DeSantis Falls to Trump's Tolkienesque Shadow

How did it come to this?

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Flickr, Gage Skidmore.

The results of the Iowa Caucuses are in, and while predictable, they are nevertheless demoralizing. The last realistic chance to prevent the election no one wants has likely passed. I’ll get into your 2024 survival guide later, but for now, we have to call curtains on yet another promising figure in the Republican Party that Donald Trump has victimized.

I’ll begin by disclosing that I am a big Ron DeSantis fan. I hoped he would run for President since the second half of 2020. As the world was going mad with biomedical authoritarianism, Ron DeSantis stood, sometimes almost alone, against the tide, demonstrating how unscientific and devastating to the human condition the COVID-19 mandates were. When America’s cities burned from coast to coast in the worst wave of rioting since the 1960s, it was notable that cities in Florida were not among them. When Biden entered office, DeSantis stood as “Shadow President,” showing an alternative to his incompetence. As Biden presided over historic inflation and slow growth with his insistence on further COVID-19 mandates and stimulus, Florida’s economy was booming. As Biden presided over one disaster after another—at the border, in Afghanistan, in Ukraine—DeSantis demonstrated laudable disaster management skills.

DeSantis also showed his effectiveness as an executive with a rare political talent to deliver highly-desired wins for his core base and maintain strong support in the center. While he successfully attacked DEI and ESG in schools and the private sector, he also raised teacher pay. While he passed an election integrity law, he also expanded environmental protections in the Everglades. The list goes on.

The proof of this approach came in November 2022. As Trump-endorsed candidates crashed and burned nationwide, DeSantis won re-election by nearly 20 points, the biggest gubernatorial landslide in the state in 40 years, and the biggest overall Republican ticket victory in Florida since Reconstruction. Florida Democrats were so dismayed that they wondered if they had any future in the state.

In his victory speech, DeSantis looked ready. He was nearly 40 years younger than Biden, brimming with energy, and now undeniably successful. The prospect of sending this governor and former Navy veteran against the old and perennially unpopular incumbent looked like a rare instance of history making its desired direction clear. Donald Trump represented the biggest obstacle, but given his humiliating defeat on the same night, even he looked diminished and unable to resist history’s call.

So, how did it end so badly? There are two basic reasons.

The first reason is that DeSantis’ campaign has undeniably been badly handled. Given his record of competence and success beforehand, I was shocked, but maybe I shouldn’t have been.

Even before the campaign started, I noticed signs of weakness in DeSantis world. This was in the spring of 2023, during the lead-up to the passage of Florida’s Heartbeat Protection Act, which prohibits most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Given voters’ clear rejection of such onerous abortion restrictions both during and after the 2022 midterm, I tried warning DeSantis’ team in what small way I could that he was making a mistake. Florida had already passed a 15-week ban, which sits in the range of happy harmony the country generally wants with abortion. Six weeks is too soon. Many women don’t even know they’re pregnant at that point. DeSantis needed anti-Trump moderate independent voters in open primary states like New Hampshire to secure the nomination. Past that, he was giving Biden a cudgel to beat him with in the general election. I was far from alone in making these warnings, but they all fell on deaf ears.

Then came the campaign announcement on Twitter Spaces, which I thought was novel and cool at the time but proved glitchy. It was a critical lost opportunity to leave a first impression on a national audience and another sign of things to come.

By June, I realized the campaign was in big trouble, though I was far from alone. DeSantis talked about policy and Florida when he needed to go for the jugular and prove how Trump failed his base, particularly in 2020. Donald Trump didn’t build the wall. Donald Trump tweeted about law and order but retreated to his bunker during rioting in the nation’s capital. Most of all, Donald Trump empowered Anthony Fauci and turned him into a de facto dictator whose word was law in wide swathes of the country.

The truth is that Donald Trump is not “a danger to American democracy.” He can cast the illusion of strength because of his high-risk tolerance and total shamelessness (these are good traits in moderation). However, at his core, he is a very weak man who is desperate for approval, especially from his enemies.

Yet DeSantis attacked none of these political or character weaknesses early enough. He was policy-focused while failing to realize that this primary would never be about that. It would be about dominance and strength of character. It was more similar to a mixed martial arts fight than a debate contest. A decision victory over Donald Trump would never be possible. He had to be knocked out or submitted.

