Politics
Column: The only thing voters liked less than Ron DeSantis' anti-woke crusade was Ron DeSantis
Sunday was a tough day for those, like me, who get their entertainment jollies by watching losers try to redeem themselves. I’m not talking only about the Buffalo Bills, the only NFL team I care even two cents for, whose effort to erase their four consecutive Super Bowl losses (1990-1993) was defeated by the Kansas City Chiefs.
Even more crushing, I am forced to bid farewell to the Ron DeSantis for President campaign.
The theme of the postmortems that started appearing in the political press almost instantaneously after DeSantis’ announcement that he was withdrawing from the quest for the Republican nomination was that his campaign’s recklessness was matched by its fecklessness.
The damage of the laws [DeSantis] pushed through in Florida … will live on.
— Miami Herald editorial
That’s true enough, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. The DeSantis campaign exposed the vacuum at the heart of Republican policymaking, which is that it doesn’t involve policymaking at all, only the ceaseless repetition of grievances against fabricated enemies — teachers, librarians, doctors, transgender individuals, advocates of social inclusion-equity-diversity — accompanied by performative viciousness.
The campaign also exposed the vacuum in our political press corps, which tried valiantly to prop up the Florida governor as a doughty maverick who shouldn’t be underestimated. (Pamela Paul, New York Times, Feb. 9, 2023: “His policies land better with voters than with progressive critics.”)
The elevation of DeSantis into some sort of political virtuoso with frighteningly occult skills began midway through his first gubernatorial term, when Politico ran an article headlined, “How Ron DeSantis won the pandemic.” This oustandingly ignorant piece underscored the folly of calling the game before the final whistle blows — indeed, even before the game has begun.
The truth was that the pandemic was defeating DeSantis even then, since 32,000 Floridians already had died of COVID-19; by the time the pandemic was declared over, Florida would have one of the worst records against COVID of any state in the union, due mostly to DeSantis’ resistance to sensible social policies and his demonization of the COVID vaccines.
DeSantis continued to snow the press with disinformation about his COVID response, citing Florida’s relatively high median age to explain away the state’s wretched performance against COVID. The problem there is that three of the four states with higher median ages than Florida (Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont) had significantly lower death rates than Florida.
There are two chief methods of assessing the DeSantis presidential campaign. One is to examine its nuts and bolts and assess DeSantis’ ability at retail campaigning; that’s the method of the political press corps, which prefers horse-race coverage to writing about things as dull as policies. The other is to examine the implications of a DeSantis presidency for voters and their families, which is where the rubber meets the road.
In both respects, DeSantis was a disaster. Let’s take them in order.
DeSantis’ campaign began with the audacious tactic of announcing his candidacy May 24 on Twitter Spaces, an online audio feature that Twitter (now X) owner Elon Musk thought would raise the social media platform to a new level of user appeal. Didn’t work that way.
Musk couldn’t get the thing to function, plying the audience with feedback, weird musical interludes and long stretches of silence instead of with DeSantis. Scheduled to start at 3 p.m. Pacific time, it finally got going about 18 minutes late.
Musk and the moderator, a Musk acolyte named David Sacks, kept trying to assert that the technical screw-ups amounted to a triumph brought about by a large audience. “We are melting the servers, which is a good sign,” Sacks said early on.
This sounded like the claim by SpaceX, another Musk venture, that its April 20 launch of a prototype rocket, which ended with the vehicle exploding in flight four minutes after liftoff, was a success. Never mind that the launch destroyed the launchpad and showered a neighboring community with debris, which sounds like a convenient metaphor for the DeSantis launch.
On the stump, DeSantis proved singularly maladroit. Coverage of his personal appearances focused on his obvious discomfort in meeting with strangers and his fruitless efforts to laugh or even crack a smile, which tended to produce only a hideous facial rictus.
He sat down for interviews only with right-wing sources such as Fox News, where he could be assured of receiving questions as solid as balls of yarn. After I wrote that DeSantis had “all the charisma of a linoleum floor,” The Times received an indignant letter from an architect objecting to the unwarranted affront to linoleum.
The end of the campaign was as slipshod as its beginning. In his withdrawal speech, DeSantis quoted Winston Churchill as stating, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.”
