Ron DeSantis failed because Trump’s base wants the man himself, not an imitation
So long, Ron. After a poor showing in the Iowa caucuses, Ron DeSantis has dropped out of the Republican presidential primary and endorsed Donald Trump. This outcome has looked inevitable ever since the campaign’s botched launch announcement on Twitter, but it was surprising how quickly and totally DeSantis surrendered after losing just a single contest. Many people had heralded DeSantis as the man who could take down Trump, but it was not to be. His campaign began with a whimper – then ended with one too.
The political flaws of DeSantis and his campaign have been so numerous that it’s amazing the Florida governor ever generated so much buzz. He looked politically impressive operating in the safely conservative state of Florida, but he was completely unprepared for the intensity of competitive national politics. He lacked the empathy and personal warmth necessary to connect with voters and donors alike. He proved a poor administrator. He tried to run on his management of the Covid-19 pandemic when voters had moved on. Worst of all, he could offer no plausible reason why Trump voters should opt for him rather than for the real thing.
Despite all of this, DeSantis found huge success among a certain class of Republican pundits and donors. At one point he was hailed by the Murdoch press as “DeFuture”, and conservative writers fell over one another to praise him as the Trump who “gets things done”. When someone so flawed has so many boosters, it’s worth asking about the motivation of the boosters.
In this case, the DeSantis campaign was promoted by a set of conservative elites who saw the opportunity for a kind of “Trumpism without Trump”. DeSantis drew support from people who were happy with the broad direction of the Republican party under Trump, but had doubts about the former president’s competence. Since his victory in 2016, Trump has been a serial loser of elections who invests little time in trying to implement policies, preferring to focus instead on the melodrama of his own political and legal struggles. DeSantis, by contrast, exudes the kind of grim, thuggish determination of Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister whose policies have made him a hero of the American nationalist right.
As an electoral proposition, this vision was flawed from the get-go. The idea of “Trumpism without Trump” was to take Maga content and present it in some more palatable form. But this ignores the fact that for many grassroots Republicans, Trump’s form ishis content. They support him not because of the concrete policies he will implement but because of who he is and what he represents. The unhinged style of communication, the self-pitying beefs with “the establishment”, the unfiltered racism and bigotry – these are the essence of Trumpism, not paraphernalia which can be discarded.
For decades, Republican elites have believed they could channel and control the populism and bigotry of their party’s base. A video from the 2008 election which periodically goes viral of John McCain defending Barack Obama in the face of a racist question from a voter, represents the exception in this history rather than the norm. As a rule, Republican donors and politicians have winked at or actively encouraged the worst instincts of their base, believing they could be harnessed and ridden to victory. The DeSantis candidacy was just the latest example of this. But now the base is in the saddle, and what it wants is Trumpism red in tooth and claw – not some bloodless imitation.
However doomed it was at the polls, there might have been some redemptive quality in the DeSantis project if it had offered a challenge to the yawning ethical chasm at the heart of the Republican party. But rather than denouncing the cruelty towards immigrants, women and trans people that pervades the modern conservative movement, DeSantis merely promised to pursue it with more ruthless efficiency. He showed indifference to the suffering of the people who got in his way, such as the migrants he transported to Martha’s Vineyard and then abandoned for the purposes of a political stunt. The experience made them feel, one said, “like cattle” – yet DeSantis defends the action to this day.
The fact that supporters of the DeSantis project were not actually trying to challenge the core premises and practices of Trumpism will make it easier for them to take the next step: reverting to support for Trump. After he dropped out, DeSantis endorsed Trump with unseemly speed and it may take some of his backers a little longer to come around. But just as in 2016, Republican politicians and media figures will inevitably follow their base and resume backing the former president, even as he engages in Hitlerian rhetoric about migrants “poisoning the blood” of America and promises to be a dictator “on day one”.
As John McCain showed in 2008, there is an alternative course available to former DeSantis backers, if they wanted to take it. They could say publicly what many of them know privately – that while Trump poses a unique danger to the republic, Joe Biden is a decent, patriotic man with whom they happen to have some policy disagreements. They could lament the grip that a racist and authoritarian figure has on such a large segment of their party, and even try to challenge it. But they will not, because that’s never what the DeSantis candidacy was really about it. Instead, they’ll get in line behind Trump – and march themselves and everyone else closer and closer to disaster.
Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States at Leiden University and the creator of America Explained, a podcast and newsletter