The Encouraging Lesson From DeSantis’s Crash

This time last year, political commentators were hotly anticipating the opening act of the 2024 GOP primaries: a battle royal between former president Donald Trump and his fastidiously groomed ideological successor, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Trump’s excesses, theatrics, and legal challenges were starting to look like an albatross for a Republican Party that had drastically underperformed over the previous three election cycles, and DeSantis, a founding member of the congressional Freedom Caucus, seemed like the tailor-made solution to the GOP’s political woes. During a grim 2022 midterm cycle, the Florida governor cruised to a 20-point reelection victory, touting the state’s sound economic condition and his roster of base-pleasing culture-war gambits, from anti-CRT and “Don’t Say Gay” bans in state schools to his resistance to “Faucism” during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. His later immigration-relocation stunts and camera-ready showdown with the Disney Corporation were clearly calculated to burnish his hard-right bona fides as he prepared to subdue MAGA King Trump and declare himself the new monarch of the grievance-addicted GOP base.