Nate Hochman

Ron DeSantis didn’t just drop out of the 2024 presidential race this Sunday — he also endorsed former president Donald Trump, the opponent who had bested him in Iowa. That pragmatic act made sense for him in terms of self-preservation, but was sure to frustrate some of his early supporters and “influencers,” who had been engaged in a lengthy online war with Trumpworld for months. Where will they turn now that the GOP primary is a two-horse race? "My view on every election has always been to vote for the best available candidate,” ex-Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis told The Spectator. Now that DeSantis is out, she is not sure if that candidate will be on the Republican ticket. “At this point, I am considering third-party options, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

I wonder if Ron DeSantis’s favorite mot these days is from Mark Twain: “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Maybe so. But let’s face it, the reports are many and deafening.  They are also damaging. Consider, to take one recent example, the report, conveyed by Semafor, on the DeSantis Meme Team that works under the rubric of “War Room Creative Ideas” on the encrypted message app Signal.   Among the “creative ideas” were videos, insinuated anonymously onto Twitter (as it then was), that smeared Donald Trump by including a fascist symbol — get it? Another attacked Trump for pro-LGBT rights comments. Both were instantly attacked by the Trump base.