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I wrote a few days ago that Ron DeSantis’s long campaign collapse was likely the most ignominious and vertiginous in the presidential primary era, which dates in stages from the 1960s and early 1970s. Some skeptics pointed to Jeb! in 2016 or Rudy Giuliani in 2008. But on a closer inspection neither flameout measures up to Ron’s. As evidenced by his legendary “Please clap” mix of exhortation and lament, Jeb! had an uncanny degree of self-awareness about the impending collapse of his succession plans that would cheat him of the prize. Giuliani had the political press in his hands. But his attempt to corner the 9/11 market was never enough to overcome his heterodoxy on issues like gay rights or serial-philandering in an earlier version of the Republican Party where those things mattered. His strategy of sitting out the early primaries and waiting until Florida, while a nice foreshadowing of Florida’s future as the home of Trumpism, was always correctly identified as a way to post-date the end of his campaign. Even the 9/11 brand was too long in the tooth by 2007. Joe Biden was able to make him a punch line with his famous one-liner.
The truth though is that DeSantis never had a chance. His humiliation was preordained and basically certain. Professional Republicans were at least a bit soured on Trump after the 2022 election, which seemed to make clear what 2018 and 2020 had strongly suggested: that Trump is an electoral loser. For professional Republicans there’s a bit more to it though. They’re completely down with Trump and Trumpism, as the last seven years have shown clearly enough. But they’re always going to have an eye out to move on. Part of what it means to be a political professional is to have a wandering eye for the new political horse, the new candidate, the new rising star, which is the usual path to professional advancement. More generously, it’s why you get into political work in the first place.
A Republican Party ruled by Donald Trump is one in which true advancement and greatness is always stymied and, to the extent it exists, always subject to his whims.
Professional Republicans also tend to be a shade different from MAGA Republican voters in that they tend to be creatures of the blue mega-cities they revile — New York, Los Angeles, Miami. They have college degrees. They share Trump’s politics of resentment but it’s not precisely the same. They’re more than ready to sign on to the Trump agenda and elect Trump’s candidates. But they’re always going to have a roving eye for any hint that it’s time to move on.
It’s much the same for the few dozen billionaires who fund the Republican Party. Many of the big ones ruled out backing Trump again either after the insurrection or the 2022 disappointments. Of course they did. They were against him before they were for in 2016. But they’ll be back when they realize that Trump is still the nominee and still the owner of the Republican Party. Which is to say, now.
None of this means that any of these people are secret Never Trumpers. It just means there are reasons they’ll have a wandering eye if and when Trump looks like he might be fading. They’re the ones who got political reporters thinking that DeSantis might be the next thing. Really the whole 2024 Republican primary cycle was the billionaires and the Republican professional class getting together to see if it might be possible to nudge Trump out of the way. But it became clear before it even began that it was impossible. Most of the last year was just rushing through a novel you’d already watched to the end in its movie version. What else was there to occupy bored reporters but Ron’s long, inevitable fall — punctured by the occasional cringey viral video.
Sad.
As I wrote one year ago …
Even though each [candidate] is there to make the case against Trump (without saying it) they are all like planets orbiting the sun of Donald Trump. Look at each one and try to imagine what their candidacies are even about if Trump didn’t exist. They’re all emanations of him. DeSantis is just the biggest planet orbiting the sun … If the GOP were ready to move on from Trump they would be having a campaign that wasn’t entirely about him. But that is just what they’re doing.
DeSantis’s fall was so dizzying because he was the perfectly packaged billionaire-funded post-Trump candidate, Trump Without The Baggage. But anyone watching him should have seen that even if Trump were beatable, which he probably never was, DeSantis hardly had the juice to accomplish it. He was meant to be a Trump-clone, a carbon copy of Trump who could replace Trump without speaking his name. But he was wooden, packaged and weird. Only a wild blindness born of the folly of the Trump Clone fantasy can explain that. Just one clear-eyed look at the dude made it all crystal clear.
DeSantis’s reputation in Congress was as someone who made zero friends during his short tenure. That wasn’t a good sign. He won his first term as governor by running as a toadyish devotee of President Trump, even down to goofy commercials about teaching his toddler about Trump’s border wall. But remember that lack of dignity is an asset under Trump’s wings.
DeSantis’s 60% reelection win was a triumph. But on closer inspection Republicans outspent Democrats by something like 10 to 1. Democrats knew they were going to lose and only half contested the race. Also important, Florida is a big state where 30-second ads are the coin of the realm, not retail politics. This kept some of DeSantis’s weakness as a presidential candidate out of view. Once DeSantis hit the campaign trail reporters and the peanut gallery of social media saw a guy who was awkward and weird. That first impression stuck because it was accurate. He was done for. Every new outing became a test to see whether he was as socially awkward and uncomfortable around people as everyone said. As it always, always is, trying super hard to be loose and natural was like trying to look dignified climbing a greasy pole, a one-way trip to ever mounting dignity loss.
But even DeSantis’s now legendary discomfort in his own skin isn’t the whole of it. It was all reporters had to talk about because DeSantis never attempted to make a case against the person he was nominally running against. The same of course can be said about every other candidate in the race. Chris Christie was the exception that proved the rule, and his unwillingness to really take his campaign to Trump told the story as clearly as anything. The idea of the entire 2024 campaign – billionaire funded and operative run – was that a Trump clone could somehow be swapped in for Trump without anyone noticing. They imagined Trump would see the writing on the wall and just walk away. DeSantis was like a lab-designed version of what’s been the establishment GOP holy grail for half a dozen years, the fabled Trump Without The Baggage. To paraphrase what they said about Austin Powers, Republicans craved this fabled creature, Democrats feared him. But Trump is the baggage. All the “rough edges” and degenerate values are what feeds his supporters’ devotion. Trump is The Baggage. It’s worth repeating since after almost eight years, so few seem to understand this.
The fall of DeSantis — barely making it to even the first contest before bowing out — confirms this and reminds us of it. The only way such a terrible candidate could have been hosed down with money and treated as the next big thing was that so many people — in the billionaire class, among Republican professionals and especially in the political press — somehow still don’t realize this.