Which Republican candidate is the worst demagogue? Personally, I think it's Trump. But in this post, Robert Reich makes a good case for DeSantis:
As you know, Congress has just a few days to raise the borrowing limit before the government goes into default on its debt, which would most likely set off a global financial crisis, and potentially throw millions of Americans out of work.
I wouldn’t have negotiated with Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans if I were president. I would have relied on Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, and continued to pay the nation’s bills with IOUs.
But I’m not president, and the deal worked out Saturday between Biden and McCarthy is the only deal in town. To oppose it now is to opt for chaos.
So I was alarmed by the decision by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to oppose the agreement.
“Our country was careening toward bankruptcy” before the deal was struck, DeSantis said on “Fox and Friends” on Monday, “and after this deal, our country will still be careening toward bankruptcy.”
DeSantis’s broadside comes just as McCarthy is trying to round up Republican votes to approve the deal this week. And it puts pressure on Donald Trump to come out against the bill as well. Will he?
There’s much debate about the capacity of the Republican Party to govern. As you know, I’m of the view that it’s rapidly turning into a White Christian Nationalist party, divorced from democracy. DeSantis’s opposition to the debt-ceiling deal is an example.
DeSantis comes as close to a fascist as any politician in modern American history. To my mind, he’s more dangerous than Trump because DeSantis knows exactly what he’s doing and where he wants to take the country — into tyranny, bigotry, and ultra-nationalist culture warfare — while Trump is motivated by nothing more than Donald Trump.
A test will be whether Trump follows DeSantis into opposing the debt-ceiling deal.
What do you think?
