It was more than a #DeSaster

I’ve long held the view that Donald Trump is something akin to a horror movie monster — a Godzilla or a T. Rex, say — to the American political system. In such films, it is often not the puny humans who take out the monster; it’s a different monster. And in such a scenario, it seems perfectly logical that only a Republican designed and optimized specifically for the bizarre cult of GOP politics in 2024 would be the right candidate to get the job done with Trump. But if that’s the theory of Ron DeSantis, the forty-four-year-old governor of Florida, Wednesday night’s events have shown that it’s still a largely unproven theory.

Was the launch of DeSantis’ presidential campaign best described as a debacle? A farce? A nightmare? The Time called it a “meltdown”. Politico went with “terrible”. Perhaps the best summary of Wednesday’s epic bust was #DeSaster, a real trending hashtag on Twitter. Whatever you call it, it’s a pretty bad sign for a campaign when the biggest controversy inspired by its debut is what’s synonymous with “terrible” to give it. And the problem wasn’t just the technical glitches. The start of the Twitter Spaces event featuring DeSantis and Twitter billionaire owner Elon Musk was delayed by more than twenty-five minutes as Musk audibly struggled to get his new platform up and running. But just as miserable was what DeSantis had to say once he started speaking, both on Twitter and in a subsequent interview on Fox News, which amounted to a lot of complaints about the “legacy media” and little justification for his candidacy.

Trump, whose name DeSantis never uttered Wednesday night, welcomed news of his rival’s implosion with a video from a rocket labeled “Ron 2024!” explode on a launch pad. Don, Jr., cheerful compared DeSantis to the former Republican governor of Florida who was eviscerated by his father in 2016. “DeSantis makes JEB! look energetic now,” he taunted. Even Joe Biden, who unlike Trump was often mentioned by DeSantis, got involved. The president squeezed DeSantis tweet urging supporters to give money to his own campaign. “This link works,” Biden promised.

But the rush to mock, while understandable, was also a bit of a distraction. After all, the really crucial question posed by DeSantis’ official entry into the 2024 race wasn’t whether Twitter could handle a large crowd in its Spaces feature without crashing. (Answer: no.) What mattered was whether DeSantis could revive his presidential prospects and actually emerge as the Republican to take out Trump.

After DeSantis’ 19-point election victory last November, he finally appeared to be the Republican Trump beater, a younger, sharper, smarter version of the forty-fifth president — without the pesky Twitter habit and all the legal troubles. Subsequent exposure suggests he is also Trump without the charm. In recent months, DeSantis has fallen rather than risen in the polls, as his many missteps, from violently retaliating against Disney to signing an unpopular six-week abortion ban, have given Trump and his allies much to feast on. DeSantis doesn’t look like a Trump beater anymore. The ex-president, whose lead in the GOP primaries is back in the double digits over DeSantis, remains an overwhelming front-runner. Meanwhile, DeSantis will go down in 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’ campaign. When asked on Fox why he was running for president, DeSantis said he wanted to bring his “unprecedented policy success” in the state to the national stage, and this, he promised, was a way to end to the “culture of losing” that plagued Republicans during the tenure of the man DeSantis refused to criticize by name.

A big problem for DeSantis, though, is that this Florida blueprint that he’s trying to export to the rest of the country is such a cramped, crass vision of America. His “touchstone” issues for appealing to the Republican electorate, like Jeff Roe, the GOP operative who heads a pro-DeSantis super PACtold the Time, fighting “corporate America,” fighting about what is taught in schools, and fighting “acceptance around sexual orientation and medical care for transgender people.” My translation: Disney bashing, book bans and monitoring who uses which bathroom. Roe is never back down PACit 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.

Did no one tell the governor that a lot of serious things are happening in the country and in the world?

When Twitter finally got going on Wednesday, one of the first things I heard DeSantis say was “the waking mind virus.” I’m not sure what this phrase means, although apparently it’s also a Musk favorite, but I know it’s DeSantis’ battle cry in the culture wars. And that the culture wars are at the heart of his candidacy, which includes a platform to protect “freedom of expression” but also to ensure that “gender ideology” and the “sexualization of children” are tightly controlled. His complaints about the distribution of “sex toys” information to fifth graders may be the first time “sex toys” have ever been mentioned in a presidential campaign announcement. “We will never surrender to the awakened mob,” DeSantis pledged at the Twitter event, “and we will leave the awakened ideology in the dustbin of history.”

Later, on Fox, he reiterated this as a top priority for a future DeSantis administration. “The wake-mind virus,” he said ominously, “is actually a form of cultural Marxism.” Trey Gowdy, the former Republican congressman who conducted the interview with DeSantis, did not ask for clarification or a definition. He just nodded along.

And so it went on, as if DeSantis’s campaign was just a fabrication of a Fox News producer’s niche program for the hard-core believers, not to be broadcast to an entire country. DeSantis hardly seemed like a leader in his own right, but rather an echo and amplification of some of the worst aspects – and personalities – of the Trump years. There were times on Wednesday when he sounded like Steve Bannon, going on about the need for “reconstitutionalization of the administrative state.” (I admit I don’t know what “reconstitutionalize” means either, but it seems to have something to do with taking back control of the FBI and the Justice Department.) There were times when he sounded like Stephen Miller, who promised to finally build the goddamn wall and close the border. And there were times when he sounded like Trump himself, whining about the swamp and the evil elites out to get him.

But most of all, DeSantis sounded to me like the backbencher in the House of Representatives he was not so long ago, who jumped at the chance to appear on Fox and was willing to say anything to get there. He spoke in a sort of secret language of acronyms and shorthand favored by the far right about the evils of ESG and DEI and Washington’s “accreditation cartels” as if his audience were Jim Jordan and not the rest of America. He never even spoke of the current crisis in Washington, where the country is on the verge of a catastrophic default. His dismissive response to Russia’s offensive war in Ukraine was that he didn’t want the US to get too involved. Of the enemies he mentioned, and there were many, the one he sounded most passionate about was “the old media.” He was certainly not a happy warrior. Only a few times did a faint smile flash across his face. He turned out to be a man of many hatreds. The way he said “California” sounded like a slur.

After listening to it all, I couldn’t tell you why Ron DeSantis is running for president, except maybe because it’s the good people at The Atlantic Ocean And Vanity purse. If he impersonated Trump, it was indeed a poor impersonation. DeSantis didn’t look like a Godzilla or a T. Rex. He looked like a forty-four-year-old maverick who was about to be eaten alive. He may have many millions of dollars to spend, but the bottom line from his campaign launch was that he doesn’t seem to have what it takes yet. Time may prove me wrong, but I suspect we already know how this movie ends. ♦