libs. Still, we’re told that the average GOP voter doesn’t like feeling that elites are talking down to them (like someone nerding out about the Federalist Papers?), even though one suspects that they actually want to be the rich guy eating off the golden spoon. Will Red State primary voters see more of themselves in strivers like Ron and Casey—or in their old, brash, filthy-rich ‘God Emperor’ and his supermodel spouse?
There’s more if you’d like to partake.
I think the lady Macbeth thing is a big overdrawn because really, Ron himself is more than just a clod. He’s a truly evil clown. But there is no doubt that Casey is right in there with him pushing this creepy, ultra-divisive agenda. She is literally wearing the message.