News/Commentary

Politico gives Casey DeSantis the Republican treatment with ‘deranged’ and creepy hit piece

May 19, 2023 | | Print Article

Politico published a long, catty and defamatory piece on Casey DeSantis that did nothing more than show just how much the author fears her husband Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) becoming president, and made it appear that he equally fears her as well.

Author Michael Kruse called his hit piece, “The Casey DeSantis Problem: ‘His Greatest Asset and His Greatest Liability’”

Listen to how he describes Florida’s first lady and possibly the nation’s first lady in waiting during a campaign stop in Iowa:

Casey DeSantis, the wife of Ron DeSantis, just a few minutes before at a table in the crowd had looked oddly disengaged, listening to him give a speech this past Saturday evening in a drab hotel conference room here, sitting somewhat stiffly, clapping intermittently, her face flat and her shoulders almost slumped. Now, though, having been prompted to join him up on stage, she turned in expression and tone suddenly and noticeably brighter.

 

Dripping venom from his keyboard, Kruse sounded more like a jilted paramour than an objective reporter.

‘That’s a good question,’ she cooed, thanking the head of the state Republican Party for having them and for convening this scripted Q&A, before launching into a 3 ½-minute stump speech of an answer — in which she called her husband a fighter and ‘a good dad’ and ‘a good person’ and ‘really the embodiment of the American dream,’ tracing his biography from Jacksonville in Northeast Florida to Dunedin in the Tampa Bay area to Yale College to Harvard Law to joining the Navy and becoming a judge advocate general and then going to Iraq and then getting elected to Congress and then getting elected to be the governor of ‘the third-largest state in the country and now the 13th-largest economy in the world’ and at some point the crowd found a place to applaud and she had a chance to take a breath,” the article continued.

Kruse mentioned that Ron DeSantis is potentially getting ready to announce his candidacy for president and his trepidation was almost palpable. He then turned to further smear Casey DeSantis as a power-hungry, politically driven spouse who lets nothing stand in her way. Nothing could be further from the truth.

“For 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. 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,” he stated.

“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. ‘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 shaping him, in driving him … it’s different,’ said a veteran Republican lobbyist. ‘Unlike any first lady in my extended memory,’ added Tallahassee fixture Mac Stipanovich,” Kruse wrote.

“For 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. 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. 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. Especially forthright are the people who are granted anonymity on account of their fear of retribution given their power — not just his but hers,” he remarked.

“‘She’s the power behind the throne,’ a Republican lobbyist told me. ‘The tip of the spear,’ said a Republican consultant. She is, they say, in the middle of good decisions of his, but bad ones, too. 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,” Kruse continued.

It’s almost as if he’s cast Casey DeSantis in a Shakespearean play or a version of the Game of Thrones. He’s seems obsessed with her.

Not being able to resist it, Kruse quoted someone he despises… Trump loyalist Roger Stone.

“Have you ever noticed,” Stone remarked in a Telegram post last fall, “how much Ron DeSantis’ wife Casey is like Lady Macbeth?”

It’s no secret that former President Trump is out to beat DeSantis. And leftists are using that scenario every chance they get to denigrate Republicans so President Biden is elevated.

“In the tragic drama, of course, Lady Macbeth prods her husband to kill the king so she can be the queen. At this juncture, the literary analogy goes only so far. 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,” Kruse noted.

“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. 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. She can ameliorate some of the effects of his idiosyncrasies. She can also accentuate, even exacerbate, his hubris, and his paranoia, and his vaulting ambition — because those are all traits that they share. He wouldn’t be where he is without her. He might not get to where he wants to go because of her,” he ridiculously wrote.

Then came the quotes from unnamed staffers.

“He’s a leader who makes political decisions with the assistance of his wife, who was elected by nobody, who’s blindly ambitious,” said a former DeSantis administration staffer according to Kruse. “And she sees ghosts in every corner.”

“She’s more paranoid than he is,” said another according to Kruse.

“He’s a vindictive motherf***er. She’s twice that,” another staffer allegedly said. “She’s the scorekeeper.”

The leftist hatred of Casey DeSantis is almost legendary at this point.

https://twitter.com/kathrynresister/status/1659423457145413633

Kruse goes on at length dredging up people to say bad things about Casey DeSantis. He also seems to think it is very odd that the two are in love and are partners in his political ambitions. If he wants to see a political climber that used her husband as a stepping stool, he might want to look at Hillary Clinton, not Casey DeSantis.

Unlike the Clintons, Casey DeSantis has been there for her husband all the way. Something that Kruse views negatively.

“DeSantis in Congress had three chiefs of staff — one for every term he served. But first and foremost he had her. She introduced him at his first town hall in 2013. She accompanied him on a congressional trip to Israel in 2014. Even as she transitioned from reporting and anchoring for WJXT to co-hosting a midday talk show for First Coast News, even as she gave birth to their first child, she helped conduct interviews for his staff. She served as his media strategist, putting to use her professional knowledge of optics,” he said.

“‘I learned how to do my makeup from Ron DeSantis, and he learned from Casey,’ Rep. Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, told me in 2021. ‘He worked harder on his fundraising than anybody else,’ said the aforementioned top congressional aide, ‘and he did it in conjunction a lot of times with Casey.’ Those who worked for Ron DeSantis quickly deduced they in essence worked for her too. And it was clear she was not to be crossed. ‘She was looped in on every email and calendar invite,’ a former staffer told Vanity Fair last year. ‘If Casey said jump, we would pull out the trampoline,'” Kruse speciously reported.

He even recounted Casey DeSantis being branded an “ice queen.” The article is well over 4,000 words long… far too long to dissect every piece. Suffice it to say it is an attempt to paint Florida’s first lady as cold and power-hungry which is utterly defamatory. The only evidence you need of that is that he also quoted Lincoln Project founder Rick Wilson, who slimily stated, “Never cross Casey.”

The author only mentions her brave fight with cancer in passing. He was too busy trying to character-assassinate her to give much airtime to that or the fact that she is a devoted mother and wife.

He saved some of his vitriol for the governor as well, “The ‘Florida Blueprint,’ ‘Make America Florida,’ anti-‘woke’-warrior policy platform DeSantis is going to run on — the limiting of teaching of gender and sexual identity in schools, the banning of critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion programs, the expulsion of the top prosecutor in Tampa he judged as too progressive, the policing of what the state’s teachers can teach particularly about history and race, the six-week abortion ban and his vengeful clash with Disney that’s more than anything else spooked some big-dollar donors — it’s a roster of accomplishments to some, and missteps, flashpoints or even autocratic overreach to others. And it’s hard to lay it at the feet of his wife. He, after all, is the governor. He, after all, is the candidate. Not her. But still …”

One source actually referred to the couple as a dragon and dragon lady. And Trump supporters were quoted to make them look bad as well.

This is surely just one of many hit pieces to come as the left attempts to savage Ron and Casey DeSantis to keep them out of the White House.

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