Dan Crenshaw Is the Trumpiest of the Wannabe New Trumps

[Zorro]

He’s got the same gift for aggrievement and shameless performance. And he’s got real military experience and isn't shy about exploiting it.

Close your eyes, if you would, and picture the next Trump-like president. Who do you see? Maybe it’s seditionist Sen. Josh Hawley, with his simulacrum of the Black power salute, but for white-supremacist storm troopers about to attack the Capitol Building in Washington? Or the oleaginous Sen. Ted Cruz, a patchy-bearded propagandist who spends his days lying about election fraud and picking Twitter fights with Hollywood actors? Or throne-sniffing Sen. Tom Cotton, or former UN Ambassador under Trump (appointed because she seemed foreign-y to him), Nikki Haley?

But it’s far from clear that any of these awkward, unpleasant profiles in perfidy have what it takes to stimulate the amygdala of Trump’s deplorable devotees. Those who made clear in the Alabama special of 2017, midterms in 2018, Virginia statewides in 2019, and two Georgia Senate races in 2020, that they don't turn out in surge numbers when their One True Love isn't on the ballot.

Hopefully, there won’t be any Trump 2.0, but there is one Republican I can picture pulling it off. You haven't heard quite as much about him, because he’s only a House member, and because it’s challenging to make your batshittery stand out when you’re surrounded by that trinity of trashy truculence that is Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, and Louie Gohmert. But Dan Crenshaw may just have the combination of shamelessness, cynicism, cruelty, and performative charisma to put Trump’s band back together.

One thing that you have heard about him says a lot about why he may be the one. Back during the 2018 midterms, Pete Davidson of Saturday Night Live made a joke about how he was surprised that Crenshaw, a former Navy Seal who wears an eye patch because he lost an eye while serving in Afghanistan, was “a congressional candidate from Texas and not a hit man in a porno movie.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/dan-crenshaw-is-the-trumpiest-of-the-wannabe-new-trumps