Despite the cold and Nikki Haley’s late-breaking momentum, Ron DeSantis finished second in Iowa’s Republican caucus on Monday. DeSantis had bet heavily on Iowa, winning the endorsements of Governor Kim Reynolds and Evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats and building a formidable ground operation in the state. Still, he finished 30 points behind Donald Trump, forcing DeSantis to declare his campaign is not dead. Republican voters want the former president back in power and are unwilling to give DeSantis, who once seemed like the future, a chance.
There’s something deeply satisfying about the Florida governor’s flameout. DeSantis is a vicious bully who runs on outright cruelty and gross neglect. His record in Florida is replete with attacks on LGBTQ+ people, especially trans people. “You have one conservative candidate running in this race, and that is me at this point. That’s just the reality,” he once said in Iowa. “When we can’t even, as Republicans, agree that it’s wrong to chop off the private parts of a 14-year-old kid, what is going on in this party?” At the height of the pandemic, he largely abandoned his state to COVID, empowering an anti-vaccine crank to be the state’s surgeon general as people died. Millions of Floridians still lack health insurance, which does not appear to bother him or his allies in the state GOP, who refuse to expand Medicaid.
DeSantis isn’t wrong to think that cruelty appeals to Republican voters. Trump channeled it so effectively in 2016 that he won the White House, and it remains key to his dominance now. Like DeSantis, Trump is a bully, but he’s also an entertainer. When Trump punches down, he makes supporters feel like they’re in on the joke and, in turn, that makes them feel powerful. In 2016, while defending his false claim that “thousands” in Jersey City had celebrated the 9/11 attacks, he mocked a reporter with a disability. It was peak Trump: racist conspiracy theory mixed with a joke at someone else’s expense. DeSantis knows how to punch down, but he lacks Trump’s jovial affect. There’s a coldness to the governor, visible in the strain on his face and in the rictus grin he performs for the camera. He’s so awkward he has become a punch line himself.
That would be fatal — as long as Trump’s around. Trump makes the base feel good and strong by dint of their association with him. He tells them he is their retribution, their justice; he has taken their anger and transformed it into a movement. (Perhaps that’s why his supporters find him more vigorous than Joe Biden, though Trump is nearly as old.) DeSantis is far right, certainly; as far right as Trump and perhaps with greater ideological heft. There’s no question DeSantis would try to subdue the right’s enemies were he to become president. Compared with Trump, though, he can seem almost wan. A convincing strongman would have broken free of his competitors by now. What’s more, a convincing strongman is never a punch line. He’s the one who makes all the jokes.
There’s more to Trump’s appeal than his jocularity, of course. Because he was already president, he has given Republican voters things they want, like conservative justices for the Supreme Court who overturned Roe v. Wade. That record grants his jokes weight, and his subsequent loss to Biden can be waved away with a conspiracy theory or two. Even without Trump, it would be difficult to imagine DeSantis attracting the same unshakable loyalty. He hasn’t energized Republican voters outside of Florida in the same frenzied way — and at this point, he probably won’t. It’s too early to speculate about his long-term national future, especially if Trump is somehow not a factor, but in the short term, DeSantis is a dead man walking. To his staffers and his few supporters, that probably isn’t funny. To everyone else, though, he’s good for a laugh.
