Ron DeSantis

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      Ron DeSantis failed because Trump’s base wants the man himself, not an imitation | Andrew Gawthorpe

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      So long, Ron. After a poor showing in the Iowa caucuses, Ron DeSantis has dropped out of the Republican presidential primary and endorsed Donald Trump. This outcome has looked inevitable ever since the campaign’s botched launch announcement on Twitter, but it was surprising how quickly and totally DeSantis surrendered after losing just a single contest. Many people had heralded DeSantis as the man who could take down Trump, but it was not to be. His campaign began with a whimper – then ended with one too.The political flaws of DeSantis and his campaign have been so numerous that it’s amazing the Florida governor ever generated so much buzz. He looked politically impressive operating in the safely conservative state of Florida, but he was completely unprepared for the intensity of competitive national politics. He lacked the empathy and personal warmth necessary to connect with voters and donors alike. He proved a poor administrator. He tried to run on his management of the Covid-19 pandemic when voters had moved on. Worst of all, he could offer no plausible reason why Trump voters should opt for him rather than for the real thing.Despite all of this, DeSantis found huge success among a certain class of Republican pundits and donors. At one point he was hailed by the Murdoch press as “DeFuture”, and conservative writers fell over one another to praise him as the Trump who “gets things done”. When someone so flawed has so many boosters, it’s worth asking about the motivation of the boosters.In this case, the DeSantis campaign was promoted by a set of conservative elites who saw the opportunity for a kind of “Trumpism without Trump”. DeSantis drew support from people who were happy with the broad direction of the Republican party under Trump, but had doubts about the former president’s competence. Since his victory in 2016, Trump has been a serial loser of elections who invests little time in trying to implement policies, preferring to focus instead on the melodrama of his own political and legal struggles. DeSantis, by contrast, exudes the kind of grim, thuggish determination of Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister whose policies have made him a hero of the American nationalist right.As an electoral proposition, this vision was flawed from the get-go. The idea of “Trumpism without Trump” was to take Maga content and present it in some more palatable form. But this ignores the fact that for many grassroots Republicans, Trump’s form is his content. They support him not because of the concrete policies he will implement but because of who he is and what he represents. The unhinged style of communication, the self-pitying beefs with “the establishment”, the unfiltered racism and bigotry – these are the essence of Trumpism, not paraphernalia which can be discarded.For decades, Republican elites have believed they could channel and control the populism and bigotry of their party’s base. A video from the 2008 election which periodically goes viral of John McCain defending Barack Obama in the face of a racist question from a voter, represents the exception in this history rather than the norm. As a rule, Republican donors and politicians have winked at or actively encouraged the worst instincts of their base, believing they could be harnessed and ridden to victory. The DeSantis candidacy was just the latest example of this. But now the base is in the saddle, and what it wants is Trumpism red in tooth and claw – not some bloodless imitation.However doomed it was at the polls, there might have been some redemptive quality in the DeSantis project if it had offered a challenge to the yawning ethical chasm at the heart of the Republican party. But rather than denouncing the cruelty towards immigrants, women and trans people that pervades the modern conservative movement, DeSantis merely promised to pursue it with more ruthless efficiency. He showed indifference to the suffering of the people who got in his way, such as the migrants he transported to Martha’s Vineyard and then abandoned for the purposes of a political stunt. The experience made them feel, one said, “like cattle” – yet DeSantis defends the action to this day.The fact that supporters of the DeSantis project were not actually trying to challenge the core premises and practices of Trumpism will make it easier for them to take the next step: reverting to support for Trump. After he dropped out, DeSantis endorsed Trump with unseemly speed and it may take some of his backers a little longer to come around. But just as in 2016, Republican politicians and media figures will inevitably follow their base and resume backing the former president, even as he engages in Hitlerian rhetoric about migrants “poisoning the blood” of America and promises to be a dictator “on day one”.As John McCain showed in 2008, there is an alternative course available to former DeSantis backers, if they wanted to take it. They could say publicly what many of them know privately – that while Trump poses a unique danger to the republic, Joe Biden is a decent, patriotic man with whom they happen to have some policy disagreements. They could lament the grip that a racist and authoritarian figure has on such a large segment of their party, and even try to challenge it. But they will not, because that’s never what the DeSantis candidacy was really about it. Instead, they’ll get in line behind Trump – and march themselves and everyone else closer and closer to disaster.
      Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States at Leiden University and the creator of America Explained, a podcast and newsletter More

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      Biden campaign calls for investigation of New Hampshire robocalls impersonating US president – as it happened

