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Donald J. Trump plumbed new depths of degradation in his savage overthrow of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a yearlong campaign of emasculation and humiliation that helped force one of the party’s rising stars to drop out of the presidential race after of just one fight and left him alone. pick up the pieces of his political future.
In front of huge audiences at rallies, Trump described DeSantis as a submissive crybaby, insisting that he had cried and begged “on his knees” for an endorsement in the 2018 Florida gubernatorial race.
In a series of sexually charged attacks, Trump suggested, without a shred of evidence, that DeSantis wore high heels, that he might be gay and that he might be a pedophile.
He promised that intense national scrutiny would leave DeSantis whining about “mommy.”
DeSantis avoided fighting back, which only inflicted more pain on his campaign. The governor had presented himself as one of the Republican Party’s fiercest political fighters, but he stood firm in the most important race of his life.
Now he is defeated and demoted. His exit from the race on Sunday was a major fall from grace after opening his campaign as the heir apparent of a Trumpified Republican Party. Rehabilitating that reputation while considering his next political move will require a lot of repair work with Republican donors and voters, thanks to Trump’s merciless parade of insults over 242 days of the campaign.
“I don’t care if he’s a Republican,” Trump said of his disparagement of DeSantis at a November meeting of the Republican Party in Florida, the governor’s home territory. “We hit him hard and now he’s like a wounded bird falling from the sky.”
But even more crushing was DeSantis’ response, or lack thereof.
After releasing a campaign video in 2022 that portrayed him as a political fighter sent from heaven, he seemed unwilling or unable to respond to Trump or attack. Even Trump advisers were surprised that DeSantis’ campaign wasn’t tougher on the former president on issues where he might be vulnerable to conservatives, such as abortion.
And the prickly nature of DeSantis’ personality, which could manifest itself in a strange mix of detachment, moodiness and facial tics, made an irresistible target for Trump, who seemed to enjoy bullying DeSantis as if he were filling in a freshman in a high school locker.
Still, DeSantis remains popular in his home state and beyond Florida is considered relatively favorably. As a presidential candidate, he needed to succeed where every Republican before him had failed: to alienate Trump’s loyal supporters from the former president without alienating them.
Trump has long trampled the boundaries of generally accepted political behavior, relentlessly pushing the racist lie about President Barack Obama and urging his supporters to lock up Hillary Clinton. But his campaign reached new levels of cruelty against a fellow Republican.
The missives were often led by Trump’s chief spokesman, Steven Cheung, who drew on his experience as a public relations agent for the Ultimate Fighting Championship to deliver brutal blows with the force of the sport’s suffocating guillotine hold.
In November, Cheung told The Wall Street Journal that in Iowa, DeSantis would face “unimaginable pain that he had never felt before in his life.”
In a press release, she questioned DeSantis’ masculinity and said he walked like “a 10-year-old girl who had just raided her mother’s closet and discovered heels for the first time.”
Cheung also called the Florida governor a “desperate eunuch,” questioned why DeSantis was “cheating” in front of the entire country (sexual slang that implies weakness in a man), and accused him of seeking “new things.” sugar daddies” to finance his campaign. He called Mr. DeSantis a “disloyal dog.”
DeSantis countered with a more traditional approach.
His campaign launched a “Trump Crash Tracker” in a daily email to the media that highlighted Trump’s mistakes along the way. He criticized Trump’s “juvenile insults” and said voters didn’t like them. (The explosion of laughter inside Trump rallies suggested otherwise.)
In the end, DeSantis tried to improve his game.
Responding to the accusations who wore lifts on his cowboy boots to look tallerDeSantis questioned Trump’s manhood.
“If Donald Trump can work up the guts to show up to the debate, I’ll put a boot on my head,” DeSantis said.
The line didn’t seem to land. DeSantis himself has admitted that, unlike Trump, he is “not an artist.”
At the same time, pro-Trump online influencers formed an army of trolls, posting content such as videos showing a man with DeSantis’ face getting kicked in the groin. By comparison, DeSantis’ online operation was woefully inept.
The different approaches arose, in part, from a fixation on DeSantis inside Trump headquarters, where animosity toward the governor was high.
Not only was Trump outraged by what he saw as a shocking lack of loyalty from DeSantis, but Trump’s campaign also includes former DeSantis campaign aides who had been fired or felt mistreated by the Florida governor, including Susie Wiles, one of the former president’s closest confidants. Many still had interests to hone.
“Bye, bye,” Wiles posted Sunday on social media about her former boss, who had tried to oust her from Republican politics.
DeSantis’ swift endorsement on Sunday may help heal some of those wounds. Hours later, Trump promised that he would retire the “DeSanctimonious” nickname, and his allies began posting messages welcoming DeSantis back into the Trump fold.
But aides said Trump and DeSantis had not yet spoken.
When asked if the two men could repair their relationship, Cheung did not speak.
“We’re focused on New Hampshire,” he said.
Ken Bensinger contributed reporting from Los Angeles.
