DeSantis Will Never Be DePresident
Hunter For Daily Kos Staff
$lave’s Note: Even the libs see how lackluster Ron is.
There have been multiple pre-postmortems on Ron DeSantis’ still-unannounced presidential campaign, and the most complete one might be David Lurie’s piece in Public Notice. Mother Jones is also weighing in. The proximate cause of these new pieces was DeSantis’ utterly cringeworthy world tour, during which the plastic dress-up doll underwhelmed foreign counterparts from Asia to Europe.
That’s not to say that the foreign visits doomed him. The Republican base doesn’t give a damn whether its would-be presidential candidates are liked or loathed by America’s various allies, and would in general prefer candidates who are despised abroad to ones foreign leaders actually liked. The DeSantis “campaign” had already been on rough ground, though, as soon as the seditious Republican coup leader Donald Trump began publicly attacking him—only to have DeSantis prove himself unable or unwilling to respond.
Ron’s foreign trip was seen as a way to dodge the topic while providing some needed footage of the candidate looking like a plausible diplomat, a way to salvage the campaign without engaging Trump directly. And it might have worked, if DeSantis had more charisma than a wooden spoon. He doesn’t, so the result was yet more press footage of Ron DeSantis looking out of his element in every situation he could possibly put himself in.
The problems with Ron DeSantis as a plausible national personality remain twofold. First, the man has no personality of his own and no apparent ability to find one. And second, DeSantis has covered for his vacuousness by shamelessly borrowing all of the cruelest Republican Party ideas and fashioning his personality around those cruelties and nothing else. The man’s campaign suit consists of over-the-top cultural resentments all stitched together and overlapping, but if you ask who Ron DeSantis is, as a person, there doesn’t seem to be anyone who can answer that.
Now, we had some good laughs in ye olden days making fun of candidate Mitt Romney’s attempts to blend in with the common folk after a life lived in the top and most brutalist ranks of capitalism. A lot of laughs. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign-trail persona could be described as what if Thurston Howell III had been assembled in a Ford auto plant—but that man comes off as Freddy Mercury compared to what DeSantis brings to the table.
In Ron’s case, the campaign coat moves without a man inside. It is almost uncanny, watching press conference after press conference in which a floating empty suit of Republican bile glides to the microphone, says a few rote lines about the immigrants, or the gay Americans, or the universities, or the schoolteachers, and then floats off until the next scheduled event. The man’s personal presence is not merely awkward: It doesn’t exist.
Even in the most literal of softball interviews, press appearances in which the chosen talking head is meant to fawn over DeSantis like a TV pitchman selling a new blender, the result is audioanimatronic at best. The pitch was that Ron DeSantis used to play ball, back when he was a child. The resulting awkward banter while tossing a ball in a full business suit not only made it look like DeSantis was a pretender at playing ball, but by the end was enough to raise suspicions about claims that Ron DeSantis was ever a child.
The man looked and sounded, in his too-memorized answers, about as realistic as the stiffly moving characters bolted to the ground inside a Disney World dark ride. Was the man here to play ball, or to offer you a poison apple?
We have seen the speedy collapse of presidential ambitions before, and in countless variations. There have been a great many state politicians over the years who have thought themselves the next big thing, the genius idea-men who would turn around the shrinking Republican Party and turn it into something with principles, and proposals, and at least enough dignity to allow voters to pretend they were casting their vote for something other than spite and cruelty. Then, after polishing their alleged credentials through years of curated press glad-handing, they actually launch their presidential campaigns only to crash and burn the moment the wider public got a good look at them.
This would be the Scott Walker model, in which the candidate thoroughly prepares an agenda only to find that campaign crowds do not give a flying damn about an agenda, do not want to argue about an agenda, and especially do not want to be told what their agenda should be based on the say-so of the insufferable conservative opinion writers who imagine themselves to be the gatekeepers of such things.
Sen. Marco Rubio’s ruined presidential run is another case of this, though he perhaps shares more ground with Sen. Ted Cruz when it comes to how the actual campaign death came about. Marco Rubio, like Walker, imagined himself a great idea-man and pitched himself as yet another young up-and-comer technocrat. He then got his ass handed to him (and then some) on the national stage, when the most boorish and mean-spirited Republican candidate in modern history began to insult him for little reason other than the sheer pleasure of doing so—and Marco was caught flat-footed, apparently unprepared to push back against a mere schoolyard bully, much less the world’s autocrats. His leadership credentials evaporated in the span of a few debates, and the “ideas” behind his campaign, whatever they were, were lost to history.
Ron DeSantis is unambiguously not an idea-man. He visibly chafes when he is even in the same room as an idea, much less asked his opinion of one. The lesson Ron took from Marco Rubio being humiliated by the ignorant, vapid, and gleefully cruel Donald Trump is that Trump’s politics work and Rubio’s politics do not, and ever since Trump’s victory Ron has turned that single lesson into the personality he was never able to find. Ideas: No. Gleeful cruelty: Yes, please, and then some.
