Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis continued his crusade against his state's largest tourist attraction when he threatened to build a prison right next to Walt Disney World.
Scott Maxwell, a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel, argued this week that DeSantis' obsession with punishing Disney had become so destructive that "the wheels have come off" the entire venture.
The problem, as Maxwell sees it, is that DeSantis simply doesn't know how to handle improving his national profile in a way that doesn't involve nonstop culture warring that will grow off-putting to non-Republican voters.
"See, your average American doesn’t believe Mickey and Minnie are trying to turn preschoolers gay or that the Main Street Electrical Parade is a covert Pride operation," he writes. "They’re not obsessed with drag queens. And they’re not keen on book bans."
Maxwell goes on to argue that all of this has deeply unsettled deep-pocketed right-wing donors who had hoped that DeSantis would be able to pull off the trick of appealing to Trump voters without also threatening the stability of the American republic.
"Instead, he declared thermonuclear war on a cartoon mouse," Maxwell notes.
