Election Countdown, 288 Days to Go: ‘Kissing the Ring’
Rituals of submission in one party, nearly ten months before the nation casts its votes.
A young Robert DeNiro, as the young Vito Corleone, kissing the ring of then-boss Don Francesco in Godfather Part II. That film came out 50 years ago. The rituals are timeless. (Getty Images.)
This post, which comes one day after Ron DeSantis dropped out of the Republican presidential competition and one day before the Haley-Trump New Hampshire primary, is meant as a notation on what Americans know, as we head to the next election.
It consists of four introductory short video clips or links, leading to a fifth link that I genuinely hope you will watch in full.
First, the short clips:
1) Newsom v. DeSantis, November 2023.
Two months ago, when Ron DeSantis was mocking Gavin Newsom for not running against Joe Biden, and Newsom was mocking DeSantis for his doomed run against Trump, Sean Hannity invited them both to a 90-minute “debate” on Fox.
The whole session was more enlightening and less cringe-worthy than the cycle’s other debates. Each governor made substantive points about his state, while also delivering one-liners. If you go to time 2:20 of the CNN clip below, you’ll see the most prescient and stinging line from Newsom. [Spoiler: He says that despite their many differences, he and DeSantis have one deep similarity. “Neither of us will be the nominee for our party in 2024.” The reaction is not included in this CNN clip, but DeSantis visibly winced.]
2) DeSantis on the humiliation of ‘kissing the ring,’ January 2024.
It turns out that DeSantis has been using a ‘kiss the ring’ line about Donald Trump from the very earliest days of his campaign. If you’ve missed it, his line goes this way: It doesn’t matter if you’re a good Republican governor, or a bad one. From Donald Trump’s point of view, all that matters is whether you kiss his ring.
Probably the last time DeSantis will have dared use that line in public was one week ago, in a rally at Ankeny, Iowa. The redoubtable C-Span was there to capture it on tape:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5103534/user-clip-desantis-kiss-ring
For C-Span technology reasons, I can’t embed this clip; you will have to click on the link. But the linked video comes up right at the crucial part, where DeSantis explains Trump’s need for submission.
Yesterday, six days after that rally, DeSantis announced his submission and delivered his kiss.
3) Tim Scott on why ‘We Need Donald Trump!’ January 2024.
Tim Scott, whom specialists will recall as another entrant in the once-crowded anti-Trump field, dropped out of the presidential race late last year. Three days ago he officially endorsed Donald Trump, in a performance that was less a submissive kiss than—well, I’ll let you think of the amorous analogy.
Again you have to click on a C-Span link, https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5103360/user-clip-tim-scott-endorsement. It’s only three minutes long, and you’ll quickly get the idea.
4) Donald Trump on ‘Nikki Haley’ and January Sixth: Looking back on 2021, from 2024.
In what will presumably be her final moments of even-muted criticism of Trump, Nikki Haley last week dared question Trump’s “mental fitness.” She referred to this moment several days ago, in which Trump kept saying Haley’s name when he meant “Nancy Pelosi.”
I post this as a time-stamped marker of the man whom Haley is presumably days away from supporting, and whom the party leadership is solidly lining up behind. (See also this by Michael Tomasky in TNR.)
5) The video I actually hope you will watch: Stuart Stevens on ‘Holding on until 2032.’
Deb and I met Stuart Stevens back in 2012, when he was chief strategist for the Mitt Romney presidential campaign and I was reporting on that. We’ve become friends, and I’ve recommended several of his recent books.1
Last night he spoke with Jim Acosta on CNN for nearly ten minutes. It was a post-mortem on the DeSantis campaign, and essentially a pre-mortem on Haley’s. Among the chestnuts:
-“When you run against somebody, you have to run against him.” This is what both DeSantis and Haley strikingly declined to do. Haley’s argument boiled down to, “Trump was great, but that was then.” DeSantis’s boiled down to, “Trump was great, but I can do the same things better.”
-“You can’t just present yourself as Diet Trump.” Which despite the differences between Haley and DeSantis applied to both of them.
-“Pain is the only teacher in politics. We are going to have to defeat this party again and again and again.” He said this process could take until at least 2032.
The only link I see for this is from a CNN post on Xitter. You can see the whole thing there, and I really hope you will. Here’s the link https://twitter.com/jeffstorobinsky/status/1749225105685708846.
Where does this leave us? I agree with Stuart Stevens’s general perspective. But for now I’m just noting these videos as part of what we know, as of now.
And to sign off, here is an example of leaders confidently dealing with each other as equals, not demanding submission:
Those books I have in mind are The Last Season, Stuart’s moving memoir of his shared fan-dom, with his late father, for SEC football; his roman-a-clef political novel The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear; and his new The Conspiracy to End America, which I blurbed. Deb and I also enjoyed his earlier book Night Train to Turkistan. Over the years we’ve had discussions with Stuart about novels by our mutual friend Karl Marlantes, starting with his widely acclaimed Matterhorn and his new Cold Victory.
#4--yeah, Trump's dementia is showing badly. I don't think he's going to be in the running this fall, and if he is, he will lose.
You forgot to mention "It Was All A Lie," which is Stevens' mea culpa, from which he has been "walking the walk" ever since.