So Ron DeSantis started to dress like Trump, with his slightly-oversized coats and power-red ties. DeSantis speeches began to sound more like Trump speeches in tone and mannerisms, with DeSantis mimicking even Trump’s accordion-hands gestures. In Christina Pushaw, DeSantis found an arch-right press secretary who could compulsively tweet the insults, misinformation, and spite Trump was infamous for but that DeSantis himself has neither the obsessiveness nor quick-enough wit to muster.
Instead, Ron DeSantis has been utterly, monotonously one-dimensional. The Ron DeSantis method of politics is to watch enough television to learn what the new conservative culture war is supposed to be, upon which he adopts it as the newest fundamental aspect of his persona.
Trump and Fox News launched a campaign of paranoia against immigrants and refugees, so DeSantis not only adopted the same stances but tried to prove himself more anti-immigrant than anyone else by staging stunts that themselves crept near human trafficking.
Conservative media decided that wearing masks during a pandemic amounted to a violation of their freedoms, so Ron DeSantis, a governor, not only embraced the stance but sought to overturn safety measures even at the pandemic’s height.
Conservative media tried mightily to turn pandemic-fighting vaccines into a victory for Donald Trump, upon which Ron DeSantis embraced them, but would soon bend to widespread conservative conspiracy-mongering and declare the vaccines to be bad, upon which DeSantis embraced the new conspiracies and vowed criminal investigations of those who encouraged them.
Conservatives panicked about “Critical Race Theory” in universities, upon which DeSantis decided that that, too, was his brand, going so far as to push the far-right hoax promoter who invented the panic into a board of trustees position and began systemic retaliations against university professors whose public speech conflicted with that of the governor’s office.
Trump and conspiracy theorists decided in 2020 that democracy itself could not be trusted, asserting all manner of supposed schemes that “rigged” the vote against Republicans, upon which Ron DeSantis demanded a new police force devoted to fighting invisible election “fraud,” one that counts as its only public victory 19 arrests, many at gunpoint, of a handful of Florida voters who thought their voting rights had been restored, based on what they had been told by the state or by election canvassers, but who turned out to be wrong.
Conservative panic about LGBT children receiving compassion in school leads immediately to a new “Don’t Say Gay” law forbidding such support. Conservative panic about sex education in general leads to a purge of school libraries, not only of books that reference the existence of sex but, because conservatism, the removal of “controversial” books that feature non-white characters, or narratives, or authors, or references to aspects of U.S. history that white conservatives believe too delicate a topic for their children’s ears. A new transgender and crossdressing panic is invented, and Ron is immediately aboard. A Fox News host and other elements of the anti-democracy right try to gin up support for leaving Ukraine to the Russian kleptocracy’s whims, and Ron tries valiantly to be on all possible sides of the issue.
This is not just a pattern for DeSantis. It is his entire persona. All of it. The man is less cipher than crustacean, the kind that fashions camouflage for itself by putting shells and pebbles and bits of coral on its head, pretending to be its own front lawn. He is a hermit crab, constantly trading into new shells.
DeSantis is willing to alter his persona to an extent that should be humiliating, at least to anyone with an old persona that had to be overwritten. A well-known tale of American politics is that being tall is much better than being average, so DeSantis has been walking through Florida in heels that would challenge anyone:
The Floridian has indeed adopted tall-heeled cowboy boots as his personal fashion; among those of us with real livestock on the property that might be called ranch dressin’. But look: It has even forced him into the stereotypical Trump lean.
Nope. This man is not a crab but an empty suit, and very nearly literally so. He assembles conservative grievances, stitches them together, and holds press conferences to announce when he has added something new. And that is all he does. All of it, every day, every hour. Even when his children appear with him in an ad, it is only as props for his latest gimmick.
It is this blazing hollowness that keeps doing DeSantis in, every time he is put in a public situation that is not so tightly controlled by the man as to border on autoerotic asphyxiation. He makes a bad first impression, which botched his would-be world diplomatic tour. He doesn’t wear any better, according to stories claiming him to be near-universally disliked.
A David Frum tweet thread calls DeSantis’ lack of plausible personhood in a slightly different way, observing that even in his own semi-almost-campaign-announcement video voters are repeatedly “shown interacting with DeSantis indirectly, through screens,” rather than with the candidate himself. It paints a picture of a man who does not even exist, except through his own media appearances; the strong implication is that candidate DeSantis has never met with the rabble even once, obliging handlers to piece together an advertisement premised on the rabble admiring him from afar.
As for the content of the ad, it consists of nothing but far-right fluff. “Not a single line of his ad addresses the material world. If you don’t spend hours a day watching TV or scanning Facebook, you will barely understand what the candidate is talking about. This ad is for people who worry more about “the woke mob” than crime or inflation,” tweets Frum.
