Steer Clear of the DeSantis Lane, Don!

The New Center: A Wednesday Newsletter From Sohrab Ahmari

For much of 2022 and early 2023, the right-wing commentariat was abuzz with anticipation for Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid. For a certain type of professional conservative, the Florida governor was the figure destined to advance “Trumpism without Trump”: Brash and willing to take the fight to the establishment like the 45^th president, DeSantis was slick and disciplined (where Trump was impulsive and messy).

Young right-wing intellectuals swooned as he slapped Disney over wokeness, even as he also largely eschewed free trade, entitlements, and foreign interventionism—the issues that had animated the original Trumpism with Trump. Judged by retweets and favorable write-ups at The Daily Wire, the RDS campaign-in-formation was going swimmingly. But then the effort collapsed just as soon as it was formally launched. As I summed up the failure for The New Statesman when he finally withdrew from the GOP primary, the DeSantis campaign had been “too online, too rigid, too weird”—weaknesses skillfully exploited by Team Trump at the time.

Now, I fear, just when Democrats have put forward a plausibly left-populist vice-presidential nominee in the form of Tim Walz, the Trump campaign is drifting into the too-online lane that doomed DeSantis in the primary.