Ron DeSantis’s campaign is increasingly consumed with the kind of turmoil and leaking that was characteristic of Donald Trump’s first two campaigns. “People increasingly think it’s over. It’s a dumpster fire,” a person close to DeSantis tells the Washington Post.
Of course, as Trump’s example shows, this kind of dissension does not ensure defeat. (The dumpster fire was possibly the most commonly employed metaphor for Trump’s 2016 campaign). But it does strike at the heart of one of DeSantis’s central promises: that he would run a disciplined, tight ship.
DeSantis attacks Trump for surrounding himself with unreliable staff who quit or are fired constantly and leak to the media. “I also think just in terms of my approach to leadership, I get personnel in the government who have the agenda of the people and share our agenda,” DeSantis told Piers Morgan in March. “You bring your own agenda in, you’re gone. We’re just not going to have that. So, the way we run the government, I think, is no daily drama, focus on the big picture and put points on the board, and I think that’s something that’s very important.”
“You’re just not going to be successful if everything is constantly in a state of chaos,” he insisted as recently as a month ago.
This turns out to be an apt diagnosis of DeSantis’s own stuggles. Over the summer, DeSantis’s campaign underwent several rounds of shake-ups, firings, and reboots.
DeSantis’s super-PAC, Never Back Down, to which he outsourced much of his strategic work, has been a snake pit, with members quitting or threatening to fight each other. Just before Thanksgiving, Chris Jankowski, chief executive of Never Back Down, resigned, to be replaced by Adam Laxalt. NBD board member Ken Cuccinelli wrote in an email obtained by NBC News that the group’s ads were “exceedingly objectionable” and asked “to preserve this email as part of the board records.” Now Laxalt is leaving, too.
For an organization called “Never Back Down,” there seem to be an awful lot of people walking away.
There are a lot of reasons DeSantis is losing, the biggest, almost certainly, is that Republican voters simply adore Trump. But it’s a grim irony that the Republican campaign that has been consumed with drama and chaos is not Trump’s, but the rival who promised order and competence.