Um, no. After checking Churchill’s ample canon for this quote and another line purporting to define “success,” the International Churchill Society reported that it could “find no attribution for either one,” and that an almost equal number of online sources credit them to Abraham Lincoln — but the society couldn’t find them in the Lincoln archives either. At least one dedicated sleuth found the same quote in a Budweiser beer ad from 1938.
That brings us to the more important ramifications of the DeSantis candidacy, for the residents of Florida today and potentially for Americans who might have lived under a DeSantis presidency.
Whether or not he and his sedulous sycophants in the Florida Legislature specifically tailored their in-state policies to his desire to pose as the most extremist culture warrior in America, the consequences for Floridians have been dire.
Start with the pandemic. After bragging about being personally on hand to welcome the first shipments of the COVID vaccine into Florida — he called it a “historic day” — DeSantis staged an about-face.
Evidently calculating that throwing in his lot with the anti-science, anti-vaccination right wing was a surer path to electoral success than protecting his constituents from harm, DeSantis demonized the vaccines and joined the far right in trying to turn Anthony Fauci, the most respected immunological authority in America, into the chief pandemic villain.
He hawked campaign swag like beer can cozies and T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan, “Don’t Fauci My Florida,” a reference to Fauci’s advocacy of vaccination and social distancing — policies that Fauci actually had no authority to enforce. This while COVID cases were exploding in Florida and nationwide.
In September 2021, DeSantis appointed as his state’s surgeon general the COVID crank Joseph Ladapo, an advocate of the useless anti-COVID nostrums hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and a persistent anti-vaccine advocate.
Supporting his advice to all Americans to avoid the mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer with fabricated research papers and long-debunked claims about the hazards of the vaccines — which have protected millions from death and hospitalization from COVID — Ladapo has used his position as a state public health official to undermine public health nationwide. As I described him, “the most dangerous quack in America.”
Ladapo’s ideological and ignorant pronouncements against the vaccines prompted the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to upbraid him jointly, in a letter notifying him that his claims are “incorrect, misleading and could be harmful to the American public” and warning that his activity “puts people at risk of death or serious illness that could have been prevented by timely vaccination.”
But there’s more. In April, DeSantis signed one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the nation, barring the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy — before many women even know they’re pregnant. He was so proud of his decision that he signed the measure late one night.
In September 2022, minions acting in DeSantis’ name deceived nearly 50 immigrant asylum seekers in Texas into boarding flights to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.
The immigrants, who were in the U.S. legally, were told that they were being taken to Boston or Washington, D.C., where they would be given jobs and receive a host of immigrant services. Instead, they were dropped off on the island, which is reachable only by air or sea and where no one capable of providing such services had been warned of their arrival.
This stunt may have been designed to show up the islanders as heartless liberals who talk a good game but don’t walk the walk. Instead, the islanders met their humane responsibilities, providing succor to the deceived innocent victims and arranging the services they had been promised. All this was paid for by Floridians’ taxes. DeSantis hasn’t yet paid the price for his contemptible behavior.
Then there’s DeSantis’ impersonation of a champion of election integrity, shown by the arrests of 19 people, 14 of whom are Black, for alleged voter fraud in 2022. Most believed they were entitled to vote because that’s what they were told by state elections officials. The first cases to go to trial ended with dismissals or acquittals, and all the rest are probably destined to go the same way.
The most significant and far-reaching DeSantis policy is his assault on education. DeSantis eviscerated New College of Florida, a state college that has long been considered a beacon of liberal arts education; he fired its board and replaced it with a passel of right-wing ideologues including the egregious Christopher Rufo (last seen as an advocate of firing Harvard President Claudine Gay). The board fired the school’s president and replaced her with another GOP time-server who has presided over plummeting academic standards.
DeSantis’ notorious so-called Don’t Say Gay law and other policy initiatives aimed at banning books from school libraries have turned teaching in Florida schools into a potentially career-ending minefield. The harvest has been one of the most severe teacher shortages in Florida history, which the Florida Education Assn. attributed to the deliberate creation of “sustained chaos in public schools” designed to “undermine parents’ trust in their child’s neighborhood school with the ultimate goal of having a fully privatized education system.”
