Is The House That DeSantis Built Imploding?
A woman has filed a sexual battery charge against the governor and presidential primary contender's key ally, but this episode may be a chapter in the larger drama of Florida's GOP
Happy Thursday, friends! If you missed my conversation with Heather Cox Richardson earlier in the week, you can catch up here. Today’s post is a cross between news and juicy gossip, so please feel free to:
The Florida Trident, a newsletter produced by the Florida Center for Government Accountability, reports today that the Sarasota Police Department is investigating the state’s GOP Chair Christian Ziegler on a sexual battery charge. The woman who filed the charges alleges that Christian Ziegler assaulted her in her home on October 2. Police have seized Ziegler’s phone because, as sources told Norman, they believe, among other things, that Ziegler “secretly videotaped the sexual encounters between the couple and the woman.”
Fun, right?
Both Christian and his wife Bridget, an insurance broker, are allies of Florida Governor and GOP presidential primary candidate Ron DeSantis. Christian Ziegler has appeared onstage with DeSantis and with Donald Trump, and was recently praised by Trump in a speech, while Ron DeSantis endorsed Bridget for a seat on the Sarasota County school board, saying: “we should have her in every county in Florida.” DeSantis also appointed her to the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, which oversees Disney World. While we don’t know what Bridget makes for doing that job, we do know that the administrator of the District makes $400,000 a year.
Why does DeSantis want Bridget in every county in Florida? Because she is a leading ant-trans activist, and a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, the Astroturf extremist group whose mission is to bring so-called “Christian values” into schools by banning books, putting people allied with M4L on school boards, and interfering with the secular and democratic nature of public education more generally. These self-righteous busybodies go on to implement broad book bans, which are powered by an M4L-funded site called BookLooks that directs chapter members across the country to find specific books and file complaints.
I am not bringing Bridget Ziegler into this because of her husband’s alleged nastiness, but because the investigation into the sexual battery complaint has uncovered a second allegation about her. As the Trident’s Bob Norman explains, the anonymous woman who has filed charges alleges “that she and both Zieglers had been involved in a longstanding consensual three-way sexual relationship prior to the incident. The incident under investigation by Sarasota police occurred when Christian Ziegler and the woman were alone at the woman’s house, without Bridget Ziegler present [.]”
There are at least two layers to this story.
The first, and most superficial issue, is that the Zieglers have some explaining to do. In my view, there’s nothing wrong with opening a marriage to other people as long as it is done ethically and consensually. However, I am not clear which “Christian value” a three-way, or “swinging,” as we used to call it in the olden days corresponds to (not to mention the girl-on-girl action which, by the way, you are not allowed to teach about in Florida’s public schools.) Right now, the Zieglers are simply not answering their phone, which tells us nothing except that they have retained legal counsel, and they are following that person’s advice. But if there is something on that phone (why do people keep sex videos on their phones?) that indicates that the three-way is really a thing, this is yet another headache for a DeSantis campaign that is falling apart day by day.
The second, and more serious, issue is what this scandal will do to a Florida Republican party that is already under strain. In January, Florida’s three delegates to the national convention were split on supporting the re-election of Ronna McDaniel as national chair. September, Politico reported that “Top officials in the Republican Party of Florida, under pressure from Trump supporters, voted to remove a provision in its state bylaws that required any candidate seeking to be on the March 19 presidential primary ballot to pledge loyalty to the eventual GOP nominee.” Repealing that provision, adopted only four months earlier, “was not only a win for Trump’s campaign but a sign that DeSantis no longer enjoys an iron-clad grip over the state party. DeSantis supporters, including House Speaker Paul Renner, had urged the state GOP to keep the pledge intact.” And the Florida congressional delegation is said to have been deeply divided over the ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Simultaneously, Donald Trump, now a resident of Florida, is said to be moving like a bitch on a state GOP. In April, Trump claimed that he had endorsements from a majority of Republican elected officials in the state, many of whom had been DeSantis allies. This month six more elected officials defected. And a little more than a week ago, acting on a tip, a Florida watchdog site published a report that DeSantis’s top election fraud official did not just die in the Tallahassee capitol building, but right outside DeSantis’s office, where he had collapsed and laid unconscious for almost half an hour before anyone noticed.
