Politico Enlists Three Democrats, Roger Stone, and Donald Trump’s Campaign Manager for Hit Piece on Casey DeSantis

 

Oftentimes, it’s the pretense of yeomen-like, respectable professionalism that members of the press pretend to approach their jobs with while doing the bidding of the Democratic Party that frustrates conservatives more than the actual hackery itself.

Such is the case with Politico‘s latest hit piece on Casey DeSantis, the wife of Florida governor and soon-to-be candidate for the Republican presidential nomination Ron DeSantis. Senior writer Michael Kruse conducted “hundreds of interviews over the last few years and more than 60 more over the last few weeks,” to produce it. And yet, the stars of his supposedly praiseworthy reporting are three Democratic apparatchiks, plus Donald Trump’s campaign manager and his longtime advisor Roger Stone.

No, you shouldn’t be impressed.

The thesis of Kruse’s work is that Casey DeSantis is, if not a veritable Lady MacBeth, something approximating it. Here’s some of the more damning quotes he was able to cobble together

“Never cross Casey,” warns Rick Wilson, whom Kruse calls a “former Republican strategist” but means “Democratic strategist who recently called DeSantis ‘a monster,” and ‘whiny weirdo’ at a Democratic club meeting.”

“Have you ever noticed how much Ron DeSantis’ wife Casey is like Lady Macbeth?” asks Stone, a longtime Trump confidante who has urged DeSantis to “step aside.”

Mac Stipanovich — who is described as a “Tallahassee fixture” who worked for Jeb Bush but is actually a Democrat who has said he’d “rather have teeth pulled without anesthetic than be on a boat with Ron DeSantis” — asks “who the f*** are we?” about her use of the collective pronoun during a press conference.

David Jolly, who ran against DeSantis for the GOP Senate nomination prior to Marco Rubio reentering the race before then becoming a professional Republican-basher on MSNBC, told a dubious story about her snapping at his mother:

David Jolly got a close-quarters glimpse of the sharp edges of her personality when he and DeSantis both were running in the 2016 cycle for the United States Senate. (DeSantis and Jolly left the race after Marco Rubio halted his presidential campaign and wanted to come back and keep his seat.) In a lobby in a hotel in Tampa, Jolly’s elderly mother asked the DeSantises if she could take their picture to have as a keepsake. They obliged and she thanked them. “And Casey,” Jolly told me, “turns and snaps at my mom and says, ‘I better not see that photo in any opposition research.’” Jolly was appalled. He called her in our conversation an ice queen. “Both ice and queen,” he said, “are doing the work there.”

Stone resurfaces later in the piece to call the DeSantis’s canning of Susie Wiles — who has gone on to become the campaign manager of Trump’s 2024 campaign — as “a mistake they might regret.”

Wiles features prominently in Kruse’s narrative. Axing her “struck many” as “a shortsighted miscalculation” and even a potentially “fatal mistake.” The author abandons restraint to dramatically comment on the decision: “’What’s done,’ to quote Lady Macbeth, ‘cannot be undone.'”

Wiles thanks Kruse for the free press just as Trump thanks him for his in-kind contribution to his campaign, but the idea that a single political operative will swing the entire course of the Republican primary is so hopelessly naïve that its shocking that Kruse wrote it, and more shocking still that his editor let it slide.

The other damning quotes come from unnamed faces with unknown motivations. “She sees ghosts in every corner,” offered one anonymous source. “She’s more paranoid than he is,” said a second.

“Does she also feed into his, I guess, worst instincts, of being secluded and insular and standoffish with staff?” asks a third before answering in the affirmative.

The harsh tenor wouldn’t work without any named sources, so Kruse, armed with a demonstrated willingness to mislead, clumsily cobbled together a strange mix of Trump loyalists and Trump-reliant Democrats. The result of his efforts was an even more shoddy faux consensus around Casey DeSantis’s villainy than would have existed without their inclusion.

If the closest you can get to a someone’s inner circle is his avowed rivals, it’s not a story you have, it’s a press release.

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