Former President Donald Trump set his four-letter word trap for rival Florida Governor Ron DeSantis last week when he disemboweled DeSantis’s campaign keynote, painting the term “woke” as a loser politically.
That’s a problem, Trump knows, for DeSantis, who is running his rival presidential campaign on just two main ideas so far — the wonderfulness of Florida and the horror of woke.
The first DeSantis bet is on the presumption that America at large aspires to be more like Florida, which DeSantis portrays as a refuge for “hope and sanity” — especially during the pandemic, when it lifted lockdowns early and let kids back in schools, even if there were fewer books there.
(Trump, a Florida resident, inevitably helps DeSantis with this claim — the former president could live anywhere, after all.)
But the far more prominent message of DeSantis’s campaign is that he is Anti-Woke — and not just that, but that he is The Great Woke Hunter, like some figure out of Hemingway with a rifle and a sense of manliness that necessitates a corruption of compassion.
In Iowa this week, even after Trump laid his trap, DeSantis doubled down on his Anti-Woke Hero pose, as seen below.
DeSantis: As president, I recognize that the woke mind virus represents a war on the truth so we will wage a war on the woke. We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of congress. pic.twitter.com/8bd7eQSDgM
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 3, 2023
Trump set the trap earlier this week when he said woke doesn’t mean anything, or that “half the people” don’t know what it means. Creating confusion around the concept and thereby creating confusion around DeSantis’s main message is the strategy.
DeSantis already has an innate challenge with campaigning on Anti-Woke, in that it has been hard traditionally to run strictly against something — unless it’s war or new taxes. Otherwise candidates have to be for something — like expanded health care or job creation, things people want.
The DeSantis anti-woke campaign may already have inherent limits nationally too, as polled Americans broadly favor things like diversity and inclusion when done properly. Trying to get people across the country outraged at Chick-fil-A, just because the company pledged to treat people of all backgrounds with dignity, is hard.
Trump sees a vulnerability in DeSantis’s focus, and his plan is to have DeSantis, while aiming at Woke in his Great Woke Hunter outfit, shoot an elephant instead. The establishment GOP elephant, that is.
“I don’t like the term woke, because I hear woke woke woke,” Trump told a crowd of Magadonians, “it’s just a term they use, you know half the people can’t define it, they don’t even know what it is.”
Trump: "I don't like the term 'woke," because I hear the term 'woke woke woke' — it's just a term they use, half the people can't define it, they don't know what it is." pic.twitter.com/uhZLRADXHa
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 1, 2023
