Ron DeSantis has revealed the next phase of his plan to win the Republican presidential nomination by firing 30% of his campaign staff. He has also dismissed a staffer, Nate Hochman, a prominent conservative writer, for creating a video that features a notorious Nazi symbol. A pro-DeSantis political action committee has used artificial intelligence to generate a video in which Trump’s voice trashes the Republican governor of Iowa. A recent poll showed Trump ahead of DeSantis in Iowa by 27 points.
After his campaign declared he was entering his “insurgent” stage as “the underdog”, DeSantis disappeared on a donor-provided private jet, his usual mode of travel. Several billionaire donors, however, previously enamored of DeSantis’s “electability”, gave notice that they are jumping overboard without the lifeboat of another candidate. Rupert Murdoch withdrew his mandate of heaven, not so privately dubbing DeSantis a “loser”. Two DeSantis fundraisers in the exclusive Hamptons were scrapped for lack of interest and a third was poorly attended.
To steady his wobbly backers, DeSantis issued a dramatic statement, his first announcement of a potential appointment to indicate the kind of administration he would form as president. His choice, another unsteady presidential aspirant, the anti-vaxxer Democrat Robert F Kennedy Jr, to “sic” on the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Members of RFK Jr’s revered family have vehemently denounced him for propounding the antisemitic canard that Jews possess some sort of genetic immunity to Covid, unlike “Caucasians and Black people”, and for suggesting that the disease was “ethnically targeted”. By floating Kennedy’s name, DeSantis had shown that his idea of national unity begins with a government of all conspiracy theorists, regardless of party label.
DeSantis capped his reset with a historic declaration, making him the first presidential candidate since before the civil war explicitly to defend the supposed benefits of slavery. (This includes Strom Thurmond, the senator who ran as a pro-segregationist Dixiecrat in 1948.) Florida’s new academic standards for the teaching of Black history include the claim slaves “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit”, a line some critics have likened to John C Calhoun’s description of slavery, in the years immediately before the civil war, as “a positive good”.
DeSantis waded into the controversy with his trademark flat spottiness, remarking, “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” Say what you will about human bondage; at least the enslaved could leverage slavery’s benefits down the line. The closest any political figures, much less any presidential candidates, have come in this century to DeSantis’s strained justification for slavery was the refusal of eight Republican senators in 2005 to sign a formal apology for the Senate’s long “failure to enact anti-lynching legislation”.
In the immediate aftermath of DeSantis’s latest antics, Trump led him in various polls by margins ranging from 24% to 43%.
“What’s going on?” asked the Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. “There was a lot of optimism about you running for president early in the year … What happened?”
DeSantis nervously laughed.
“These are narratives,” he explained. “The media does not want me to be the nominee.”
“Narratives” is among DeSantis’s favorite words to assert, without further explanation, how “the corporate media” and “the woke” control politics. The “narratives” are a looming phantom enemy. It would be unfair to accuse DeSantis of grasping Foucault’s post-structuralist ideas about the expression of power through discourse. His clotted and fractured political language is related to abstruse theory the way his rudimentary distortions of history are related to history. But his understanding of political dynamics is even dimmer and more self-defeating.
DeSantis’s slot as the No 2 in a Republican field of implausible bit players settles his fate as the chief non-challenger. He is inevitable, so long as his utility lasts, as the guarantor of Trump’s nomination. He is the non-viable alternative, a void who occupies unmovable political space. His function is to stymie every other non-contender, none of whom can dislodge Trump themselves. DeSantis blots out the rest. If Trump is the sun, he’s the lunar eclipse.
DeSantis has vaulted into second place at least partly because the only other two notable candidates are despised within their party. The former vice-president Mike Pence will almost certainly be the decisive witness in Trump’s trial on January 6 offenses, testifying in the courtroom, facing Trump sitting at the defendant’s table. Pence has no wiggle room politically, despite his state of denial of how it will end. “Hang Mike Pence!” But, imagining himself as president, Pence did manage to criticize DeSantis for his ideological swerve.
“To be clear,” he said, “pro-abortion Democrats like RFK Jr would not even make the list” of his potential appointees.
The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, unlike Pence, is utterly without illusions. Christie has an intimate, gritty knowledge of New York, at the nexus of greasy real estate, the mafia and Roy Cohn – the underworld from which Trump emerged. Christie is a former top federal prosecutor in New Jersey. His aunt’s husband’s brother was a ranking member of the Genovese crime family.
“He’s never run against somebody from New Jersey who understands what the New York thing is and what he’s all about,” Christie says about Trump.
Christie has what the wise-guys would call “motive”, for it was Christie who put Charles Kushner, father of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and White House chief adviser, in prison.
He explained: “If a guy hires a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, and videotapes it, and then sends the videotape to his sister to attempt to intimidate her from testifying before a grand jury, do I really need any more justification than that?”
In turn, Kushner has waged an unrelenting vendetta. In his own turn, Christie now questions the basis of Kushner’s post-Trump administration fortune.
“Jared Kushner, six months after he leaves the White House, gets two billion dollars from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. What was Jared Kushner doing in the Middle East? … He was put there to make those relationships and then he cashed in on those relationship when he left the office.”
Kushner’s aunt and uncle, who have a poisonous relationship with Jared and Charles, have maxed out contributions to Christie’s campaign. Unlike DeSantis, Christie does not want to edge out Trump in order to be Trump. He wants to prosecute him, as “a liar and a coward”. The fundamental difference between DeSantis and Christie is between the clueless and the clued-in. Among Republicans, though, Christie is polling at 3%.
DeSantis is the only actual contender against Trump, and he’s not a contender. He’s trapped in a hopeless conundrum. Circumstances may be beyond his control, but whatever the circumstances he handles them poorly. Every time DeSantis turns the spotlight on himself, the play goes haywire. Whenever he gets the cue, he always hits the wrong note. Playing himself, he’s playing someone trying to imitate another character. While he can never be more like Trump than Trump, he doesn’t really know who Trump is. Only Christie is willing to make the case that Trump is a criminal sociopath. When Trump received his target letter from Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating the January 6 coup, DeSantis repeated standard Republican talking points, calculated to support Trump, that the US justice department is “weaponized” and “criminalizing political differences”. Joining the chorus, DeSantis faded into the indistinguishable background, in an exercise of the party closing ranks. His mealy-mouthed words showed him to be the weak disciple.
If he were to echo Christie about Trump as a gangster, DeSantis would stand apart from the partisan pack. But then he would be a copy of Christie and earn the enmity of most of the party. Instead, in his crabbed understanding, he conceives of Trump as solely a mean-spirited rightwinger who can be gotten around by being meaner and more reactionary. The more he tries to move to Trump’s right, however, the more he exposes himself as a literal-minded copycat incapable of arousing the depth of emotional devotion that Trump enjoys.
DeSantis diminished himself from the start by chasing Trump’s shadow. There is no rightful succession to a cult of personality, and certainly not with the absence of personality. Being a messiah is a one-at-a-time business. The false messiah who turns out not to be the second coming typically winds up being castigated as a fraudulent betrayer and burned at the stake. Christie presents the only true alternative model, which is to purge both the cult and the personality, to deal with crime and punishment. That herculean task would require expunging most of the Republican party. DeSantis owes his career to the Trump party, not the old defunct Republican party. He has sought to become Trump after Trump, only to have to confront the existence of Trump being Trump. So, DeSantis has reduced himself to a troll.
Trolling is not merely one of DeSantis’s characteristics; it’s become his principal one. DeSantis struggles to establish an identity through his culture war on identity politics. Yet he lacks both culture and a distinct identity. His battles are stunts, a series of negative projections, at best an accumulation of fears that do not add up. Suing Disney over its acknowledgment of gay people, banning books, gutting universities, prohibiting abortion, shipping unsuspecting migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, and slipping into the curriculum a good word for slavery have only prompted DeSantis to try out another personality larger than himself as a summing up.
“We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the corporations,” he has declared. “We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”
It is also where its governor stages an unselfconscious satire of Winston Churchill’s defiant speech against the Nazis in which the performer does not recognize his comic absurdity.
DeSantis’s inconsistency is his one constancy. On issues, he has an extensive and recurring history of flip-flopping on federal disaster relief, privatizing social security and Medicare, aid to Ukraine, and so forth. But his deeper problem is his failure to connect, which pressures him to flounder and spiral in a never-ending search for a convincing image. His behavior demonstrates a pattern of impatience, anxiety over things not happening exactly as he wishes, his frustration building, insistent that people do as he says, obliviousness to their signals, angering easily, and an impulsive inability to cope with criticism. On a campaign stop in New Hampshire in June, when a reporter asked if he intended to take questions from the audience, he snapped: “What are you talking about? Are you blind? Are you blind?” But it was not the reporter who was tone-deaf.
•••
DeSantis’s wife, Casey, a former Jacksonville TV host, is his producer. His first defining ad, in 2018, in his first campaign for governor, depicted him as a good father following the guidance of the great father-figure: Donald Trump. It began with Casey.
“Ron loves playing with the kids,” she said. DeSantis played with blocks with his infant son and said, “Build the Wall!” “He reads stories,” said Casey. “Then,” said DeSantis, holding Trump’s The Art of the Deal and his baby on his lap, “Mr Trump said, “You’re fired! I love that part.” “People say Ron is all Trump,” Casey chimed in, “but he is so much more.” DeSantis leant over the crib to see his baby lying in a jumper stenciled, “Make America Great Again.” “Big league, so good,” Ron said.
DeSantis was a little-known backbencher and member of the House Freedom Caucus, lagging in the polls, running behind the establishment candidate, the agriculture commissioner, Adam Putnam. Suddenly, Trump leaped in to endorse him as a “special person who has done an incredible job”.
“My opponent’s running on an endorsement,” Putnam said. “No plan, no vision, no agenda – just an endorsement. Just hanging on to the coattails.”
Putnam was correct – and DeSantis won the primary by about 20 points. He barely squeaked by in the general election, defeating his Democratic opponent by 0.4%, a razor-thin margin, but Trump’s endorsement again made the difference. Running on the image of the dutiful Maga dad, DeSantis owed his elevation to his worship of Big Daddy.
After DeSantis’s landslide re-election in 2022, preparing his run for the Republican presidential nomination, his wife cast him in a new TV ad as a Tom Cruise-a-like knock-off from the movie Top Gun: Maverick, donning the leather bomber jacket and the Ray-Ban sunglasses to teach the “Top Gov” class.
“This is your governor speaking,” he said, to invisible students. “Today’s training exercise, dogfighting, taking on the corporate media.”
Cut. He walked to a fighter jet marked “Top Gov”.
“Don’t accept their narrative … I’ve just disabused you of their narrative.”
The whoosh of a jet taking off.
In his identity cosplay, DeSantis is the heroic pilot willing and able to take on the enemy. Every element of his alibi for his subsequent nosediving campaign can be found in this video: “Corporate media … their narrative …” His latest excuses imitate his previous, empty scripted self. He’s replicating his facsimiles.
A few months later, his wife oversaw production of yet another TV ad in which God was now Ron’s co-pilot. She tweeted it out, under the cover line, “I love you, Ron.” Fortunately, so does God, essentially DeSantis’s executive producer, who was mentioned 10 times within 90 seconds in the black-and-white video.
While morning light and rolling waves showed the finger of God, Casey DeSantis’s photograph appeared four times. “And on the eighth day,” the deep voiceover explained, “God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.” DeSantis stood before an American flag. “God said, ‘I need someone to be strong,’” who can “advocate truth in the midst of hysteria” against “the conventional wisdom” and take “the arrows”.
“God said: ‘I need a family man, a man who would laugh and then sigh, and then reply with smiling eyes when his daughter says she wants to do what Dad does.’ So God made a fighter.”
In this narrative, DeSantis is more than divinely inspired. He is the chosen one. The will of God is revealed. The Almighty has cast his vote. But the basso profundo voice expressing God’s anointment and the narration itself duplicate in precise tone – and partly word for word – an old routine of the long-ago conservative radio broadcaster and huckster Paul Harvey, a chum of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the FBI director J Edgar Hoover.
Harvey’s masterpiece of kitsch, “God Made A Farmer,” ends with a riff.
“God said, ‘I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs … who would laugh, and then sigh, and then reply, with smiling eyes, when his son says that he wants to spend his life ‘doing what Dad does.’ So God made a farmer.”
The DeSantis ad is a divine revelation of a reproduction of old-time corn. Plagiarizing the identity from Harvey’s spiel, the salt of the earth is transformed into the holy warrior.
•••
DeSantis’s opening act of his campaign was to establish his image as a strongman to displace Trump. His strategy was to belittle and hurt the helpless – Black people, migrants, women, gay people, trans people, academics – targets he wraps up as “the woke”. His antipathy seemed to come naturally. His chief adviser in his Florida kulturkampf has been a prolific conservative activist and would-be scholar, Christopher Rufo, who claimed to have a master’s degree from Harvard. In fact, he attended Harvard Extension School, a separate, “open enrollment” branch. Rufo was another case of an overextended identity. After Rufo advised DeSantis to trash the New College of Florida, a public institution, for its “focus on social justice”, DeSantis installed him as a trustee.
DeSantis’s victorious crusades over his vulnerable woke foes led him to lay siege to Disney’s Magic Kingdom. The little Napoleon’s attack in Orlando, however, began his downfall. As a ploy, taking on Disney less resembled misleading a bunch of migrants to board a flight to Martha’s Vineyard than marching through the Russian winter. DeSantis had thoughtlessly miscalculated, out of false bravado.
The aspiring authoritarian tries to seize absolute authority through contempt for civil authority. But once he stumbled into his quagmire with Disney, one of the largest employers in Florida, DeSantis’s theatrics did not seem so clever in beating the woke and owning the libs. His imitation of Trump’s defiant exploitation for political and personal advantage hit a snag. Against Disney, DeSantis trapped himself into a conflict with a more popular and powerful adversary. His stalling upset his image-building to inflate himself above Trump. He made himself appear weak, small and reckless.
When his stunts ceased working to make him seem big, DeSantis’s stature fell to earth. His obvious ploys are increasingly seen, even by his erstwhile donors, as his vain effort to define his identity. His battles with “the woke” are insignificant in comparison with the Deep State Trump conjures to fight. DeSantis is too insubstantial to be attacked at the same level. Trump’s high and low crimes are integral to who he is. DeSantis’s carnival acts are contrived sideshows. Trump has been consistently malicious, malignant, deceptive, cruel, vengeful and selfish. This is the character his followers adore. DeSantis is both cruel and a bad mime of cruelty. His gestures at viciousness in the light of Trump’s vast villainy cast him as a follower seeking to be the leader.
Trump knows no limits in committing any offense, personal or legal, while DeSantis is bound and driven by his stringent limitations. He’s a static figure. He launches spectacles of abuse in compensation for his drab and detached personality. They are his substitute to generate an interest he does not have intrinsically. He is seemingly incapable of operating apart from his stunts because of his deficit of being. He fills his vacuum with barbs, insults and cruelties to prove his strength in a strained effort to draw attention away from his nullity. He tries to manufacture authenticity through these forced gestures that rebound to illustrate his artificiality and highlight the inescapability of the all-too real Trump.
Trump has sniffed out DeSantis’s weakness, his “no personality”, as Trump has put it. Searching for a demeaning nickname, he tried out “Meatball Ron” before settling on “Ron DeSanctimonious”, inspired by the “God made a fighter” ad. He doesn’t take him seriously as a contender. The trait that rankles him is disloyalty.
Trump lifted DeSantis from the dregs of the House Freedom Caucus to be his Florida Man. It was not for any special qualities that DeSantis displayed, other than slavish devotion to Trump. Trump never saw him as a successor. Trump never thinks of successors. Narcissists don’t have successors. They don’t groom anybody to follow in their footsteps. DeSantis attempted to groom himself as if he were groomed by Trump, in order to surpass Trump without disturbing Trump. He was acting out a unique Oedipus simplex. It did not work.
“And, now Ron DeSanctimonious is playing games,” Trump tweeted, right after the 2022 midterm elections. “Well, in terms of loyalty and class, that’s really not the right answer.” Trump recounted in detail how he saved the hapless DeSantis from oblivion during the Republican primary of 2018. “I said, listen Ron, you’re so dead that if Abraham Lincoln and George Washington came back from the dead, and if they put their hands and hearts together and prayed … nothing is going to change. Ron, you are gone.” Trump now refers to him as “very disloyal”.
•••
DeSantis’s failed attempts to outflank Trump ideologically on the woke front moved him to a new phase, launching a contest to defeat Trump as a sexual emblem of superior virility. In response, Trump collected gossip, rumors and innuendo. On 20 March, Trump tweeted a photo of DeSantis when he was a high school teacher, at a party with teenaged girls. “Ron DeSanctimonious will probably find out about FALSE ACCUSATIONS & FAKE STORIES sometime in the future, as he gets older, wiser, and better known, when he’s unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that are ‘underage’ (or possibly a man!)”.
DeSantis answered with an ad accusing Trump as “the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate” LGBTQ+ Pride month and felt comfortable around trans people – in contrast to DeSantis, who touted his “draconian” record to “threaten trans existence”. The ad was weirdly filled with fleeting images of young male actors from American Psycho, Troy, Peaky Blinders and The Wolf of Wall Street – as if a glancing view of Brad Pitt proved Trump was weak on woke. Interspersed between shots of Pitt as Achilles in a Greek war helmet were rerun images of “Top Gov” DeSantis in his bomber jacket, playing at being Tom Cruise in Top Gun.
But DeSantis’s bizarre effort to nail Trump as a dangerous sexual hypocrite only created puzzlement. Of course Trump is a hypocrite. Trump is also the living embodiment of toxic masculinity, however decayed it may be. He remains the Maga-mega male idol. He has been, after all, found liable for sexual assault, and a judge stated he is a rapist. Trump proclaimed his credo in the infamous Access Hollywood tape: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” DeSantis neither does “anything” – nor is he a star.
Nor is DeSantis in peril from the law, another deficit. With each indictment, Trump’s support rises and solidifies. The indictments prove to true believers he is the true enemy of their enemies. Unindicted, DeSantis cannot out-Trump Trump. DeSantis’s pledge to “Make America Florida” is only a promise that he can transcend being a provincial would-be dictator. Trump has and will always beat him to the subversion of American institutions – and on a far larger scale.
In his ad swiping at Trump for being responsible for the gay movement, DeSantis claimed his bona fides by flashing leftwing denunciations of himself. “DeSantis is public enemy No 1”. “DeSantis is evil”. Showing he is hated more than Trump, he hopes, might be the ultimate stunt, the one that makes Trump No 2.
DeSantis’s cruelty may be genuine, but he’s a minor fiend, not Satan himself. Abandon all hope.
