There have been multiple pre-postmortems on Ron DeSantis’ still-unannounced presidential campaign, and the most complete one might be David Lurie’s piece in Public Notice. Mother Jones is also weighing in. The proximate cause of these new pieces was DeSantis’ utterly cringeworthy world tour, during which the plastic dress-up doll underwhelmed foreign counterparts from Asia to Europe.
That’s not to say that the foreign visits doomed him. The Republican base doesn’t give a damn whether its would-be presidential candidates are liked or loathed by America’s various allies, and would in general prefer candidates who are despised abroad to ones foreign leaders actually liked. The DeSantis “campaign” had already been on rough ground, though, as soon as the seditious Republican coup leader Donald Trump began publicly attacking him—only to have DeSantis prove himself unable or unwilling to respond.
Ron’s foreign trip was seen as a way to dodge the topic while providing some needed footage of the candidate looking like a plausible diplomat, a way to salvage the campaign without engaging Trump directly. And it might have worked, if DeSantis had more charisma than a wooden spoon. He doesn’t, so the result was yet more press footage of Ron DeSantis looking out of his element in every situation he could possibly put himself in.
The problems with Ron DeSantis as a plausible national personality remain twofold. First, the man has no personality of his own and no apparent ability to find one. And second, DeSantis has covered for his vacuousness by shamelessly borrowing all of the cruelest Republican Party ideas and fashioning his personality around those cruelties and nothing else. The man’s campaign suit consists of over-the-top cultural resentments all stitched together and overlapping, but if you ask who Ron DeSantis is, as a person, there doesn’t seem to be anyone who can answer that.
Now, we had some good laughs in ye olden days making fun of candidate Mitt Romney’s attempts to blend in with the common folk after a life lived in the top and most brutalist ranks of capitalism. A lot of laughs. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign-trail persona could be described as what if Thurston Howell III had been assembled in a Ford auto plant—but that man comes off as Freddy Mercury compared to what DeSantis brings to the table.