Remarkably, major institutions kowtowed to DeSantis’ basest instincts. The College Board rewrote the syllabus for its advanced placement course in African American studies to meet his objection that it made slavery look too mean. The National Hockey League refashioned a conference aimed at recruiting diverse candidates into its management ranks when DeSantis henchpersons objected that it was too “woke.” The Special Olympics rescinded a COVID vaccine mandate for a meet in Florida when DeSantis threatened it with a massive fine. He was the meet’s honorary chairman at the time.
All those institutions deserve to be shamed for failing to stand up to a bully.
The truth is that most voters appear to be repulsed by extreme right politics of this sort. In every state where they’ve had their say on abortion, including red states, they’ve favored expanded abortion rights. School board candidates who advocated book bans lost their elections in November coast to coast. The voters see through the “parents’ rights” flapdoodle when it’s used to narrow the educational opportunities for their children.
DeSantis’ failure to appeal to even Republican primary voters — who tend to be the most right-leaning among Republicans generally — should raise questions about whether the GOP has any appeal to American voters at all, outside Trump’s strongman personality cult.
But his impact on his home state will last far longer than his campaign. “The damage of the laws he pushed through in Florida,” the Miami Herald lamented in an editorial on Sunday, “will live on. Without his political ambitions, there likely wouldn’t be ‘Don’t say gay,’ woke wars and the waste of state resources to fight meaningless battles against drag queen bars.
DeSantis ended by endorsing the candidate he had been attacking in the final stages of his campaign, Donald Trump. That’s the most vivid manifestation of the condition of Republican electioneering in this presidential cycle. Shakespeare described it best: “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Politics
Mamdani’s response to Trump’s Iran strike sparks conservative backlash: ‘Rooting for the ayatollah’
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New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing blowback from conservatives on social media over his post condemning the U.S. attack on Iran that led to the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
On Saturday, as a joint strike on Iran by the United States and Israel was developing, Mamdani blasted the Trump administration’s decision in a post on X that has been viewed roughly 20 million times.
“Today’s military strikes on Iran — carried out by the United States and Israel — mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression,” Mamdani wrote.
“Bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war. Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit of regime change.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks to reporters during a news conference in New York Feb. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Mamdani said Americans prefer “relief from the affordability crisis” before speaking directly to Iranians in New York City.
“You are part of the fabric of this city — you are our neighbors, small business owners, students, artists, workers, and community leaders,” Mamdani said. “You will be safe here.”
The post was quickly slammed by conservatives on social media making the case that Mamdani’s response appeared sympathetic to Iran’s brutal regime and pointing to his lack of public reaction to the Iranian protesters killed in recent years.
“Comrade Mayor is rooting for the Ayatollah,” GOP Sen. Ted Cruz posted on X. “They can chant together.”
OBAMA OFFICIAL WHO BACKED IRAN DEAL SPARKS ONLINE OUTRAGE WITH REACTION TO TRUMP’S STRIKE: ‘SIT THIS ONE OUT’
“Do u say anything pro American ?” Fox News host Brian Kilmeade posted on X. “do u know any Iranians – ? they hate @fr_Khamenei they celebrate his death, you should be celebrating his death ! hes killed thousands of American’s and just killed 30k Iranians, did u even say a word about that? You are an embarrassment !! Please quit.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, questions Pam Bondi, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be attorney general, during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing in Hart building Jan. 15, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“I don’t feel safe in New York listening to someone like you, Mamdani, who sympathizes with the regime that killed more than 30,000 unarmed Iranians in less than 24 hours,” Iranian American journalist Masih Alinejad posted on X.
“We Iranians do not allow you to lecture us about war while you had nothing to say when the Islamic Republic shot schoolgirls and blinded more than 10,000 innocent people in the streets. You were busy celebrating the hijab while women of my beloved country Iran were jailed and raped by Islamic Security forces for removing it.
“And NOW you find your voice to defend the regime? No. I will not let you claim the moral high ground. The people of Iran want to be free. Where were you when they needed solidarity?”
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“How is it that you can’t differentiate between good and evil?” Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman posted on X. “Why is this so hard for you?”
“It takes a particular kind of audacity, or ignorance, for a city mayor to appoint himself the conscience of American foreign policy while his constituents step over garbage on their way to work,” GOP Rep. Nancy Mace posted on X. “History will not remember his bravery. It will not remember him at all.”
“Iranian New Yorkers are thrilled today and see right through you,” Republican New York City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino posted on X.
Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management LP, speaks during the WSJ D.Live global technology conference in Laguna Beach, Calif., Oct. 17, 2017. (Patrick Fallon/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
“When Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, UAE, Bahrain all support today’s operation eliminating world’s #1 sponsor of terror, but New York City’s Mayor @ZohranMamdani is shilling for Iran,” Republican New York City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov posted on X.
Fox News Digital reached out to Mamdani’s office for comment.
Shortly after Mamdani’s post, it was announced by President Trump and Israeli officials that the military operation resulted in Khamenei’s death.
Israeli leaders confirmed Khamenei’s compound and offices were reduced to rubble early Saturday after a targeted strike in downtown Tehran.
“Khamenei was the contemporary Middle East’s longest-serving autocrat. He did not get to be that way by being a gambler. Khamenei was an ideologue, but one who ruthlessly pursued the preservation and protection of his ideology, often taking two steps forward and one step back,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of FDD’s Iran program, told Fox News Digital.
Politics
Trump vowed to end wars. He is now opening a new front against Iran
WASHINGTON — For a decade, President Trump promised to end what he calls forever wars, casting himself as a leader opposed to prolonged conflicts in the Middle East and who would rather pursue peace in the world.
Now, early in his second term, Trump is taking military action against Iran that could expand well beyond a limited effort to halt the country’s nuclear program.
In a video posted on Truth Social, the commander in chief said American forces also plan to “raze their missile industry to the ground” and “annihilate their navy.” He warned members of Iran’s military to surrender or “face certain death.” And urged the Iranian people to take the moment as an opportunity to rise up against their government.
“This regime will soon learn that no one should challenge the strength and might of the United States armed forces,” Trump said.
A few hours after relaying that message, Trump confirmed in a separate social media post that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, was among those killed by U.S. and Israeli strikes. Even with his death, Trump said that “the heavy and pinpoint bombing” would continue in Iran “as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
Trump, who has been considering a strike on Iran for several weeks, acknowledged he reached the decision to attack Iran while aware of the human toll that could come with it.
“The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties. That often happens in war,” he said. “But we are doing this, not for now, we are doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission.”
Trump’s military campaign in Iran is a sharp turn in tone for a president who has long been critical of open-ended conflicts in the Middle East, and marks a shift from an America-first agenda message that helped him return to the White House.
“I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars,” Trump said in his November 2024 victory speech as he promised to focus national resources on domestic priorities rather than foreign conflicts.
As Trump advocated to bring home American forces from deployments around the world and to withdraw from key defense treaties, his position resonated with a war-weary electorate in the lead-up to the election.
Fewer than six in 10 Americans (56%) believed the United States should take an active role in world affairs ahead of the election — the second-lowest level recorded since the question was first asked in 1974, according to polling by the Council on Foreign Affairs.
Trump’s posture on war in the Middle East had been largely consistent before he ran for office.
In 2013, he criticized then-President Obama’s negotiations with Tehran, predicting in a post on Twitter that Obama would “attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly.” That same year, Trump warned that “our horrendous leadership could unknowingly lead us into World War III.”
And in a heated February 2016 debate, Trump attacked former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, stating that his brother George W. Bush lied about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities to get the U.S. into the Iraq war. Trump called the Iraq war a “big, fat mistake” that “destabilized the Middle East.”
“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none,” he said.
At the time of the Iraq war, however, Trump had said he supported it.
Trump’s confrontation with Iran bears little resemblance to his earlier rebukes.
Trump has yet to present evidence of an imminent threat to the United States from Iran’s nuclear program — a capability he claimed to have “obliterated” just eight months ago — and has instead framed the military campaign as one to ensure Tehran never develops nuclear weapons at all.
“It is a very simple message,” he said. “They will never have a nuclear weapon.”
Trump’s shift has already drawn the attention of congressional Democrats, many of whom are calling the president out for backing out on his promise to end foreign wars — and are demanding that he involve Congress in any further military actions.
“Regardless of what the President may think or say, he does not enjoy a blank check to launch large-scale military operations without a clear strategy, without any transparency or public debate, and not without Congressional approval,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said.
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) criticized Trump for “drawing the country into yet another foreign war that Americans don’t want and Congress has not authorized.”
