The New York Times Tallies the Knives in DeSantis’s Back

Luther Ray Abel

Sunday, December 24, 2023

 

In a piece that’s unmistakably intended to be the last word on the Ron DeSantis campaign — a eulogy to be dusted off for future editorials when the New York Times needs to comment on whatever Ron might be doing in the next few decades — the Times idly acknowledges two landmarks of import as it zooms past to fixate on ideological tourist traps that tantalize political reporters (e.g., private jets, golf simulators, and anonymous advisers).

 

The first Big Cypress is that DeSantis missed his window to land a kill shot while seeing camp dissidents abscond to the rival campaign and sharpen the steel with which Trump has tormented DeSantis:

 

Mr. DeSantis’s decision to delay his entry into the race until after Florida’s legislative session concluded meant he was on the sidelines during Mr. Trump’s most vulnerable period last winter. Then, once Mr. DeSantis did hit the trail, he struggled to connect, appearing far more comfortable with policy than people as awkward encounters went viral.

 

“You’re running against a former president — you’re going to have to be perfect and to get lucky,” said a person working at high levels to elect Mr. DeSantis and who was not authorized to speak publicly. “We’ve been unlucky and been far from perfect.”

 

In Mr. Trump, the governor has also found himself running against a rival who filled the upper ranks of his operation with veteran consultants that Mr. DeSantis had discarded. The Trump team used its insider knowledge of his idiosyncrasies and insecurities to mercilessly undermine him, from his footwear to his facial expressions, starting months before he entered the race.

 

While the Left’s caricature of the Right as fixated on hypermasculine effect is grating, it’s also true that DeSantis has been too obsequious toward Trump to win him the anti-Trump voter, while also running a campaign that’s necessarily undercutting the Trump cult that sees their golden man as the one who can stick it to the libs, cucks, and sundry other effeminate forms of government. DeSantis had the chance to try and bury Trump last winter — instead he poked the man with the shovel that’s included in an Amelia Island beach bucket. What’s most frustrating from an outside perspective is that DeSantis had to know what advantages Trump would have available to him in the last year — ostensible persecution and Populist Inc. But what DeSantis couldn’t know was how many of his anti–Trump 2024 peers would seek to destroy him first.

 

The second landmark, the Everglades (if you’ll permit), is that DeSantis’s foibles have been denuded by critical advertising beyond what every other candidate has been subject to combined:

 

Remarkably, in a race Mr. Trump has dominated for eight months, it is Mr. DeSantis who has sustained the most negative advertising — nearly $35 million in super PAC attacks as of Saturday, more than Mr. Trump and every other G.O.P. contender combined.

 

DeSantis is pinched between the anti-Trump and Trump wings and, from what I can tell, he is neither a threat nor a friend — just a limping target with 15 percent of the Republican base whose supporters can either catapult Haley into a threatening position or allow Trump to squash the intraparty resistance to his third campaign for the White House. The Times has provided the reading public a couple-thousand-words-too-many summary of two observations: DeSantis overestimated his friends and underestimated his enemies.