It was often said that when Bill Clinton walked into a room, each person thought he noticed them in particular. Clinton was the ultimate retail politician: he liked people and they knew it.
When Ron DeSantis shows up, even those who want to support him feel that he harbours a special dislike for them. Being a black hole in terms of charisma is not automatically fatal to a candidate’s prospects. When your target is the diabolically charismatic Donald Trump, however, you are working at a big disadvantage.
The story of how DeSantis went from being the favourite, or near-favourite, Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential race to America’s most rapidly falling meteor in years, tells us a lot about the mindset of US conservatism. The Florida governor’s campaign began with every advantage. He had huge sums of money, name recognition, powerful backers and the sense that he was the only Republican capable of replacing Trump. Yet he has singularly failed to perform. One of his detractors memorably called this “electile dysfunction”.
In theory, the case for DeSantis was very good. Republicans would embrace Trumpism without Trump: in Florida’s youthful governor, they could have their war on woke before breakfast, lunch and dinner without the personality flaws of its namesake. DeSantis was Trump without the indictments and future jail sentences. He was Trump minus the drama. He would offer the kind of Trumpism that college graduates could vote for without apology.
It turns out there was a serious flaw: Maga voters cannot get enough of the Trump drama. The case against Trump in 2016 was that he was not electable. His base nevertheless recklessly voted for his nomination, then he went on to win. If part of the thrill of backing Trump is precisely because he is not electable – that he is unsafe and not respectable – it takes some brass to announce yourself as the electable version of Trump. It is now clear that the DeSantis hypothesis is a fatal misreading of what Maga wants.
Unfortunately for DeSantis, he is doubling down on his theory. I have seen some bad campaign advertisements in my time. But the latest DeSantis offering, which accuses Trump of being a friend of the LGBTQ community, takes first prize. The ad has to be watched a couple of times to digest its full awfulness. Plenty of things can be said about Trump. One of them is decidedly not that he is too woke. The ad’s message, spliced with the oddly homoerotic images of oiled body builders, is that DeSantis is the answer to America’s alleged crisis of masculinity. Running to the right of Trump is one thing. Doing so in this manner is surpassingly strange.
DeSantis is setting himself up to be the most promising also-ran of US politics. He would join an august list of diminished former hopefuls. The names Scott Walker, Howard Dean and Bill Bradley spring to mind. As the only candidate who could have ejected Trump yet failed, DeSantis would top that list.
But we are not quite there yet. Though Trump leads DeSantis by around 30 points in the polls – a near reversal since the turn of the year – his slump is not beyond the point of no return. The Republican debates start next month. Trump’s next flurry of indictments from his alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia is probably near. And Trump’s ability to self-destruct is always in the offing.
To retrieve his prospects, DeSantis needs two things. The first is luck. The second is to grasp that he is dealing with a cult. If the example of DeSantis’s candidacy has delivered one benefit it is to remove all doubt about the nature of today’s Republican Party. It is in the grip of a personality cult that defies any common sense rules of democratic politics.
Disbanding this cult cannot be done by focus group or contrived positioning. You have to slay the dragon or die trying. In this regard, DeSantis has it all wrong. His pretence at being a macho man – indeed a fearless superhero – is belied by his instinct to tiptoe around the dragon. The point is not to get to the right of the dragon. It is to plunge your spear into its heart.
Could that still work? I have no idea. Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, is testing the theory without much luck so far. His moment will come if Trump agrees to appear in the debates. But Christie has grasped something that continues to elude Trump’s other rivals, DeSantis in particular. You cannot defeat Trump by pretending you are a better version of him. In that surreal audition, Trump is literally unimprovable. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023