The military involvement in Iran is not the first time that members of Congress have complained about the Trump administration’s willingness to sideline the legislative branch on decisions that could trigger broader conflicts this year.
In January, Trump ordered military forces to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and said the United States would run the sovereign nation until further notice. He threatened military action in Colombia, whose leftist President Gustavo Petro has been one of Trump’s most vocal critics.
Trump has alienated allied nations when he said he was willing to send American troops to seize Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark. And on Friday, he said U.S. is in talks with Havana and raised the possibility of a “friendly takeover of Cuba” without offering any details on what he meant.
His actions have coincided with his annoyance at not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At one point, the president said he no longer felt an “obligation to think purely of Peace” because he didn’t get the recognition.
Trump’s shifting tone, and his use of violent war imagery in his pretaped remarks about Iran, have rattled even part of his base.
“I did not campaign for this. I did not donate money for this,” said former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a conservative who recently left Congress after a bitter fight with Trump. “This is not what we thought MAGA was supposed to be. Shame!”
Republican leaders, however, are largely standing behind the president.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said Iran “posed a clear and unacceptable threat” to the United States and has refused “the diplomatic off-ramps.” House Speaker Mike Johnson (D-La.) said Trump took the action after exhausting “every effort to pursue peaceful and diplomatic solutions.”
Other top Republican lawmakers rallied behind Trump, too.
“The butcher’s bill has finally come due for the ayatollahs,” Sen. Tom Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote in a post on X. “May God bless and protect our troops on this vital mission of vengeance, and justice, and safety.”
Politics
Iran fires missiles at US bases across Middle East after American strikes on nuclear, IRGC sites
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Iran launched missile and drone strikes targeting U.S. military facilities in multiple Middle Eastern countries Friday, retaliating after coordinated U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iranian military and nuclear-linked sites.
Explosions were reported in or near areas hosting American forces in Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Jordan, according to regional officials and state media accounts. Several of those governments said their air defense systems intercepted incoming projectiles.
It remains unclear whether any U.S. service members were killed or injured, and the extent of potential damage to American facilities has not yet been confirmed. U.S. officials have not publicly released casualty figures or formal damage assessments.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) described the operation as a direct response to what Tehran called “aggression” against Iranian territory earlier in the day. Iranian officials claimed they targeted U.S. military infrastructure and command facilities.
Explosions were reported in or near areas hosting American forces in Bahrain, pictured above. (Photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Adelola Tinubu/U.S. Naval Forces Central Command/U.S. 5th Fleet )
The United States military earlier carried out strikes against what officials described as high-value Iranian targets, including IRGC facilities, naval assets and underground sites believed to be associated with Iran’s nuclear program. One U.S. official told Fox News that American forces had “suppressed” Iranian air defenses in the initial wave of strikes.
Tomahawk cruise missiles were used in the opening phase of the U.S. operation, according to a U.S. official. The campaign was described as a multi-geographic operation designed to overwhelm Iran’s defensive capabilities and could continue for multiple days. Officials also indicated the U.S. employed one-way attack drones in combat for the first time.
IF KHAMENEI FALLS, WHO TAKES IRAN? STRIKES WILL EXPOSE POWER VACUUM — AND THE IRGC’S GRIP
Smoke rises after reported Iranian missile attacks, following strikes by the United States and Israel against Iran, in Manama, Bahrain, Feb. 28, 2026. (Reuters)
Iran’s retaliatory barrage targeted countries that host American forces, including Bahrain — home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet — as well as Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base and the UAE’s Al Dhafra Air Base. Authorities in those nations reported intercepting many of the incoming missiles. At least one civilian was killed in the UAE by falling debris, according to local authorities.
Iranian officials characterized their response as proportionate and warned of additional action if strikes continue. A senior U.S. official described the Iranian retaliation as “ineffective,” though independent assessments of the overall impact are still developing.
Smoke rises over the city after the Israeli army launched a second wave of airstrikes on Iran in Tehran on Feb. 28, 2026. (Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images)
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Regional governments condemned the strikes on their territory as violations of sovereignty, raising the risk that additional countries could become directly involved if escalation continues.
The situation remains fluid, with military and diplomatic channels active across the region. Pentagon officials are expected to provide further updates as damage assessments and casualty reviews are completed.
Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.
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