DeSantis criticized for 'slitting throats' remark in New Hampshire

Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis is facing widespread criticism for using violent imagery to describe his plan to reduce the size of the federal workforce, a long-standing Republican project that remains broadly unrealized.

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What he said

“We’re going to have all of these deep state people, you know, we are going to start slitting throats on day one,” DeSantis said at a Sunday barbecue in New Hampshire hosted by Scott Brown, a fellow Republican who served as a senator from Massachusetts.

The “deep state” is a vague concept popularized by former President Donald Trump that refers to the sprawling federal bureaucracy. It is generally used by the right to describe a shadowy and unaccountable — not to mention fictional — cabal of powerful elites.

DeSantis’s comments were initially reported by New Hampshire Public Radio, which observed that some attendees at the barbecue were disturbed by the governor’s hard-edged “terminology.”

The remark led to renewed criticism of DeSantis, who has had to fend off attacks from both the pro-Trump right and disenchanted Republican moderates, not to mention Democrats and progressives who have taken to delighting in his recent political misfortunes.

“Look, I know cruelty sells in my former world of the right, but this is ... this is such a bad thing to say,” wrote Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, on Twitter.

At the barbecue in New Hampshire, DeSantis also said that traffickers bringing drugs into the United States by crossing the border with Mexico would be “shot stone-cold dead.”

Read more on Yahoo News: DeSantis disappoints, and some Republicans seek new Trump-slaying savior

What he meant

DeSantis is a former Navy attorney who served as a legal adviser at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay for suspected terrorists. He has cultivated an image of toughness, and though he never served in a combat role, the governor’s rhetoric often includes military terms such as “over the target” and “incoming fire.”

In an interview with a conservative outlet last week, DeSantis said that, were he to become president, his chosen defense secretary “may have to slit some throats.” He recently unveiled a proposal to rid the military of “wokeness,” his favored shorthand for the push for racial and gender justice.

The DeSantis campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Read more on Yahoo News: Showtime pulled ‘Vice’ episode about Ron DeSantis at Guantanamo Bay without explanation, via New York Daily News

Reducing the size of government

The size and reach of the federal government expanded dramatically during the 20th century. The executive branch grew especially rapidly with the New Deal programs of President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s and, in the 1960s, with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society initiative. As a result, the federal workforce — excluding the Department of Defense — expanded from 443,000 employees in 1940 to 1.2 million in 1979. (The national population grew from 132 million to 227 million during the same period.)

Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States in 1980 on a conservative platform that treated the federal government as an intrusion on Americans’ liberties. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” he famously said during his first inaugural address.

Since then, conservative aspirants for the White House have promised to cut the size of the federal government.

Broken promises

It was Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who said in 1996 that “the era of big government is over.” And yet government kept getting bigger—and bigger.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the administration of George W. Bush built out the national security apparatus to an extent that would have been unimaginable only a few years before. Under his successors, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, government kept growing.

Now Trump is promising to “root out the deep state” (that is, if he is elected president again) by firing “rogue bureaucrats” en masse. Doing so could be difficult because of protections afforded to government workers, but the promise nonetheless resonates with committed conservatives who retain the Reagan-era vision of a much smaller federal apparatus.

DeSantis, who is trying to court Trump voters, has made similar promises.

Read more on Yahoo News: DeSantis says he would eliminate four federal agencies if elected president, via NBC News.

Widespread criticism

DeSantis made his controversial comment as his campaign seeks to recover from a difficult stretch of several months that has seen his standing in the polls fall precipitously.

His campaign announced a “reset” late last month, only to find itself embroiled in controversies about chattel slavery and Nazi iconography.

“This reboot just keeps getting better and better!" close Trump adviser Jason Miller told Yahoo News in a text message. Trump is still the clear frontrunner, leading DeSantis by an arguably insurmountable margin in recent polls.

“I know that language isn’t everything,” said Jay Nordlinger of the National Review, a prominent conservative publication that had been enthusiastic about DeSantis’s candidacy but has recently grown skittish about his prospects. “But it’s not nothing either. In an inflamed, often-violent atmosphere, I’m not sure leaders should talk that way.”

Olivia Troye, who served as an aide to former Vice President Mike Pence, called the comment “atrocious.”

DeSantis was also taken to task by the American Federation of Government Employees, the nation’s largest federal employee union. “Governor DeSantis’ threat to ‘start slitting throats’ of federal employees is dangerous, disgusting, disgraceful, and disqualifying,” AFGE president Everett Kelley said in a statement.

Read more on Yahoo News: I Was Team DeSantis Before His Disgusting Anti-Gay Ad, via The Daily Beast