After weeks of dwindling polls, Ron DeSantis is hitting the big old reset button. Turns out “Donald Trump without the personality” isn’t delighting voters everywhere the way tech bros like Elon Musk thought it might. As part of its reboot, the DeSantis campaign is promising more Pizza Ranch stops and less Florida talk, according to NBC News. They’re calling it “DeSantis Is Everywhere,” like something out of a low-rent horror movie in the 1950s. “No one in this race has been under fire more and won than Gov. DeSantis,” campaign manager Generra Peck told NBC News. “He’s ready to prove them wrong again. Buckle up.”
Okay, we’ll buckle as the DeSantis campaign swerves to get back on course—and not crash. It turns out “Make America Florida” is not the winner the DeSantis crew imagined. DeSantis has been governing Florida largely as a GOP primary campaign advertisement, trying to show MAGA voters that Trumpism can scale (it can’t) since being elected governor in 2018. DeSantis’s governorship has been one culture war crusade after another—from targeting LGBTQ+ Floridians with “Don’t say gay” to targeting disenfranchised voters with his Orwellian “election-integrity task force” to fighting with the largest employer in his state, Disney.
In vying for the White House, the DeSantis campaign has “burned through nearly 40 percent of every dollar he raised in his first six weeks without airing a single television ad,” according to The New York Times, which notes the candidate’s “taste for private planes.” His advisers are now promising a “leaner-meaner” operation, per the Times, which would reframe DeSantis’s candidacy as an “insurgent” run. DeSantis, notable, has never been a small-dollar candidate; most of his donations came from “donors who gave the legal maximum in the primary of $3,300.”
DeSantis’s team tried convincing big-time donors on Sunday that the campaign was reining in spending and emphasized the new “insurgent” posture, according to Politico. “Let Ron be Ron,” said Nick Iarossi, a Florida-based lobbyist and fundraiser. “That’s what got him here. That’s what made him the leader that he is in Florida. We’re going back to our basics on all of this.”
Speaking of Florida, DeSantis is now embroiled in yet another fiasco of his own making. His anti-“woke” agenda has led Florida’s State Board of Education to approve new standards for teaching African American studies, which includes instruction as to “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” DeSantis assured reporters that this was “rooted in whatever is factual,” and an education department spokesman offered examples of people who supposedly benefited from slavery. Though experts said that some of those listed were actually free.
I think “if you’re defending slavery, you’re losing” is a pretty good political maxim. And I’m not the only one. Vice President Kamala Harris flew down to Florida and ripped the Florida governor over his state’s curriculum: “Come on—adults know what slavery really involved. It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother. It involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world. How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?”
So this past week, as DeSantis should be trying to convince Republican primary voters that he is somehow more capable or electable than Trump, the clear front-runner in the race, he’s out there defending slavery? Feels like a stupid hill to die on, but dying on stupid hills is one of the tenets of MAGA.
But wait there’s more! DeSantis, after being battered by Disney, is now taking on Budweiser-parent Anheuser-Busch. According to DeSantis, who seems to have no idea how capitalism works, “There’s got to be penalties for when you put business aside to focus on your social agenda at the expense of hardworking people.” (Yes, this is all stemming from Bud Light doing a short-lived promotion with trangender social media star Dylan Mulvaney.) Oh, did I mention that Anheuser-Busch has donated millions to Republican organizations, like the National Republican Senatorial and congressional committees, and allied groups (along with some Democrats). Steady Republican donors, seems like a great fight to pick.
In February, I wrote how “DeSantis shouldn’t be covered like just another Republican” given the danger he poses to democracy. As governor of Florida, he has been a wildly effective autocrat, installing loyalists in government, using taxpayer dollars for campaign travel, attacking higher education, fostering a climate ripe for book-banning, and shutting out the mainstream media. (He took a brief step outside the conservative bubble last week by appearing on CNN, another sign his struggling campaign is shifting tactics). Trumpism without Trump would be the next logical step toward authoritarianism, and a DeSantis presidency could accomplish any number of far-right initiatives that the 45th president didn’t have the attention span to complete.
While a second Trump presidency is also nightmare fuel, lucky for us, DeSantis is a terrible politician with negative charisma, and the chances of him riding into the White House are looking less likely. He is aggressively dull and wooden, making his interactions with voters border on painful to watch. His head bobs in a strange and unnatural way, and he wears high-heeled cowboy boots. DeSantis makes Scott Walker look charming. He makes Paul Ryan look lively. Plus, voters tend not to vote for people who seem like they’re screaming at them all the time. No amount of donor dollars can make DeSantis, a MAGA marionette traipsing across Iowa and New Hampshire, seem like a real human boy.