What the Florida governor’s failed campaign to succeed Trump revealed about the future of the Republican Party.
In the fall of 2022, I covered the National Conservatism Conference, a soiree in Miami drawing Republican activists, writers, activists, and elected officials. The conference made two things vividly clear. First was the degree to which post-liberalism — the idea that traditional democracy was failing, and Republicans must use coercive government power to gain and hold power — had moved from the fringes to the mainstream of the conservative movement. The second was that the most ardently post-liberal conservative activists, the ones who believed the Deep State had sabotaged Donald Trump and openly envied Hungary’s strongman Viktor Orban, had grown convinced Ron DeSantis was their candidate.
The Florida governor spoke to a rapturous audience at the convention. Even though his landslide reelection victory still lay ahead of him, you could see the gears of elite influence turning. The energies revealed and unleashed by Trump were now consolidating behind a new movement, and at that moment it all seemed to be lining up behind DeSantis.
We know now, and have known for quite some time, that the flesh-and-blood DeSantis could not live up to the expectations heaped upon him. He was, both figuratively and literally, too small — making inept tactical decisions, failing at attempts to do things like smile, laugh, and banter with regular people, and probably doomed from the outset by the durability of the Trump personality cult. He dropped out of the race on Sunday.
But as pathetic and ridiculous and small as the procession of spousal handshakes, custom-built lift boots, awkward laughs, spoonless puddings may have been, the DeSantis campaign was not unimportant. It represented something that will have lasting significance: the ratification of Trumpism by the conservative movement and the Republican Party.
Who is permitted in the coalition is a vital question for any political body, especially one with dangerous extremists. On the American right, that question has hung in the balance since Trump came on the scene. DeSantis’s campaign put it finally to rest.
It is difficult to overestimate the panic and existential dread Trump’s rise set off within the GOP elite. It was not merely Trump’s personality or ideological unreliability that terrorized Republican politicians and thought leaders. The National Review’s famous “Against Trump” issue, in which a collection of paragons of conservatism dismissed Trump as a con man and read him out of the movement, embodied what was at the time a wall of opposition.
The conservative movement’s initial rejection of Trump set off what was, internally, a catastrophic series of events. The movement depended on the assumption that its existing organizations spoke for “the base,” yet Trump had mobilized a vast new army of followers who were transparently at odds with the priorities of their self-appointed leaders. Nearly every major established conservative organ soon found its fundraising, audience, donor subsidies, and political influence at risk. The old institutions of the right either disappeared (the Weekly Standard ceased publication after its pro-Trump owner yanked funding) or fell into line. New institutions quickly rose up to take their place. Some of them (like the alt-right) flirted with, or plunged directly into, racism and antisemitism, or explored other previously forbidden ideas, like fantasies of civil war, explicit opposition to democracy, or conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and QAnon.
DeSantis grew up firmly rooted in traditional movement conservatism. His manifesto, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers, was an anti-government screed that argued President Obama’s economic redistribution was a form of oppression. But DeSantis cleverly aligned himself with Trump in order to leap ahead of his competitors and win the governorship of Florida. And traditional conservatives saw him as the vehicle to unite the old factions of the right with the new ones.
The DeSantis project was to give up on waiting out Trump or trying to restore the old, Reaganite party, and instead consolidate the new one. The traditional conservatives gave up on trying to expel the grifters, paranoids, and antisemites from their ranks. Their goals had retreated to avoiding being expelled themselves. “Some version of what DeSantis represents has the greatest odds of coaxing the party away from Trump and forging a new political synthesis that bears the unmistakable stamp of Trump while jettisoning his flaws,” wrote National Review Editor-in-Chief Rich Lowry, “There will be no Bourbon Restoration. The challenge to Trump will have to come from the Trump wing — at this point, more like the Trump fuselage, wing and landing gear — of the party.”
DeSantis described his pitch as “competent Trumpism.” The deal was that traditional Republicans would get a reliable leader who focused on his job rather than binge-watching television and tweeting compulsively, while the Trumpists would secure a respected place in the movement’s constellation.
“No enemies to the right” became his campaign’s prime objective. Outside observers boggled at DeSantis’s relentless ideological posturing, but it reflected his core strategy of refusing to allow even a sliver of daylight to open up on the right. DeSantis refused to concede that Joe Biden had legitimately won the 2020 election (“It’s not for me to do”), floated the idea FBI informants might have instigated the violence on January 6, and promised to consider pardons for convicted insurrectionists, and attacked Liz Cheney for holding hearings on the riots. (“Cheney is totally off the rails with her nonsense. And I think she’s not really a Republican in terms of what she’s doing. We want people that are going to fight the left.”) He campaigned for election-denying candidates like Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano that fellow Republicans avoided.
After Disney issued a statement criticizing one of his laws, DeSantis singled it out with a series of punitive regulatory and tax measures aimed at the company’s Florida theme park. He then repeatedly cited this episode as an example of how he would intimidate other businesses from stepping out of line. It fit with DeSantis’s theme that the problem with Trump’s authoritarian ambition was that it was all talk. “He said he was going to hold Hillary accountable,” he complained, “and he let her off the hook.”
DeSantis found a COVID-vaccine skeptic, Joseph Ladapo, and made him Florida’s surgeon general, then bashed Trump for Operation Warp Speed that sought to expedite the creation of the vaccines. He refused to condemn a cell of neo-Nazis operating out of Orlando, and lashed out at the press after his spokesperson suggested they were left-wing crisis actors. There was no right-wing sect so kooky that DeSantis wouldn’t tiptoe gingerly for fear of offending.
The traditional Republicans backing DeSantis justified these gestures of outreach and respect to the lunatic fringe as shrewd and necessary. DeSantis had to win “in a way that keeps Trump’s most passionate supporters behind him come that November,” wrote National Review’s Dan McLaughlin, calling it a “test of character.” Months later, he argued that trying to openly confront the “nationalist/populist ‘New Right’” would only “strengthen the hand within the party of not only the nationalist/populist Right in general, but its most irresponsible elements in particular.” Nikki Haley’s attempt to win without those irresponsible elements, he said, would split the party and bring likely defeat. But DeSantis had correctly recognized that “the populist faction is not going away, and the party cannot win or advance conservative policy without doing what American parties always do with significant factions: ensure them a place at the table.”
This is a remarkably frank acknowledgement that DeSantis’s strategy involved catering to and empowering right-wing factions that conservatives themselves considered dangerous, simply because the party could not win without them.
The irony of the strategy is that it ultimately undercut the main rationale of DeSantis’s campaign: that he, unlike Trump, could win and accomplish the things Trump and his followers wanted. Eventually, polls showed DeSantis performing worse against Biden than Trump. His plan to court Trump supporters by reducing their differences to electability wound up forfeiting it.
What remained from the effort was a profound concession to Trump’s revolutionary changes. The DeSantis campaign asked Trump’s base to select a more competent leader, and in return conceded every moral and philosophical objection to Trump any Republican still clung to. The request was rebuffed, but the concessions were pocketed.
