I'm Totally Here for the DeSantis Jokes—But Let's Not Forget the Vicious Cruelty He Imposed

This winter I mark 40 years of covering presidential campaigns, and I’ve seen all kinds of weird stuff, from that first day in 1984 — forced to watch also-ran California Sen. Alan Cranston jog around a Birmingham track to prove he wasn’t too old to be POTUS (he was 69) — to hanging out with Donald Trump supporters on the Wildwood boardwalk in 2020. But now I can authoritatively state I’ve seen the worst run for the White House of my lifetime.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — long a bête noire of this column for his neo-fascist policies in the Sunshine State, but ignored lately as his national campaign was clearly crashing and burning — stated the obvious on Sunday when he suspended his presidential bid. Pundits were quick to note that DeSantis — who’d raised in the ballpark of $150 million from his rich pals and spent almost all of it, with a lot on perks like private jet travel — received just 23,420 caucus votes in Iowa before his withdrawal, giving him the record for the worst dollar-per-vote ratio of all time.

Any notion that you don’t kick a man when he’s down felt wrong for DeSantis, who has practically changed Florida’s state motto to “The Cruelty Is The Point” during his five years as governor. For those on the left who truly despised the failed candidate, Sunday was a day for schadenfreude and a ton of jokes. One poster on Twitter/X said the governor who signed an after-six-weeks abortion ban in his home state should have been forced to carry his campaign to full term. In a fitting coda, the dramatic keep-fighting quote DeSantis tweeted and attributed to Winston Churchill turned out to be from a 1938 Budweiser ad.

There are so many examples of folks whose lives have been turned upside down by DeSantis...

I’m totally here for the DeSantis jokes, and I hope they don’t stop coming. But I also feel compelled to point out that the way that this small man in search of a balcony conducted himself these last couple of years is really no laughing matter. In the end, DeSantis’ presidential aspirations clung to two things: How much money he could raise from the wealthy, and how many points he could score by dunking on the dreams of the poor, the young, the different, or the struggling.

The modern political innovation of DeSantis — if it can be called that — was taking the kind of blustery rally-stage bravado that characterizes Trump and using his GOP majority in Tallahassee to turn that into all-too-real laws or initiatives. The New York Times Opinion writer Jane Coaston said it best on X/Twitter Sunday when she wrote that “DeSantis’ campaign was like ‘we’re the most online people alive and we’re going to performatively use the state to hurt people you don’t like, just tell me the group and I’ll go hurt them.’”

There are so many examples of folks whose lives have been turned upside down by DeSantis, including a lot of people who decided to leave the state as a new breed of political refugee. I think about Ronald Miller, a 58-year-old Black man who was rousted in his underwear, at gunpoint, by Miami-Dade cops who handcuffed and arrested him as part of a DeSantis “voter fraud” crackdown that mainly netted ineligible African Americans who’d actually been encouraged to register by confused bureaucrats.

How many Fox News primetime hits did DeSantis garner for signing the anti-transgender laws that forever altered the lives of Floridians like Hayden, a 25-year-old transgender woman who told a reporter about the stepped-up harassment and having to make a 14-hour round trip journey to North Carolina for gender-affirming medicine because of repressive new laws signed by the governor?

Did DeSantis edge even one inch closer to his White House aspirations when he dispatched minions to take over the state-run New College of Florida, to turn a small but acclaimed bastion of liberal arts and queer tolerance into a conservative campus keen on baseball recruiting — thus driving away talented students like Libby Harrity, who left behind a girlfriend and a scholarship for the winter chill of Massachusetts’ Hampshire College after their old school felt unwelcoming.

Was it really worth the headlines and the dude-bro backslaps on X/Twitter to trick some 35 migrants from Latin America who’d reached Texas — no, not Florida — onto an extravagantly taxpayer-funded charter jet with a fake promise of jobs in Boston, when they were actually dumped on a runway in Martha’s Vineyard in the dead of night? “The truth is I am worried,” one of the frightened migrants, named Yesica, told NPR. “It will be whatever God wishes, no?”

They are just four of the many thousands — the women who lost their reproductive rights, the teachers looking for jobs out of state, and so many others — whose dreams were trampled for the ridiculously failed ambition of one man. DeSantis’ 2024 presidential campaign will be remembered as nothing more than a punchline. But the American carnage he imposed on everyday people to make himself feel big will stain the red clay of the Florida peninsula for many years to come.