In defense of Casey DeSantis

The media should love Jill Casey DeSantis. She’s smart, she’s articulate, she’s attractive and she beat cancer. She’s a mother of three beautiful children and was an Emmy-award-winning journalist, so she was once one of them. She married a man at Disney World, of all places, one who values her opinion; in fact, she is said to be his closest advisor. As the first lady of Florida, she’s spearheaded mental health and substance abuse initiatives as well as innovative plans to lift single mothers and chronically unemployed persons out of poverty. But there’s just one problem: her husband is a Republican. And not just any Republican, but a conservative Republican on a mission to make his state the place where “woke goes to die.”

Republicans expect hostile media coverage, and sometimes that hostility bleeds over to a GOP politician’s spouse. But some of the media’s recent Casey DeSantis coverage has been unusually nasty and yet also revelatory — not of who she is, but of who the media elites are. 

These folks have been insisting for years that capable, smart, strong women who wield power are to be celebrated, and anyone who doesn’t agree is sexist. But the part they’ve left out of that trope is that strong, smart women whose views stray from liberal orthodoxy must be destroyed, regardless of their other attributes. For the left, adherence to progressive values is non-negotiable, and on policy matters, Casey DeSantis is a heretic — a former member of the media tribe who betrayed the fraternity by not just marrying a dark knight determined to fight the woke, but by joining him in battle.

Michael Kruse fired a series of cheap shots at Mrs. DeSantis in a lengthy magazine piece for Politico in May that depicted her as ruthless, vindictive and hell-bent on obtaining power at all costs. “She can also accentuate, even exacerbate, his hubris, and his paranoia, and his vaulting ambition — because those are all traits that they share,” writes Kruse, a long-haired Davidson graduate who previously worked at the leftish Tampa Bay Times, which features perhaps the most hostile DeSantis coverage in the nation (which is saying something). “He wouldn’t be where he is without her. He might not get to where he wants to go because of her.”

No spouse of a Democrat would ever be on the receiving end of a mainstream media hit piece like this. It wasn’t just nasty, it was also subtlety belittling in a way that would be denounced as sexist if the target were someone on the left.

Like most hit pieces, the most damning quotes are from anonymous sources. “She’s more paranoid than he is,” reads one.“He’s a vindictive motherfucker. She’s twice that,” reads another. “She’s the scorekeeper.”

Kruse mentions in the piece that she took over a large office suite that had traditionally been used by chiefs of staff, and the insinuation is that there’s something wrong with this. But if Casey was a leftist, surely this move would be described as badass #girlboss maneuver and greeted with plenty of “you go girls!”

As bad as Kruse’s gossipy piece was, it appeared downright civil compared to a bomb later tossed at Casey by Katie Baker, executive editor of Daily Beast. The column is labeled “fashion,” though it’s really a broad-based attack that exposes how elitist the media class is and what a laughable publication the Beast has become. The headline of the piece is, “Casey DeSantis is the Walmart Melania.”

Casey DeSantis’s apparent sin was wearing a leather jacket with a gator on the back, along with a map of the state of the Florida and the words, “Where Woke Goes to Die.” Baker, who is either a Brit or a wannabe Brit based on her word choice, describes the coat as “ghastly,” and claimed it “brought to mind nothing so much as the racks of a Red State big-bin store where it would be retailing for $24.99.”

Here are a few more excerpts.

Casey DeSantis’ s coat is just like her husband Ron DeSantis’s 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’ s Florida is where the woke go to die — and a lot of other people die as well.

Baker then repeats oft-told lies about Covid and Florida, using raw numbers and failing to account for Florida’s huge elderly population, as Trump does, while neglecting to mention that despite eschewing mask and vaccine mandates and staying open, thirty other states had higher per capita death rates than Florida when you adjust for age disparities between the states.

Baker then reveals her preference for the Trumps, an increasingly common viewpoint among liberal elites:

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… 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 DeSantises 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.

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 twentieth 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.

Baker writes that neither Casey nor Melania could “ever embody the class and effortless elegance of Michelle Obama or Dr. Jill Biden.” Well of course not: those two would have their faces etched on Mount Rushmore if the media has its way. If you question the intellectual rigor of Jill Biden’s laughable doctoral thesis, you’re a misogynist. And if you offer anything but worship for St. Michele, who wasn’t proud to be American until her husband was elected, it’s a hate crime.

Baker closes her piece by finding a negative spin for, believe it or not, Casey’s battle with cancer. She asserts that having “stared death in the face,” the experience should have effectively turned her into a progressive Democrat, like her. Instead, here’s what she thinks Casey DeSantis and her jacket are telling America:

She’s telling us she is cheering on a spouse who gets his kicks off targeting his fellow Americans. She’s telling us she’s down with his message of division and dehumanization. She’s telling us they are ready for far more power. She’s incandescent in her black leather jacket, at her husband’s side — both of them seething with hate.

Raw Story approved of the hit piece, penning a summary with the headline, “‘Walmart Melania’: Casey DeSantis loudly backs her husband’s message of ‘division and dehumanization.’” Many liberals and some prominent Trump fans like Laura Loomer also liked it. She tweeted, “Even the media is having to confirm MAGA’s observations that Jill and Ron are trying to be cheap knockoffs of Melania and Donald Trump.” The term “Walmart Melania” trended on Twitter. And Politico and other publications noted disapprovingly that Mrs. DeSantis wore the jacket in eighty-five-degree heat in Iowa. (I live in Florida and eighty-five degrees is child’s play, especially if there’s low humidity.)

Clearly Baker and other elitists detest DeSantis and hope to see Trump win the nomination, as they perceive him as the easier mark for unpopular Joe Biden, whom the left isn’t sure can be carried across the finish line again. The irony is that attacks against Casey DeSantis are very likely to backfire. After all, most of us who vote in Republican primaries are quite okay with “big bin” shops, as Baker calls them. Republican voters detest the media class and so, the DeSantis campaign should hope that Kruse and Baker’s hit pieces are widely read. And Casey DeSantis ought to keep wearing her anti-woke leather jacket, no matter the weather, because it might just help her husband get elected.