That, too, is the DeSantis “personality.” He will have an opinion on inflation if and when his television tells him to, upon which he will mount a battle for or against it using every tool of his office and more than a few made-up ones, and he will threaten criminal prosecutions of whoever is on the wrong side of it, and nobody who does not live wedged into Fox News’ colon will be able to even understand what the hell he is going on about.
It’s a gimmick. Presidential campaigns, however, are not made solely of gimmicks. DeSantis is such a one-trick pony, such an obvious puppet of his own campaign needs that he stumbles in every appearance that calls for anything other than puppetry. It’s damn awkward, is what it is. This isn’t a case of Mitt Romney trying to appeal to the common folk after decades of flying above them, looking down on them as scrabbling ants. This isn’t a case of Marco Rubio, a man singularly convinced of his own collegiate skills and credentials only to be knocked out cold by the first townie he picks a barroom fight with.
This is a man who has to wrap himself in culture-war armor to have any personality at all. DeSantis smiles with the smile of a man who can’t believe his luck; he stumbled into an era when cruelty is what the conservative base is most clamoring for, and cruelty is one of the few emotions he can pantomime, no matter how charisma-deprived he is.
There are those who chafe when politics devolves into personal attacks, but fear not. The man doesn’t have a “personal” that can be insulted. His dress, his speech patterns, his mannerisms, his grudges, his enemies—all of them are borrowed from somebody else to begin with. There is, that we know of, nothing under it to insult.
And that is what the public is responding to, after even the briefest of tit-for-tats with the boorish coup plotter himself. The man tried to land a shot or two, whiffing around a bit after Trump’s indictment and some snickering on DeSantis’ possible role in extraditing his would-be opponent, only to have Trump push him into the mud and dare him to get back up. Ron’s only conservative persona, the cruel bully willing to fight to be your cruel bully, was proved to be an affect rather than an agenda. And, in the meantime, DeSantis’ performative meanness in every other venue has made him a repulsive figure to anyone not looking for a wooden-stiff bully.
The obvious question, then, is whether Ron DeSantis can turn his not-yet-even-launched presidential campaign around—and the obvious answer is no. This doesn’t appear to be anything the infamously unlikable DeSantis can fix, purely as a matter of temperament.
It is too late for him to fashion himself as anything other than a bully, so his campaign message is fixed.
He cannot win as a bully when placed aside Donald Trump, because Donald Trump is a natural bully, one who spits invectives as a showboating way of life, while DeSantis is so naturally slow on the draw that he’s had to outsource that demeanor to his press secretary. DeSantis takes an age and a half to decide whether and how much he will slight Trump on the occasion of him being criminally indicted; Trump can take an insult like eats pudding with his fingers and regale spiteful rally crowds with the tale from now until the sun burns out.
Rather than warring with Trump, DeSantis instead doubled down on bullying those he felt would not dare fight back—only to lose that bet as well, when the Walt Disney Company stopped ignoring his provocations and lobbed a megacorporation-sized lawsuit right back at him.
Ron might attempt to show some signs of personal likability, perhaps settling on a favorite color or interacting with children in some way that does not give off vibes of “ocean ambush predator holding motionless as his prey approaches,” which is surely what his campaign advisers have been asking for all along. But sweet Jesus, if the man had it in him he would have brought it out right now, and a lifetime of training facial muscles to do one thing will not produce a credible result when you face a camera and ask them to do something else.
No, Ron DeSantis has exactly one shot at becoming the Republican candidate for the presidency in 2024. He can win if Donald Trump dies. If Donald Trump dies between now and the first Republican primary, that would be nothing but good news for Ron DeSantis.
Join the club, Ron. There are only a handful of Americans in the nation who would not be better off if Donald Trump fell off a balcony or choked on a cheeseburger, and if Donald didn’t do it for Melania or for the rest of us, you’d be a fool to get your own hopes up.
Another Trump indictment might do the trick too, but probably not. The DeSantis cowardice, when it comes to confronting Trump on anything from boorish perversions to big-boy election crimes, is shared by his entire party. Trump could well run for the Republican nomination from a prison cell and run away with eight in 10 Republican votes.
There’s no realistic path forward here for Ron. Oh, he can twist on the wind for as long as he wants, and likely will, but his borrowed public stances are near-universally toxic among the majority of U.S. voters, he is gutless when it comes to defending those toxic stances in anything but the most curated of crowds, he has fashioned himself as a cheap knockoff Trump when the real one is alive and kicking and staring right at him, and when stripped of his coat-of-many-evils the man is dull, painfully dull, agonizingly and teeth-grindingly dull.
Ron DeSantis began running for president under the presumption that Donald Trump would be a good little failure and run off to retirement. The moment Trump decided he wanted a second go at wrecking the country, the very premise of Ron’s campaign fell apart.
