Kicking a man when he’s down. Please continue

I think it’s pretty clear that as long as Donald Trump was alive his prospective opponents in the 2024 Republican primaries were drawing dead, so on one level their strategic and tactical choices are moot. But given the immense media hype and what an asshole the guy is, reading mean postmortems-while-he’s-still-technically-in-the-race about Puddin’ Fingers Ron is highly entertaining. One thing candidates should remember is that not every primary voter spends hours a day on their private jet listening to Claremont Institute podcasts:

Despite Trump’s penchant for stream-of-consciousness speeches and highly controversial or weird tangents, he still has a mighty Republican brand and clear message as unmistakable as the red hats that bear his slogan: “Make America Great Again.” It resonates with the Republican base, working-class voters and the disaffected. DeSantis offered a vague and derivative version of Trumpism-without-the-chaos.

DeSantis never had a recognizable slogan or motto beyond “Never Back Down.” And when it came to fighting Trump, DeSantis sometimes backed down, backed away or never took a real punch.

An avid X user, DeSantis campaign speeches were stuffed with acronyms on heady topics that thrilled the very-online intellectual right, but the concepts just weren’t top of mind for the older not-very-online early state voters who didn’t have alphabet-soup fluency with CRT, DEI or ESG (Critical Race Theory, Diversity Equity & Inclusion and Environmental Social Governance). 

In this Iowa diner, all they can talk about is how important it is to end ESG.

Then there was his decision to entrust is campaign launch to the technical expertise of Mr. Elon Musk:

DeSantis fashioned himself as a different type of candidate. So he decided to have a different type of campaign launch on Twitter Spaces with billionaire Elon Musk on May 25. It became a glitch-filled disaster on May 24, an easy metaphor for his troubled candidacy. When the sound finally worked in the event, DeSantis was somehow talking about heady topics like the Chevron Deference, DEI and ESG without explaining what any of it was.

The DeSantis campaign’s response: it was great.

“We broke the internet,” his campaign said.

In Iowa diners, they’re talking even more about administrative law!

Then there was the not-entirely-a-pivot to outright homophobic/homoerotic Nazism:

“The Twitter launch was a disaster. Stop talking about Florida. People don’t want to hear about Florida,” he said, before turning to a recent interview DeSantis did on the Christian Broadcast Network where he talked about being with Jesus’ disciples. 

Girdusky, who did not work for the campaign, would not comment for this article.

“Whoever advised him to go on Christian TV and say he wanted to have dinner with Jesus should be fired,” Girdusky said. “Trump has evangelicals. Do you think they’re going to break with Trump over abortion? They’re not. This campaign is like Ted Cruz 2.0.”

The campaign didn’t have another conference call like that again. Girdusky later told one adviser that the campaign was “like an Irish wake waiting for the body to drop.”

The funereal atmosphere set in about a week later when the campaign was rocked by an embarrassing episode in which staffers created a bizarre web ad attacking Trump that was criticized as being both homophobic and homoerotic. It was posted on social media through a sock puppet account in a failed effort to disguise the campaign’s fingerprints.

The campaign restructured its social media policies, prompting a confrontation between Peck and the campaign’s social media maven, Christina Pushaw, who didn’t create the video in question but was locked out of messaging meetings, which prompted a confrontation in the Tallahassee office.

“If you think I’m so off-message and bad at messaging, why are you cutting me out of messaging meetings!” Pushaw yelled. “I’ll just fucking quit!”

Weeks later, another staffer created and posted an even more controversial video that featured DeSantis’s likeness against the image of a sonnenrad, a black sun rune used by the Nazis. The incident was particularly damaging because it came to light days after DeSantis was embroiled in a race-related controversy over new Florida school standards that would teach kids about “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

On July 25, DeSantis’s campaign announced it was laying off staff, including the aide who made the sonnenrad video. In a symbolic coincidence, on the day his campaign crashed into reality, DeSantis and his campaign staffers got in an actual car wreck.

Turning your campaign messaging over to Christina P’Shaw and her army of Extremely Online fascist incels seemed like a terrible idea, what went wrong.

This shorter one reminds us that DeSantis was the latest candidate to convince himself that sending low-paid staff to knock on the doors of total strangers is the path to victory:

Somehow, someway, the DeSantis campaign and super PAC created a myth of epic proportions and sold it to political reporters and donors. P. T. Barnum never imagined a con job this big.

The myth: An army of paid doorknockers would fan out across the country, even in states beyond the early primaries, and deliver the nomination to DeSantis. It’s hilarious. If you ever believed that it was possible to affect the trajectory of a presidential campaign with underemployed losers going door to door in between puffs of strawberry-flavored vapes, you are vaping an intoxicant yourself. When skeptics noted that the advertising was not moving the polls, they were told not to worry: There was a giant, secret army of DeSantis door knockers! The absurdity was breathtaking. Yet, the news media reported that DeSantis’ ground game was his secret weapon. It was secret because it wasn’t there.

Anyone near a campaign recently knows how this works: In 2023, no one in America wants a stranger coming to their door for any reason. And if they were given the choice between door knockers who were selling politicians or membership in a cult, it would be a close call. Also, as fun as it is to take a phone call from a politician during dinner, imagine the joy of opening your door to a political doorknocker, especially in the balmy Iowa or New Hampshire winter.

This election year is mostly going to be one of paranoia and tension, so it’s good to get some just deserts and comice relief. Keep them coming!