When the Cookie Crumbled: The Ron DeSantis Campaign Ends
So much for that. Much had been promised by Florida Governor Ron De Santis to derail Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House. But the attempt to wrest the Republican Party from the orange ogre’s meaty, waving hands was never convincing. In the end, DeSantis was more stumbler than balancer, a woeful mismatch before the forces he never staved off.
While he made his name fluorescent bright in Florida’s politics, launching attacks on Disney, skirmishing with public health officials regarding pandemic measures, and railing against minorities (LGBTQ youth figured highly), he seemed awkward away from the swamp. On the national stage, Trump was to DeSantis what the boulder was to Sisyphus, having to be constantly pushed, a crushing, seemingly perennial burden. But to win the nomination, let alone have any prospect of a shot at the White House, DeSantis had to extricate himself from that task without anybody else noticing.
He did so in a myriad of ways, none successful. One particularly shallow effort involved DeSantis’s attempt to woo the right-wing of the Twitter/X-sphere, going so far as to invite social media figures (one dare not call them personalities) in January 2022 to Tallahassee for a package visit. The agenda: a pop in to the governor’s office, dinner at the gubernatorial mansion, topped off with drinks at a rooftop bar near Florida’s state house. Many of the feted bloviators had recently made the move to Florida, where they could bask in freedom’s airy glory.
This all looked like an effort to sketch a separate agenda, bringing out the paving for his own way to the White House. But DeSantis’s reasons for wading into that particular echo chamber were unmistakable: Trump was going off him, and the emotionally distant DeSantis was not one to press the flesh with enthusiasm. (His social circle, it had been said, was so small it “could fit the back seat of a Mini Cooper.”) Cornered, and not willing to go for such savoury electoral items as the economy, DeSantis chose culture of the most “Right” sort. The governor’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw, told Politico that the tactics were not out of the ordinary. “Turns out that a governor who stands up for individual rights against federal tyranny is popular among conservatives.”
Whatever Pushaw’s view on this, conservative commentators could not but notice the heavy reliance on digital campaigning as the be-all and end-all. Jack Butler of the National Review Online was sceptical from the start. “An essential element of its emerging strategy appears to be rooted in the belief that Twitter is not merely a means to disseminate information and messaging produced elsewhere, but an essential political background itself – a digital Iowa, New Hampshire, or South Carolina.” It was his effort to seek the “Terminally Online aura” that captured such figures as Blake Masters in 2022 or Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
And terminal it proved to be. The DeSantis campaign was chaotic, controversial without constructive return, fatally weak, and inclined to needlessly sap resources. It also started late, enabling Trump to gather steam and mount his own offensive against “Meatball Ron” and “Ron DeSanctimonious”.
The mounting legal challenges for the former president were also failing to shrink his popularity. Each indictment and charge came with an invigorating effect. The May 2023 launch by the Florida governor also began in ominous fashion, with DeSantis choosing the venue as Twitter Spaces, with his facilitator being the erratic billionaire Elon Musk. By controlling access and the message through the audio-format, the governor could eschew meeting actual human beings.
As it transpired, the site creaked and glitched. It took almost half-an-hour of technical problems before DeSantis took off. Even then, his presentation, delivered to a significantly smaller online audience, could not resist the digital aura. “I think what was done with Twitter was really significant for the future of our country.”
Described once by Trump as a “brilliant cookie”, the crumbling DeSantis saw the dark writing on the electoral wall after the results of the Iowa caucus. The January 15 outcome did place him second on the returns at 21.2%, ahead of Nikki Haley at 19.1%, suggesting that the campaign would continue into New Hampshire and South Carolina.
It was not to be. Rather than risk further defeat and likely humiliation, DeSantis suspended his campaign. Inevitably, the announcement came on the platform now known as X. He declared that there was “no clear path to victory.” Like many politicians in the US, he could not resist relying on words supposedly uttered by Britain’s wartime leader, Winston Churchill, and making a hash of it: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
Churchill never said anything of the sort, though he did write that, “No one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it” and that, “Success always demands a greater effort.” Both quotes appear in the 1949 publication Their Finest Hour. DeSantis, it would seem, had used the words of a Budweiser advertisement from 1938, rather appropriate given the watery quality of that beverage, and the governor’s weak, haphazard effort.
The Republican candidate, branded Trump 2.0 or “Trump without the baggage”, is no more. And just to sweeten matters for the man whose hold on the Republicans he could not break, DeSantis gave his own endorsement. It leaves Trump in a near unassailable position, with Haley’s purportedly more modest bid more vulnerable and quixotic than ever.