Returning to the Zieglers: I wouldn’t bet on the sexual battery charge standing up under scrutiny. Why? Because the phone call is coming from inside Ron DeSantis’s house, and this has all the earmarks of a classic political ratfuck. If it’s true that Christian and Bridget have a vivid private sexual life, and Christian records them for future enjoyment, it’s hard to imagine a better way of bringing their hypocrisy out in the open than a criminal accusation that requires those images being put into evidence. And with one stroke, the accusation—true or untrue—will behead what remains of DeSantis’s state political machine.
What I’m doing when you’re not looking:
I went to see Ridley Scott’s Napoleon last night, and hoo boy! What a clunker! I’m not complaining about historical inaccuracies. For example, sending Marie Antoinette to the guillotine with a full head of hair was a truly unforced error. Everyone knows that in order to get a clean cut, and a quick death, you had to get your hair off your neck. But the script and acting were pretty terrible too. The battle scenes were great: you watch them and the ways that nineteenth century tactical warfare produced the horrors of World War I are clear. But the interactions between characters kept me thinking that all you had to do was nudge it a tad more into the absurd, and you had a fantastic Monty Python sketch.
Here’s a bonus: through December 26, all annual subscriptions—for yourself or gifted to others—include a free copy of my book about political media, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020.)
Short takes:
Expect the polls to be pretty much frozen from here on out, advises Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. Why? Because currently voters are “calcified,” and actually have been since 2016. The intriguing part is that Trump has never exceeded the numbers he had in his first campaign, and Biden won in 2020 because he did better than Clinton: better with independents, better with turnout, and better with new voters. Biden’s current polling problem is that his support has eroded since the last election, something that is not unusual for a sitting president. “In other words, consider big shifts in polling in the battleground states as mirages,” Walter advises. “The electorate in these places is calcified. Polls that showed Biden enjoying significant leads in these states proved to be illusory in 2020, just as theories of a “red wave” failed to materialize in 2022. That means that the millions and millions of dollars spent in these states over the next 11 months will be focused on moving a tiny fraction of the electorate. Whether that movement comes from young voters, voters of color or independent voters is what we will be watching in the ensuing months.”(November 28, 2023)
According to Politico’s Bianca Quilantan, Jewish groups at UC-Berkeley “are suing over policies enacted by at least 23 Berkeley Law student groups that exclude students from joining or bar guest speakers from presenting if they do not agree to disavow Israel or if they identify as Zionists.” The campus has been roiled with pro-Palestinian protests, which Berkeley asserts are perfectly legal under the First Amendment. However, what happens during and around these events may not be. The groups who are suing assert that “celebrations of the Hamas attacks resulted in violence against Jewish students, Quilantan writes. “A Jewish student draped in an Israeli flag was attacked by protesters who hit him in the head with a metal water bottle, according to the complaint, and some Jews have received `hate e-mails calling for their gassing and murder.’ Jewish students have also said they are afraid to attend class because of the protests.” (November 28, 2023)
The climate crisis has motivated a wide range of citizens to become activists—but how does protest become policy? In Nature, Dana R. Fisher, Oscar Berglund, and Colin J. Davis argue that protests can “set a news agenda,” making climate issues prominent in public discussions and moving them up the policy agenda. But protests can also be alienating. What moves the needle? Narrow demands. “Insulate Britain made a clear, narrow demand aimed at reducing emissions by insulating social housing,” the researchers explain. “By contrast, Extinction Rebellion has avoided making specific policy demands, preferring to advocate much broader changes in democratic governance, notably through the use of citizens’ assemblies to decide on policy questions. Narrow demands are easier to convey and achieving success can attract more activists. But they might not be as effective in communicating a positive vision of a future in which the worst impacts of the climate crisis are avoided.” (November 28, 2023)