Abby Zimet: Big Tough Weird LGBTQ-Bashing American Psycho Guy Wants Your Vote and What Could Go Wrong?

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Whew. Latest proof the GOP is truly a malignant flaming clown car: A new, screechy, homophobic campaign ad by hateful “faulty robot from Westworld” and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis that’s either the gayest or most bonkers ad ever. It attacks Trump as (eww) queer-friendly before pivoting to manly-man Ron doing his loud fake laugh amidst oiled bodybuilders, drag queens, disco music, Nazi music, gladiators, more bodybuilders, Brad Pitt’s Achilles and Christian Bale’s psychopath. Yeah, we’re confused too.

Even before this latest Hindenburg of an ad in a supposed presidential campaign that more accurately resembles a “teenage, you know, food fight,” DeSantis had proved himself “an awkward, odd, cringey meatball of a man” with “the charisma of a gasoline-soaked mushroom.” There was the “buzzword diarrhea” speech in South Carolina where, evidently attempting to channel Winston Churchill, he managed to use “woke” seven times in 20 seconds: “We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the corporations…We will never ever surrender to the woke mob.” There were the “saucy little white boots,” the wide-eyed bobblehead in Japan, the first demented fake laugh, the second, worse one, and the growing sense DeSantis is not just a bigoted, bullying, aspiring Fascist, raging egomaniac and tacky showboater with the emotional maturity of a middle-schooler who never met a vulnerable segment of the population he didn’t hate and want to hurt in the dubious name of out-Trumping Trump, but also just a weird, icky dude.

So sure, to mark the last day of Pride Month his “War Room” released an anti-Trump, anti-LGBTQ+ ad so stupid, so vile, so filled with “the self-parodying crapitude of the DeSantis camp” that it was swiftly deemed“the gayest ad in the history of political advertising,” “a terrific ad for Democrats,” or “the worst video I have ever seen in my life.” It starts with Trump expressing tepid support for the queer community after the Pulse Nightclub shootings – nah, let’s just gun ’em down – before veering to a proud montage of news stories about tough guy DeSantis’ don’t-say-gay madness and “harshest, most draconian laws that literally threaten trans existence.” To a bizarre mix of gay club disco tracks and ominous marching music, we see DeSantis alternately cackling and shooting lightning from his eyes – Dark Brandon Redux – with quick-cut homoerotic images of half-naked muscle-men, flamboyant drag queens, gladiators, warriors, American Psycho, more beefcakes seemingly prepping for Tucker’s testicle-tanning, and yes all this from a guy who wants to be – checks notes – elected president of the country.

Apart from the WTF weirdness, of course, critics cited the over-the-top homophobia, the “edgelordian way it leans into fascism’s omnipresent obsession with hyper-masculinity,” the “eliminationist rhetoric” about a small, marginalized, acutely vulnerable population and the evident wish to, in the words of openly gay Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, “make life hardest for a community that’s already one of the hardest hit in America.” Asked about the ad on CNN, he tried to “leave aside the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders” to focus on the ugly, baleful bottom line: This hateful, deranged cracker “has absolutely nothing to offer us or our country.” “Who are you trying to help?” he asked. “Who are you trying to make better off? And what public policy problems do you get up in the morning thinking about how to solve?” “Public policy problems”? LOL. Ask all these GOP morons, all the time, who they’re trying to help, other than themselves. Listen to the deafening silence. 

First published in Common Dreams. Included in Vox Populi with permission.

Abby Zimet has written Common Dream’s Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, she moved to the Maine woods in the early 70s, where she spent a dozen years building a house, hauling water and writing before moving to Portland. Having come of political age during the Vietnam War, she has long been involved in women’s, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues.