I’ve long been of the view that Donald Trump is something akin to a horror-movie monster—a Godzilla or a T. Rex, say—for the American political system. In such movies, it’s often not the puny humans who take out the monster; it’s another monster. And in such a scenario it would seem to make perfect sense that only a Republican specifically engineered and optimized for the bizarre cult of G.O.P. politics in 2024 would be the right candidate to do the job on Trump. But if that’s the theory of the case for Ron DeSantis, the forty-four-year-old governor of Florida, the events of Wednesday evening showed it’s still very much an unproven theory.
Was DeSantis’s Presidential-campaign launch best described as a debacle? A farce? A nightmare? The Times called it a “meltdown.” Politico went with “horrendous.” Perhaps the best summation of Wednesday’s epic fail was #DeSaster, an actual trending hashtag on Twitter. Whatever one chose to call it, it’s a pretty bad sign for a campaign when the biggest controversy inspired by its début is what synonym for “terrible” to give it. And the problem wasn’t just the technical glitches. The start of the Twitter Spaces event featuring DeSantis and Twitter’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, was delayed by more than twenty-five minutes while Musk audibly struggled to get his new platform to work. But just as wretched was what DeSantis had to say once he started talking, both on Twitter and in a subsequent interview on Fox News, which boiled down to a lot of complaints about the “legacy media” and little rationale for his candidacy.
Trump, whose name DeSantis never uttered on Wednesday night, welcomed the news of his rival’s implosion with a video of a rocket labelled “Ron 2024!” exploding on a launchpad. Don, Jr., gleefully compared DeSantis to the former Florida Republican governor eviscerated by his father in 2016. “DeSantis is making JEB! look high energy right now,” he taunted. Even Joe Biden, who unlike Trump was mentioned frequently by DeSantis, joined in. The President tweaked DeSantis in a tweet urging supporters to give money to his own campaign. “This link works,” Biden promised.
But the rush to mockery, though understandable, was also a bit of a distraction. The really vital question posed by DeSantis’s official entry into the 2024 race was not, after all, whether Twitter could handle a large crowd in its Spaces feature without crashing. (Answer: no.) It was whether DeSantis could revive his Presidential prospects and actually emerge as the Republican to take out Trump.
After DeSantis’s nineteen-point reëlection victory, last November, he looked to be the Republican Trump-beater at last, a younger, sharper, smarter version of the forty-fifth President—without the nasty Twitter habit and all the legal troubles. Subsequent exposure suggests he’s also Trump without the charm. In recent months, DeSantis has been sinking rather than surging in the polls, as his many missteps, from thuggishly retaliating against Disney to signing an unpopular six-week abortion ban into law, have given Trump and his allies much to feast upon. DeSantis doesn’t look like so much of a Trump-beater anymore. The ex-President, whose lead in the G.O.P. primary is back up into double digits over DeSantis, remains an overwhelming front-runner. DeSantis, meanwhile, will go into the history books for one of the worst and least competent campaign launches ever. Ouch.
“Make America Florida” might as well be the unofficial slogan of DeSantis’s campaign. When asked on Fox why he was running for President, DeSantis said that he wanted to bring his “unprecedented policy success” in the state to the national stage, and this, he promised, was a way to end the “culture of losing” that plagued Republicans during the tenure of the guy DeSantis refused to criticize by name.
One big problem for DeSantis, however, is that this Florida blueprint he seeks to export to the rest of the country is a cramped, churlish vision of America. His “touchstone” issues for appealing to the Republican electorate, as Jeff Roe, the G.O.P. operative who heads a pro-DeSantis super PAC, told the Times, are fighting “corporate America,” fighting about what’s taught in schools, and fighting “acceptance around sexual orientation and transgender medical care.” My translation: Disney-bashing, book banning, and policing who uses which bathroom. Roe’s Never Back Down PAC, it should be noted, claims that it will have a budget of as much as two hundred million dollars to spread this agenda to the nation.
Has no one told the Governor that there’s a lot of serious stuff happening in the country and the world?
When Twitter finally got its act together on Wednesday, one of the first things I heard DeSantis say was “woke mind virus.” I am not sure what this phrase means, though it is apparently also a favorite of Musk’s, but I know that it is DeSantis’s battle cry in the culture wars. And that the culture wars are at the heart of his candidacy, which involves a platform to protect “free speech” but also to make sure that “gender ideology” and the “sexualization of children” are strictly policed. His complaints about the spreading of information about “sex toys” to fifth graders may well be the first time “sex toys” have ever been mentioned in a Presidential-campaign announcement. “We will never surrender to the woke mob,” DeSantis vowed during the Twitter event, “and we will leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history.”
Later, on Fox, he repeated this as a top priority for a future DeSantis Administration. “The woke mind virus,” he said ominously, “is basically a form of cultural Marxism.” Trey Gowdy, the former Republican congressman conducting the interview with DeSantis, did not ask for a clarification or a definition. He just nodded along.
And on it went, as if DeSantis’s campaign were but a concoction of a Fox News producer niche-programming to the hard-core faithful, not broadcasting to an entire country. DeSantis hardly seemed like a leader in his own right so much as an echo and an amplifier of some of the worst aspects—and personalities—of the Trump years. There were times on Wednesday that he sounded like Steve Bannon, going on about the need for “reconstitutionalizing the administrative state.” (I admit I also don’t know what “reconstitutionalize” means, but it seems to have something to do with seizing back power over the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice.) There were times he sounded like Stephen Miller, promising to finally build the damn wall and close the border. And there were times he sounded like Trump himself, whining about the swamp and the evil élites out to get him.
But, most of all, DeSantis sounded to me like the backbencher in the House of Representatives who he was not so long ago, jumping at the chance to appear on Fox and willing to say anything to get there. He talked in a kind of secret language of initialisms and shorthand preferred by the far right, about the evils of E.S.G. and D.E.I. and the “accreditation cartels” up in Washington, as if his audience were Jim Jordan and not the rest of America. He never so much as addressed the current crisis in Washington, with the country on the brink of a catastrophic debt default. His dismissive answer about the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine was that he did not want the U.S. to get too involved. Of the enemies he mentioned, and there were many, the one he sounded most passionate about was “the legacy media.” He certainly was no happy warrior. Only a few times did a wan smile flash across his face. He appeared to be a man of many hatreds. The way he said “California” sounded like a slur.
After listening to it all, I could not tell you why Ron DeSantis is running for President, except maybe because it would piss off the good folks at The Atlantic and Vanity Fair. If he was imitating Trump, it was a poor imitation indeed. DeSantis did not seem like a Godzilla or a T. Rex. He seemed like an out-of-his-depth forty-four-year-old who was going to get eaten alive. He may have many millions of dollars to spend, but the takeaway from his campaign launch was that he does not yet seem to have what it takes. Time may prove me wrong, but I suspect we already know how this movie ends. ♦
