American Greatness
It comes down to this: DeSantis is just not presidential material.
Republican voters have been bashed over the head repeatedly with the message that Ron DeSantis is the more “electable,” new and improved version of Donald Trump. This was always a ridiculous talking point, as if an enigmatic figure such as Trump could be replicated, with all peculiar virtues retained and vices purged. But this shtick for DeSantis had life only so long as it remained an untested hypothesis. Under the pressure of a head-on collision with Trump, the careful ruse of “Trump without the baggage” is collapsing like a cardboard cutout.
DeSantis’ disastrous Twitter launch, rationalized as bold and forward thinking by his supporters, is just the tip of the iceberg. The problem is DeSantis is lacking quite a bit more than Trump’s “baggage.” Without his rival’s authenticity or charisma, DeSantis has relied on an annoyingly overbearing political operation to stay afloat. But sly maneuvering is precisely what Republican voters despise most in a politician today. Oddly enough, DeSantis appears to have even changed how he says his last name. One can imagine Trump having a field day with his understudy’s prevarications on the debate stage: “Tell us, Ron, Is it Duh-santis or DEE-santis?”
DeSantis’ surrogates want to talk about nothing but “policy,” perhaps as a distraction from the fact that he’s such an uninteresting character. It’s hard to trust a man who isn’t comfortable in his own skin. One could hardly lay such a charge against Trump. His supporters know that the chaos is part of a package deal that comes with a forceful and uncontrollable personality. With DeSantis, they get a boring, vacillating careerist pretending to be his more popular rival. The premise here was bound to end in failure once the rubber hit the road. ..