Rather than running on a national vision that would unite the party and anti-Trump independents around him as the clear alternative to the failed former leader (and later, Biden), DeSantis ran his campaign seemingly toward a narrow evangelical electorate in Iowa. Unsurprisingly, this campaign strategy did not take advantage of his unique position in the race as the only candidate capable of uniting moderate voters with voters who like President Trump’s policies but weren’t sure they wanted to see him again. As a result, he failed to consolidate the field and allowed donors and other voters to look elsewhere, resulting in the rise of Nikki Haley, who had no path of her own but who could ruin his.

His decision to ignore New Hampshire is puzzling and proves the point, given the state’s libertarian lean and the large amount of white college-educated voters there, voters who tend to appreciate his stance against COVID-19 mandates.

Instead, DeSantis banked everything on Iowa, hoping a win there would destroy Trump’s myth of invincibility and carry him through to New Hampshire. But after barely coming in second there, he is now in a terrible position. He appealed to too narrow an electorate to hope to undertake the task of defeating Trump in a primary, and a potential smashing in New Hampshire leaves him with few options going forward.

But while these were all unforced errors, there is a grimmer truth that reveals just how depraved the Republican Party has become. Ron DeSantis was simply the right guy at the wrong time.

DeSantis has every credential that a typical Republican nominee would want, which is why most Republican voters like him very much (in contrast to Nikki Haley). His campaign mistakes might not have been fatal in a normal election. Unfortunately for him, this is not a normal election, and his biggest problem was that the Republican base likes Donald Trump with a religious devotion. After the defeat in 2022, Republican voters started to waver, but the indictments changed the party’s mood and produced a rally-around-the-leader effect. Even if DeSantis had run an impeccable campaign, it might not have been enough, especially with conservative media like Fox News and an army of social media influencers in the tank for him for the sake of their revenues.

I have often thought about J.R.R. Tolkien’s tale of the Fall of Númenor these last few years. For the uninitiated, the island kingdom of Númenor was the most powerful civilization of men in Tolkien’s world. It was so powerful that even Sauron, at the height of his might, could not defeat it in war. Unfortunately, power corrupts, and as Númenor got more powerful, it fell into moral corruption. Eventually, the kingdom reached the point of no return, and its last ruler, in his madness and greed, decided to launch an expedition against the Valar, who are, for all practical purposes, the terrestrial gods of Tolkien’s world. Unsurprisingly, the expedition met disaster, and in retaliation, the creator of the world, Eru Ilúvatar, sank Númenor beneath the waves.

While the tale rings true in many areas of contemporary life, it rings truest in the Republican Party. While the Republican Party has often felt like it lacked a reason to exist since the Reagan era (one of the reasons why it has only won the national popular vote once since 1992), the Trump era has corrupted it into a low-class, low-intelligence personality cult. The Tolkienesque “Shadow” over it is now so strong that the laws of the political universe seem to mandate that it sinks beneath a different kind of wave, and that is precisely the likeliest outcome this November.

Unfortunately, this outcome would also lead to a Democratic trifecta, one very much under the influence of the “woke” far left among its ranks. A trifecta of this sort would prove very damaging to the country, but as Cicero might say, such is the “deep pain of moral corruption.”

2022 demonstrated that Trump’s removal from public life is the required first step to restore American politics to sanity. With Trump’s exile to St. Helena, a new center might be able to form against the excesses of the far left in the dark days of the trifecta, just as the Kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor were able to rise in the wake of Númenor’s fall.

Will Ron DeSantis be one of the leaders of that new center, a rough equivalent to Tolkien’s character of Elendil, as he was poised to be before Republican primary voters failed to learn the lesson in time? Or is it curtains for Ron DeSantis as a presidential contender going forward?

For now, no one can know for certain. DeSantis is still young and has some years left as the Governor of Florida. Reagan lost in 1976, after all. I will always be grateful to him for sometimes single-handedly pulling America out of COVID-19 madness. There are many millions more like me.

But those questions are for the future. Unfortunately, this year, Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee, to the great shame and detriment of the party and country.

Jordan Carpenter received his BA in Political Science from Fordham University in 2011, with coursework in international law, political theory, and political ethics. He was Assistant to the President at New York Civic, under Henry Stern, from 2012 to 2017 and is currently a script writer for The Military Show on YouTube.