7/5/2023 0 Comments Macbeth 2015![]() ![]() She can ameliorate some of the effects of his idiosyncrasies. She might well be a bit of both, say even some DeSantis proponents, and somewhere in this tension sits the central dynamic of the pending DeSantis campaign. The more complicated but also more instructive reality is that she is neither the fawning caricature she’s made out to be in conservative and even at times mainstream media nor a Shakespearean villain. Ron DeSantis has trouble even criticizing Trump by name, but with the head-to-head battle about to begin, the role of his wife is of paramount concern to many in and around the world of DeSantis, as well as those considering whether to back him. At this juncture, the literary analogy goes only so far. In the tragic drama, of course, Lady Macbeth prods her husband to kill the king so she can be the queen. ![]() They recently have scored a series of key albeit early strategic wins - a flurry of in-state endorsements, for instance, contributing to the perception of a novice, faltering DeSantis that’s also visible in a slide in early primary polls. Stone’s hyperbolic charge is but a piece of a broader effort on the part of Trump forces to kill in the crib the candidacy they consider their greatest threat. “Have you ever noticed,” Roger Stone, the notorious political mischief-maker who is both a DeSantis antagonist and a many-decades-long Trump loyalist, remarked in a Telegram post last fall, “how much Ron DeSantis’ wife Casey is like Lady Macbeth?” - an agent, in other words, of her husband’s undoing. Want to read more stories like this? POLITICO Weekend delivers gripping reads, smart analysis and a bit of high-minded fun every Friday. One in particular during the first year of his administration struck many then as a shortsighted miscalculation and looks to them now like a possibly fatal mistake - the ouster of Susie Wiles, the well-respected operative who had helped former President Donald Trump win Florida in 2016, and then helped DeSantis, 44, get elected governor in 2018 but now is running Donald Trump’s rival White House bid. She is, they say, in the middle of good decisions of his, but bad ones, too. “The tip of the spear,” said a Republican consultant. “She’s the power behind the throne,” a Republican lobbyist told me. Especially forthright are the people who are granted anonymity on account of their fear of retribution given their power - not just his but hers. The DeSantis inner circle is too small and remains so, they say, not only because he constitutionally doesn’t trust people but because she doesn’t either. She is and always has been by far his most important adviser, they say, because she is hesitant to cede that space to nearly anybody else. “Unlike any first lady in my extended memory,” added Tallahassee fixture Mac Stipanovich.įor nearly as long, too, though, others who have worked with her or around her have nodded more quietly to the downsides of the starring part that she plays. “In shaping him, in driving him … it’s different,” said a veteran Republican lobbyist. ![]() “She is every bit as involved in Ron’s rise as Ron is himself,” David Jolly, the ex-GOP Florida congressperson who’s now an MSNBC analyst, told me. In the DeSantis political project, she is unusually important and uncommonly involved, according to hundreds of interviews over the last few years and more than 60 more over the last few weeks - an array of former staffers, current supporters and donors, state and federal lawmakers and Florida lobbyists and political professionals. A telegenic former television personality, a breast cancer survivor and a mother of three young kids, Casey, 42, has a sort of policy portfolio of her own that ranges from hurricane recovery to issues of mental health. Here, then, in eastern Iowa and in concentrated form, was a preview of what is to come in the about-to-be-announced presidential candidacy of DeSantis - not just his run but also the often stage-dominating prominence of her role.įor some time now she’s been seen mostly and by many as an absolute superstar of a political spouse, a not so “secret weapon,” even something like his saving grace - an antidote for her sometimes awkward husband, social in a way that he is not, charismatic in a way that he is not, generally and seemingly at ease in the spotlight in a way that he so often and so evidently is not. ![]()
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