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11 comments
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Phil Pryor -
GL -
Roswell -
Clakka -
Kerri -
Bob -
GL -
leefe -
New England Cocky -
leefe -
GL
Return to home pageThe smell of USA republican putridity clogs and assails, Trump and the little woggy De Luded being up there, leading the charge towards uncivilised chaos. Trump would tell us that De Ranged was a woggy outsider, unreliable of patriotism and no real servant of the rotating uberfuhrer Trump (of course). Who votes for this defective garbage and why? The USA is clearly loaded, clogged, constipated and overstuffed, with the Orange Orifice in an overbearing leading position to coat his nation. Step aside.
I see DeSantis taking out his anger, frustration and petulance at having to ignominiously concede defeat on the people of Florida by becoming even more aggressive, repressive and dictatorial.
Drat it, the AIMN keeps defaulting to the home page from two days ago for some reason.
GL, might have to clear your cache.
I never thought I’d be glad to see someone’s slide into dementia. Even someone whose father brutalised them into sociopathy at a young age. But I’m hoping, for the sake of the world, the universe and everything, it comes to the bloated orange trumpeter sooner rather than later.
Signs of hope have been increasing with the collapse of the olde guarde from the NRA, and the long overdue departure of Scummo from the Oz parliament, and the explicit hammering of the EU-USA / Israel relations by the likes of Mexico & Chile now making referrals to the ICC, in addition to Sth Africa’s to ICJ, and major politicos / commentators like Bernie Sanders, Noam Chomsky, Larry C Johnson, Yanis Varoufakis, and Chris Hedges etc.
It seems to be revealing the shallowness and good-for-some-only foundation of the ‘rules-based-order’. Detente is being thrown to the already toxic winds generated by feckless mercantile / militarist competition, waste and persistent FF industrialization and pissweak polititions. On top of the Russia / Ukraine war disaster, now this Israel / Hamas Gaza war business is blowing the collaborative western hegemon to smithereens.
When, and will any good come of it?
Definitely good news. He is a terrible person, but a part of me feels sorry for Ron! He has a point when he highlighted that the Murdoch media was yet again controlling US politics by calling Trump the winner in the latest primary before he, De Santis, had even spoken.
I see the logic in removing Ron D from the race. Let Trump continue and then at the last minute get him bogged down in legal challenges. That derails the Republicans and allows Joe B another term. Joe is good for sending the economy backwards which suits certain interests, eg Blackrock. After reading a number of articles on Ron D just now, it seems that msm wants Ron gone, so Ron is gone. The upside is Floridians win.
Bob,
He’s still governor until the next election cycle in late 2026 after which he has to step down in Jan. 2027. So he still has, roughly speaking, almost three years to wreak untold havoc on Florida (unless he tries to change the rules like he, on the sly, did with the, as I term it, “I can still be governor even while running for the Repug presidential candidate”) racket. Some the other things he and his cronies did as well are not really surprising either: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/ron-desantis-signs-law-clears-way-presidential-run-rcna82046
“Turns out that a governor who stands up for individual rights against federal tyranny is popular among conservatives.”
Except the right to decide what happens to your body. The right to reproductive autonomy; the right to freely express one’s sexuality and/or gender, the right to read whatever you choose …
DeathSantis is one of those who’d love a bit of federal tyranny – as long as he was the one imposing it.
So now the USA is supposed to be grateful for small mercies; Trump rather than DeSantiis. Is that really an improvement?
The obvious solution to Trumpery is American women standing together and saying ”NO!!!””
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”No” to all the backward political policies espoused by male misogynists for controlling women in every way, especially denying women the individual right to determine their own health requirements.
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The USA (United States of Apartheid) appears headed for the Third American Revolution, after defeating the British, being defeated by the anti-Vietnam generation and now facing Generation Z that wants more equitable distribution of wealth among ALL the population.
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We have a similar problem here in the New England electorate where the representative of the NOtional$ is a self-confessed adulterer, alcoholic misogynist without any qualms about promoting his own pecuniary interests ahead of the best interests of the Australian voters.
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However, while the women of Tamworth NSW continue to allow their spouses to vote for them at elections there will be no change.
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Just think ….. ALL the women of Tamworth wanting better government services and infrastructure development doing the unthinkable by VOTING FOR ANYONE BUT NOTional$ ….. and returning New England to the glory days of representation for the Australian voters by Tony Windsor Independent.
NEC:
So the blokes broke it and now it’s up to the women to clean up the mess? Sounds about typical.
DeSantis is chucking a bit of a tantrum and hissy fit:
https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/world/news/florida-allies-back-down-on-5-million-in-state-funds-for-trumps-legal-bills-after-desantis-threatens-to-veto/articleshow/107073310.cms