Former President Donald Trump knows how to denigrate a political opponent. His weapon of choice is nicknames, of which there is an endless supply: Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Low-Energy Jeb Bush, Sleepy Joe Biden, Pocahontas, and on and on. A recent hit, knocking the Florida Governor who appears to be Trump’s chief rival for the GOP presidential nomination, is “DeSanctimonious.”
But Trump is now taking aim at what might as well be Ron DeSantis’s middle name — “woke” — and trying to disembowel the term. DeSantis’s main pitch is that his state is a freedom-loving place where, as he likes to say, “Woke goes to die.”
That means in Florida you “don’t say gay” and don’t use DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) policies, and don’t let kids read certain books in school. That stuff is all “woke” weirdness in DeSantis’s estimation and DeSantis is against it.
If you took that word away from the Governor of FL, he wouldn’t be able to complete a sentence. https://t.co/6LC0UsPztN
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 1, 2023
But what if “woke” doesn’t really mean anything? Then DeSantis would be left running a campaign against nothing. Enter Donald Trump and his savvy and indirect destabilization of DeSantis’s main message.
“I don’t like the term woke, because I hear woke woke woke,” Trump says, “it’s just a term they use, you know half the people can’t define it, they don’t even know what it is.” In other words, “woke” is a loser.
As left-leaning critic Ron Filipkowski says in forwarding the video above, if DeSantis finds “woke” to be a ghost — nothing there to rage against — then he “wouldn’t be able to complete a sentence.” Trump might then say he’s Ron DeFinished.
