The Democrats have already begun their campaign of fear and frightened intrepidity in defense of the democracy that they claim Republicans endanger by opening up a preemptive media barrage against Governor DeSantis even as their six-year death struggle with President Trump enters a new phase. 

The bruising battle with Mr. Trump has been so prolonged and has shaken Democratic complacency too profoundly for them to allow the chortling backslapping (that they are probably entitled to), following their unexpectedly strong showing in the midterm elections, to escalate prematurely into cackles of victory. 

There is a discernible distinction in the collective minds of the Democrats on this issue. On the one hand, as they regarded Mr. Trump as a laughable poltroon right up to late on election night 2016, and are acutely aware that he has shattered the post-Reagan bipartisan era with genteel fluctuations in the strength of the two parties while the 95 percent of Washington that is Democratic moved steadily to the left, they cannot easily shed their fear of Mr. Trump as an imperishable monster who has shattered the formerly impenetrable complacency of the Clinton-Obama Democrats.

On the other hand, as defenders of the tarnished orthodoxy of the OBushinton Era, they continue to incant the Democratic house truism that Mr. Trump would be the easiest Republican to defeat. They can’t attempt to impeach him again as they have lost control of the House of Representatives, (the fact that he doesn’t hold any public office is no more relevant than it was when they impeached him in 2021).

Yet they have the prosecutorial arm of the Democratic National Committee (the Department of Justice), poised to indict him for some fatuous congeries of imagined offenses strung together between January 6, 2021, and the supposed deviations from the Espionage Act that they eventually proclaimed to be the justification for the Keystone Kops occupation of the former president’s house at Palm Beach in August. The party elders are still chastened at their failure to implement that strategy in time to salvage the 2016 election.

They have been too rattled by the Trump experience to be certain that it is over, and too rigidified in their fear and hatred of Mr. Trump to stop claiming that he would be a pushover in a general election (they are unlikely to be able to exploit the ballot harvesting system in the next election with the egregious self-indulgence they enjoyed in 2020). 

So the straddle has begun: the special prosecutor, John “Jack” Smith, with impeccable anti-Trump credentials, already denounced by his target as a “hit-man” (probably accurately), will presumably observe the customary DOJ rules of improper media leaks on a scale that in ancient time required the construction of an ark, convicting Mr. Trump of crimes in advance, a practice in which the rabidly partisan national political media have had a six-year graduate course. 

At the same time the long-range artillery is already opening up on Mr. DeSantis. His success at ignoring the Covid rules so rigorously imposed by Democratic governors, and President Biden’s denunciation of his Covid policy as dangerous and irresponsible will simply have to be scrubbed from memory, since Mr. DeSantis was entirely vindicated and the deconstruction of the sinister and misguided Fauci terror is already underway at Washington.                    

Henceforth, we may expect Mr. DeSantis to be described endlessly as “belligerent,” which in Democratic newspeak means declining to wallow in the soft-left policy pablum decried by Mr. Trump. He will be portrayed as ripping from Mr. Trump’s failing hands the flame of the “hard right culture wars,” as if the policy course corrections that would end illegal immigration, petroleum imports, skyrocketing crime, bone cracking inflation, and other brain-waves of the current regime were an inexcusable sequence of aggressive provocations: a war conducted by the bad Republicans to which the Democrats respond with pristine righteousness. 

The Democrats have warned that Mr. DeSantis has gerrymandered the congressional map of Florida. By attacking the Disney championship of absurd gender ambiguities, Mr. DeSantis has set himself up to be denounced from the rooftops of blue state America and the spigots of Democratic propaganda in the national political media as a full-blooded successor to Mr. Trump as a homophobic misogynist; confected insinuations of racism and partiality to violence will surely not be long in coming.

A bellwether of Democratic commentators, Juan Williams, an amiable Democratic sleeper on Fox News, has already warned (in the Hill on November 27) that Mr. DeSantis is being misleadingly touted as “Trump without the baggage,” and as someone who will almost certainly be harder to outspend two to one as Mr.  Trump was in 2020, as Mr. DeSantis has attracted substantial donations from such wealthy figures as Ken Griffin, Steve Ross, and Steve Schwarzman. 

All that could be said in favor of Mr. DeSantis in Mr. Williams’ presumably semi-official Democratic playbook, was that he cooperated with Mr. Biden in cleaning up Florida after Hurricane Ian — the Democrats can’t expect the weather to produce a dreadful fiasco for every Republican president as Hurricane Katrina did with George W. Bush at New Orleans in 2005.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with Democrats thinking ahead and laying down fire in advance against a legitimately anticipated challenge from a formidable emerging opponent. What is not so immune to criticism is the clear indication that even if Mr. DeSantis does succeed the unprecedentedly confrontational Mr. Trump as Republican leader, instead of taking the opportunity to de-escalate, we may expect from the Democrats a revival of the mighty smear job that the Republican Party is an agent of violence and bigotry. 

One must be close to the point where that putrefied falsehood is finally seen for the outrage that it is. The party that was once led by FDR, Harry Truman, JFK, LBJ, and even Bill Clinton, should be able to run a tough and clever but civilized campaign on the basis of the qualities of their candidates and the merits of their policies. There is a good chance that that is what the Republicans will do, whomever they choose as their candidates for national office.