Ron DeSantis fancied himself a bully. But in the end, he was nothing more than a toady of Donald Trump, the former president and GOP front-runner he endorsed Sunday after abruptly suspending his own 2024 campaign. “It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance,” the Florida governor said. “He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear.”
Think back to this time last year, when the glow of DeSantis’s commanding 2022 reelection was still in his cheeks, and this ignominious end to his presidential campaign might have seemed surprising. Now go further back—and it’s maybe less so. Before DeSantis rose to the top of a heap of MAGA torch-bearers, he was merely a foot soldier in the movement—a state-level enforcer in Trump’s federal enterprise. He was an effective one, of course—inflicting pain on the Trump movement’s preferred victims, sometimes more successfully than Trump himself. But the movement was never really his—at least not as long as its namesake was still in the picture.
Trumpism without Trump? It was always a fever dream. While Trump’s personality and ticks have certainly permeated the Republican Party—his petty predilections and grand grievances theirs, now, as much as his—DeSantis was never going to be able to marshal those forces the way his party leader has. Trump is a depraved zeitgeist, a phenomenon in American politics. DeSantis? He’s a leech, a devotee whose thirst for the Kool-Aid seems equal to his appetite for punishment.
Indeed, for all his sadism, DeSantis turns out to be something of a masochist. DeSantis has endured more than a year of degrading Trump taunts and MAGA humiliations, mostly without rebuke—except recently, when he finally summed up the truth of the Trump experience to Iowa voters. “You can be the most worthless Republican in America,” he said this month. “But if you kiss the ring, he’ll say you’re wonderful.” But now, like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and countless others in the GOP, DeSantis—“DeSanctimonious,” in the former president’s confusing parlance—is puckering up.
And for what? To preserve a shot at a future run, maybe, or to keep the prospect of a job in a potential second Trump administration alive, or, perhaps, so DeSantis aide Scott Wagner—who was apparently preoccupied with a puzzle in the final days before the Iowa caucus—could finally finish that jigsaw. Or maybe he saw Trump as his best chance to defeat Nikki Haley, who finished third in Iowa but has stronger footing heading into New Hampshire and other upcoming states, including South Carolina, where she served as governor.
Such is the nature of toadies—pleased with their ability to push around who they can, and in the end, they appeal to the bully to finish the nasty work they could not. Trump seems glad to take on that burden, focusing his primary ire on Haley, who has responded to his racist attacks in recent days by questioning his mental fitness but leaving his moral character mostly unexamined. “I’m not saying anything derogatory,” Haley said after Trump confused her and Nancy Pelosi during a campaign speech. “But when you’re dealing with the pressures of the presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this.”
That kind of mealy-mouthed campaigning may do in Haley, too. But perhaps DeSantis’s exit will make her bolder. After all, she now carries the hopes and dreams of the anti-Trump Republicans who hope they won’t have to cast a second ballot for Joe Biden—even though some of her base says they’d do that if it came to it. “I wouldn’t support [Trump] under any circumstance,” one Haley supporter said recently, vowing to back Biden again if the race ends up being between him and his predecessor.
One question, now, is if Haley will accept that mantle—running not as a more electable Trump or a MAGA Lite, as she was in her Trump administration position and now in her current campaign, but as the more traditional Republican she claims to be. That role would hardly make her a moderate. But in the schoolyard of American politics, she might, at least, find a better place in the hierarchy than her nearest rival, who retreats to his petty kingdom in Florida humbled. “We wish him well,” Haley told New Hampshire voters Sunday. “Having said that, it’s now one fella and one lady left.”
