Ron DeSantis LOL

The decline and fall of a first-class traveler and third-class presidential candidate

Seems appropriate today. Photo by Quick PS on Unsplash

It has not escaped the attention of the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World that a lot is going on in the world. It is an increasingly violent place. Iran seems to have decided to piss off all of its neighbors simultaneously. Kim Jong Un is angry that no one is paying attention to him and is behaving even more menacing than usual.

I want to comment on many of these developments in the days and weeks to come, I really do. But first — and this is very important — I want to dance on Ron DeSantis’ political grave.

DeSantis announced today that he is dropping out of the presidential race with a fake Churchill quote. The Florida governor had bet his entire campaign on doing well in that state. He pretty much camped out there, visiting all 99 counties in the state and earning the endorsement of the governor. He finished second, but more than thirty points behind Donald Trump.

This is quite the comedown from the fall of 2022, when DeSantis was coming off of a 20-point re-election victory even as Trump had harmed himself by backing candidates who flamed out in the midterms. Many pundits thought this sounded the death knell for Trump and heralded the rise of a new GOP frontrunner.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World had its doubts, many of which grew as DeSantis started opening his mouth and saying really dumb things about foreign policy. He also seemed thoroughly ill-equipped to cope with being the target of Trump’s brand of negative political attacks.

Mostly, however, DeSantis imploded for two reasons. First, he was bad at, you know, basic human interactions, which kinda matter in places like Iowa and New Hampshire. Second, he and his team managed something I did not think was possible: exist in an even more insular, weird political cocoon than Trump. The disastrous glitch-filled Twitter Spaces campaign announcement was merely the most obvious example. Over time I lost count of the number of stories that made DeSantis sound like the World’s Most Online Politician.

With his departure, of course, come the political obituaries. Combine the internal turmoil of the DeSantis campaign, with his team’s initial hostility towards the mainstream media, and you have a recipe for some delicious stories of DeSantis dysfunction.

Take, for example, this NBC News story by Matt Dixon, Dasha Burns, Allan Smith and Abigail Brooks, which came out even before DeSantis dropped out. There’s so much good stuff in it:

In the week before the all-important caucuses, Scott Wagner, the recently installed head of the super PAC, was doing something that aides found puzzling: He was literally doing a puzzle. 

In the headquarters of Never Back Down in West Des Moines, Iowa, Wagner was, according to some of his staff, spending a significant amount of time in the precious final few days constructing a peaceful 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of a landscape….

“Staffers are putting their dedication and devotion to electing Gov. DeSantis and they come in and the CEO, the chairman of the organization, is sitting there working on a puzzle for hours,” said a Never Back Down staffer who was there.

That’s just the opening anecdote. Then we get to the good stuff:

It was just two weeks into the campaign, and already the squabbling had begun.

The campaign’s top brass, including then-campaign manager Generra Peck, top adviser Ryan Tyson and Christina Pushaw — who was the architect of DeSantis’ communications strategy — held a conference call with those tapped to be the social-media knife fighters on DeSantis’ behalf. The group of roughly a dozen influencers was informally dubbed the “fight club” by the campaign. They were willing to combat members of the media and DeSantis’ political foes, but from the very early weeks of the campaign, many were flummoxed by leadership’s direction, or lack thereof.

“The conference call was a s--- show, just an absolute s--- show,” said a former fight club member who was on the call. “People [top staffers] were pressed on the message, and, especially after the failed rollout, they had no answers.”

During a particularly bizarre portion of the meeting, Bill Mitchell, a DeSantis supporter with a large social media following, asked the top DeSantis campaign staff if they could call Musk because he was concerned that the site was limiting the visibility of his posts — a practice commonly referred to as “shadow-banning.”

“He cut me off — I’ll remember this to my dying day — and asked the top people on the campaign if they could call Elon Musk and ask why he is being shadow-banned,” a second person on the call recounted. “That was the level of people we were working with. It was just kind of embarrassing to a point.”

I’m sorry, did that story say Bill Mitchell? Bill Mitchell??!!

For those familiar with that name, go ahead and have your laugh, you’ve earned it. For those of you unfamiliar with Bill, count yourselves lucky. Let’s just say it’s a bit nuts that any serious political campaign would take him seriously.

If you think I’m exaggerating… let’s just quote the next few paragraphs from the NBC story:

In a statement, Mitchell said he had been “shadow-banned” as a DeSantis supporter, arguing that he has over 400,000 followers “yet it is not unusual for my posts to have fewer that 2000 views each.”

“I believe the leftists at X are doing this because they want Trump to be our nominee as he is very beatable in the general,” he added. “DeSantis terrifies them as he is far more competent without the baggage.”

That last sentence sounds a little like one of my occasional pro-DeSantis commenters, who has gone dark as of late. If it’s you Bill, thanks for reading!

In dropping out, DeSantis endorsed Trump, which completes his circle of debasement. Maybe he has a political future: he is only 45 years old. Stranger things have happened.

For today, however, I look across DeSantis and his terminally online staff, and take solace in the notion that not every arrogant asshole succeeds on the presidential stage.