DeSantis campaign

In the salad days of early 2023, when Ron DeSantis was the clear insurgent candidate to wrest the GOP nomination from Donald Trump, the Florida governor boasted of his ability to rise above the chaos and office politics that had derailed the populist agenda under Trump’s watch. “In terms of my approach to leadership, I get personnel in the government who have the agenda of the people and share our agenda. You bring your own agenda in, you’re gone,” DeSantis said. “The way we run the government, I think, is no daily drama, focus on the big picture and put points on the board.” He has since dropped that line; it’s been too obviously overtaken by actual events.

Since she began speaking out against trans athletes competing in women’s sports, former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines has received her share of threats from the mob. Just this year, she was allegedly punched by a transgender protester in California. Now she finds herself in the sights of one of Trumpworld's most rabid advocates. Laura Loomer, a self-described investigative journalist and Trump supporter, accused the athlete of shilling for Ron DeSantis and posted her address to X, sparking a cat fight between the two women.   In the post, which has since been deleted, Loomer claimed that Gaines had been bought off by DeSantis. “In June 2023, Riley announced that she was endorsing DeSantis over Trump,” the post read.

With less than a year until the 2024 election, the Republican universe is coming together to seamlessly advise the White House transition of the GOP nominee — or is it? While publicly, groups such as the America First Policy Institute, the Heritage Foundation and Turning Point USA present a kumbaya vision, multiple Republicans working on transition projects tell Cockburn that rough seas are ahead, particularly as competition heats up for credit, attention and donors.Tensions between these groups boiled over in recent weeks. James Bacon, a former low-level Trump bureaucrat-turned senior advisor at Heritage, wrote — perhaps accidentally — to his AFPI counterparts, skewering them as a “Trojan horse by which the establishment can retake control of personnel.

Miami, Florida Just sixty days away from the Iowa Caucus, all but one of the Republican presidential candidates prepared themselves for the MSNBC-hosted third Republican primary debate in the majestic Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami. Consultants, donors and surrogates seemed excited to be there — as they are supposed to. But outside the center, there were no chants for biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, no hats with Ambassador Nikki Haley’s name, no fans fainting as Senator Tim Scott walked past them. A mile away from the center, you could start to see folks with Trump 2024 flags or “Florida is Trump Country” signs on street corners.

It sounds like Never Back Down, the PAC supporting Florida governor Ron DeSantis, is having a little too much fun at the Iowa State Fair. Politico reported Sunday that a group of Never Back Down officials got into a shouting match at a local bar with a Trump supporter who was sporting a "Back to Back Iowa Champ" hat. According to two witnesses, the fight was started by communications director Erin Perrine, who told the supporter: "You know you lost." "The resulting shouting match lasted several minutes," the outlet reported. "Multiple 'F'-bombs were dropped. At one point, a Trump supporter made a lewd comment to Perrine, a fourth person familiar with the events told Politico. No physical fight ever occurred.

Rumors began to swirl that the Ron DeSantis team was planning a major reboot last week following plummeting polls and financial woes. But the first ad to emerge from his circles since appears to suggest that the presidential hopeful is a neo-Nazi. Cockburn never would have guessed this was the campaign-saving pivot his team had planned.  On Sunday morning a staffer for the DeSantis campaign retweeted an ad from the Ron DeSantis Fancams Twitter account. https://twitter.com/ltthompso/status/1683126430534598656 It features a “doomer,” a crudely drawn young man who suffers from depression and a crippling cigarette addiction, watching reports of Trump’s vaccine rollout and undelivered border wall promises.

This week a new Morning Consult poll — a qualifier for the first Republican primary debate — shed new light on the effectiveness of the various campaign strategies employed by the 2024 primary candidates. Former president Donald Trump, unsurprisingly, leads the field significantly; 55 percent of expected GOP voters say they would vote for Trump if the primary or caucus were held in their state today. Florida governor Ron DeSantis is in second place, trailing Trump by a whopping thirty-five points. How did Trump manage so quickly to neuter his strongest challenger, who was adored by conservatives for his common-sense Covid policies and “war on woke” in Florida?

When The Simpsons’s evil billionaire C. Montgomery Burns heads for a checkup, the doctor informs him he has virtually every disease known to man, including some just discovered for the first time. The odd thing is that all these diseases are in “perfect balance,” which the doctor illustrates by trying to shove a bunch of fuzzy novelty germs through a tiny door all at once. When they’re all jammed together, none can actually make it through — an example of “Three Stooges syndrome.” Despite the doctor’s warning that even a slight breeze could upset this balance, Burns happily concludes that he is “indestructible.” The Republican Party had a serious bout of Three Stooges syndrome in 2016.

The Trump-DeSantis Twitter wars are raging on — and now some real celebrity is involved. Caitlyn Jenner, the transgender woman formerly known as Bruce, previously said in 2021 that she would support Donald Trump if he ran for president in 2024. The Olympic champion in the decathlon also said in an interview in April that the country needs an "alpha male" like Trump in the White House. The DeSantis camp drew the ire of Jenner and other LGBTQ+ Republicans with a new ad attacking Trump for various statements he made in support of Pride month and trans people using the bathrooms of their chosen gender.

I think it was the once-renowned critic Clement Greenberg who gratefully acknowledged that his job as a cultural commentator allowed him to conduct his education in public. I suppose we all do it, more or less furtively, though what prompts me to mention it now is the realization that I do not know the answer to any of the questions that have motivated this column. I write in the immediate aftermath of Ron DeSantis’s official announcement that, yes, he is running for the presidency of the United States in 2024. The announcement itself was no surprise — everyone has known DeSantis was running for months.

The Republican National Committee today confirmed the criteria for presidential candidates to qualify for their first primary debate, which will take place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Wednesday August 23.