If Ron DeSantis did not exist it would be necessary to invent him
By 
If this unctuous NBC News puff piece about Ron DeSantis is any indication, the longing in the legacy media for Florida’s favorite fascist to depose Donald Trump as the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee is a truly deep and abiding passion.
DeSantis, you see, is spiritually speaking a son of the heart of the Rustbelt, not the decadent subtropics where he was born, raised, and has lived almost his entire life:
“I was geographically raised in Tampa Bay,” DeSantis writes in his recently published political memoir, “but culturally my upbringing reflected the working-class communities in western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio — from weekly church attendance to the expectation that one would earn his keep. This made me God-fearing, hard-working and America-loving.”
When Magats say Donald Trump is “honest,” this astonishing statement reflects, besides the profound delusion in which these people live, a certain extremely limited kind of truth, which is this: Trump doesn’t say stuff like this. He is possibly the biggest bullshitter America has ever produced, but he doesn’t traffic in this one particularly emetic category of fake pietistic bullshit. In that — and in only that — sense, he is authentically honest in comparison to someone like DeSantis.
The rest of the piece is a similarly gag-inducing tongue bath, that employs bags full of pretzel logic to argue that the politics of Youngstown, Ohio in the 1960s and 1970s — a place DeSantis has basically never even been to, let alone lived in (he was born in 1978 in Jacksonville) — have nevertheless molded him into an authentic tribune of the alienated white working class.
It’s going to be a long 18 months.