Media’s Smearing of Casey DeSantis as ‘Walmart Melania’ Betrays Its Nostalgia for Trump

Every great innovator builds upon the work of other great minds, taking an idea forward and fulfilling its true, unencumbered potential.

As an example, look no further than Daily Beast executive editor Katie Baker’s recent contribution to the “Ron DeSantis is worse/more dangerous than Donald Trump” genre.

“Casey DeSantis Is the Walmart Melania,” blares the headline, whose proximate cause was DeSantis’s wardrobe choice of a bomber jacket with the words “where woke goes to die” and a depiction of the Sunshine State emblazoned on its back in Iowa over the weekend. To Baker, this served as a personal reminder of what has become a kind of hive mind epiphany in left-of-center media: For the sake of both business and pleasure, Trump must defeat DeSantis in the GOP presidential primary.

The jacket demanded an extended comparison to Melania Trump’s donning of a jacket that read “I Really Don’t Care” amidst the controversy of family separation at the southern border during her husband’s presidency. Baker ruled, definitively, in Trump’s favor:

The message on Melania’s coat, like the one-time model herself, was sphinxlike. Was it a sign to the outside that Melania dreamed of escaping her boorish husband, the stuff of a thousand Resistance Twitter fever memes? Was it the physical manifestation of the Trumps’ casual cruelty? After all, Melania was flying down to where the administration locked up little kids in cages and tore them from the arms of their desperate parents. Did it mean nothing at all, like her spox insisted—maybe like Melania herself, a cipher whose eyes seem to betray an inner emptiness, like the infinite refraction of mirrored light off of all those gold-plated Trump Tower bathroom fixtures?

By contrast, Casey DeSantis’ coat is just like her husband Ron DeSantis’ campaign: Crude. Grasping. Saying the ugly part out loud. Whereas Trump would wink-wink at the fascists—who can forget his dog whistle to the “very fine people on both sides” at Charlottesville—DeSantis wants to peel off Trump’s base by being even more explicit about who he intends to target. You can see it right there on his wife’s jacket: DeSantis’ Florida is where the woke go to die—and a lot of other people die as well.

“Ron and Casey will also never be the Trumps,” sneered Baker, dismissing them as “knock-offs.”

“Trump is the danger of raw, chaotic id,” she explains, only inches away from extolling the virtues of bad boys. “DeSantis, meanwhile, is the little jerk who’s going to make all of us pay for how he had no friends in third grade.”

If Baker comes across as someone trying to discern truth by the shapes of clouds, that’s because she is. And the important thing to remember is that if others agree that one cloud appears an alluring sphinx and the other a grasping (gasp!) Walmart shopper, her business will prosper and the candidates she supports are more likely to prevail.

She’s far from the only one to admit to this preference, implicitly or even explicitly. In fact, although nothing can be taken away from her creativity, she’s not the only one to use Casey DeSantis to express this preference. Last month at Politico, Michael Kruse enlisted Trump’s longtime advisor Roger Stone and 2024 campaign manager Susie Wiles to construct a Lady MacBeth-like narrative around Florida’s first lady.

Corporate media’s investment in Trump as a ratings harvester — and force multiplier for Democrats — is further evidenced in so much of its coverage of the upcoming presidential race.

Some have foregone pretense to favor Trump outright. File writers at the New Republic (“Believe It: A DeSantis Presidency Could Be Even Worse Than Trump”), Vanity Fair (“Ron DeSantis Shouldn’t Be Covered Like Just Another Republican“)  as well as any number of MSNBC personalities within this category.

For others, its similarly self-evident even if they would deny it upon. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin was unable to contain a digital cackle over coverage of Trump’s polling lead. Bill Kristol praises Trump for of all things his courage. Charlie Sykes parrots the former president’s cracks about DeSantis’s weight; these aren’t particularly clever tips of their hands.

Still others are more, if not impressively, sly. Kruse disguised his work for the Trump campaign as respectable reporting, as did The Atlantic‘s Mark Leibovich — who leaned on many of the same “sources,” all of whom have no unique access to DeSantis and manifest motivation to attack him —  as Kruse. Here’s a hint: If Rick Wilson is being cited, it’s because the author doesn’t have the goods.

More generally, the media still has its unofficial deal to provide Trump with a wealth of free media in exchange for the ratings he provides with his outrageous behavior and the emotions he brings out in his supporters and opponents alike. Consider the treatment of his car ride to court in April as a more glamourous O.J. Simpson chase.

Make no mistake, as the GOP presidential primary ramps up and the media gathers even more data points to support the theory that Trump’s success through the Republican convention in July 2024 is best for both itself and the Democratic Party, its attacks on his competitors — and, evidently, their loved ones — will only grow more unhinged.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.