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      Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has called on New Hampshire authorities to investigate a spate of robocalls to voters in which a voice that sounds like the president encourages them not to participate in Tuesday’s primary.Biden’s name is not appearing on the primary ballot, since Democrats have decided to hold their first nominating contest in South Carolina next month. But some in the party are encouraging their voters to write in the president’s name, both as a show of support and to pressure the Democratic National Committee to give New Hampshire, which has historically been the second state to vote, a more prominent role in the nominating process.In a statement, Biden-Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said:
      This matter has already been referred to the New Hampshire Attorney General, and the campaign is actively discussing additional actions to take immediately. Spreading disinformation to suppress voting and deliberately undermine free and fair elections will not stand, and fighting back against any attempt to undermine our democracy will continue to be a top priority for this campaign.
      Nikki Haley made the most of the hours remaining before tomorrow’s primary in New Hampshire, crisscrossing the Granite state alongside governor Chris Sununu in a bid to lure votes away from Donald Trump. But polls continue to show the former president with a big lead, underscoring the difficulty Haley will have in overcoming his status as the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.Trump is expected in New Hampshire later today, after appearing this morning in a New York City courtroom for a hearing in author E Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against him, where he was set to testify. The session was unexpectedly adjourned after a juror felt ill, and one of Trump’s lawyers was exposed to Covid-19.Here’s what else happened today:
      Kamala Harris assailed Trump for his role in overturning Roe v Wade on the 51st anniversary of the supreme court decision that allowed abortion access nationwide.
      Nikki Haley has avoided talking much about abortion, even though she has signalled she would be fine with restricting the procedure federally. Some voters who support abortion rights are fine with that.
      Judge Judy delivered her verdict on the presidential race by stumping for Haley in New Hampshire.
      Elise Stefanik, who is seen as potential running mate for Trump, said the adjournment of his defamation trial was “blatant election interference”. In reality, it was requested by the former president’s legal team.
      Someone is making robocalls to New Hampshire voters that sound like Joe Biden and encourage them not to vote in Tuesday’s primary, prompting the president’s re-election campaign to call for an investigation.
      As she blitzes the state, Nikki Haley talks about keeping taxes low, the military strong and the border secure. One issue she does not mention: abortion.On the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade, Joe Biden and Democrats across the country are railing against Republicans, calling them “anti-abortion extremists” who would impose a federal ban on the procedure if they win back power this fall.Haley calls herself “pro-life” but has promised to seek consensus as president. In Iowa, where evangelical Christians dominate the caucuses, Haley signaled her willingness, if elected, to sign any restrictions that reached her desk.But in comparatively moderate New Hampshire, she has mostly shut down inquiries about what kind of federal limit she would support, insisting that any legislation is purely theoretical without 60 votes in the Senate – as she told one curious onlooker at a stop in Epping on Sunday.Across the state, several pro-choice independent voters said the risk of a Trump presidency worried them more than Haley’s views on abortion.“I’ve long ago accepted that I can’t agree with a candidate on everything,” said Carole Alfano, an independent who met Haley at the campaign stop in the town of Epping. “We’ll part ways on that.”Alfano backed Biden in 2020, but plans to support Haley in Tuesday’s primary.In Derry, Marie Mulroy is ecstatic about the prospect of a Haley nomination even though she believes abortion should remain legal.“We’ll agree to disagree on that,” she said.Can Nikki Haley pull a shock win in New Hampshire out of the bag?She’s the last candidate standing against Donald Trump, after Florida governor Ron DeSantis exited the race and endorsed the former president on Sunday. Host of the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast Jonathan Freedland headed out on the campaign trail in the Granite state to find out the answer:Joe Biden’s re-election campaign marked Roe v Wade’s 51st anniversary by debuting an advertisement in which Texas obstetrician-gynecologist Austin Dennard discusses how she had to leave the state to get an abortion after finding out that her fetus would not survive.Who’s to blame? Donald Trump, as Dennard makes clear. Expect to see tons of this sort of messaging coming from the campaigns of the president and other Democrats over the coming months:On the 51st anniversary of the supreme court’s Roe v Wade decision, Kamala Harris attacked Donald Trump for his role in appointing justices who overturned the precedent and allowed states to ban abortion.The vice-president spoke during a visit today to Wisconsin, a battleground state that will be crucial to deciding the outcome of the November election. Democrats plan to campaign on restoring access to abortion, after the 2022 decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization that curtailed abortion access in many states.Harris did not hold back from assailing the former president, citing his comments that he was “proud” of his role in getting three justices confirmed to the court, all of whom voted to overturn Roe. Here’s what she had to say:Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has called on New Hampshire authorities to investigate a spate of robocalls to voters in which a voice that sounds like the president encourages them not to participate in Tuesday’s primary.Biden’s name is not appearing on the primary ballot, since Democrats have decided to hold their first nominating contest in South Carolina next month. But some in the party are encouraging their voters to write in the president’s name, both as a show of support and to pressure the Democratic National Committee to give New Hampshire, which has historically been the second state to vote, a more prominent role in the nominating process.In a statement, Biden-Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said:
      This matter has already been referred to the New Hampshire Attorney General, and the campaign is actively discussing additional actions to take immediately. Spreading disinformation to suppress voting and deliberately undermine free and fair elections will not stand, and fighting back against any attempt to undermine our democracy will continue to be a top priority for this campaign.
      David Scanlan, the New Hampshire secretary of state, predicted Republican voter participation in the primaries will reach 322,000, eclipsing 2016’s total, when Republicans set a record of 287,652 votes. In 2020, it was Democrats who saw record turnout for their competitive primary, with 300,368 votes cast.Before a deadline in October, as many as 4,000 registered Democrats changed their party affiliation to “undeclared,” suggesting some plan to vote in the Republican primary.A Monmouth University Poll-Washington Post poll released today found that the number of registered New Hampshire independents who plan to vote in the Republican primary increased from 52% in November to 63%.More than a third of these voters said they voted for Biden in 2020, suggesting there could be a “measurable influx of Democratic-leaning independents” who will participate in Tuesday’s primary.In a conversation on Friday, Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire GOP chairman and prominent Trump opponent, said he did not see evidence that Haley had “lit a spark” among these voters in the way that might foretell “some kind of surge coming her way.”“People turn out when they are inspired, or they’re pissed off,” said Cullen, who had seen Haley on the campaign trail four times. “What we’re seeing is that people are not inspired, and they’re apathetic. And that means that they don’t show up.”New Hampshire’s secretary of state David Scanlan is predicting record turnout in the Republican primary, while governor Chris Sununu is joking that he is cashing in all of his political capital to ensure balmy weather for voters headed to the polls on Tuesday.That would be a stark contrast from Iowa, where arctic temperatures were blamed for the low turnout last week. Recent polling has shown Trump with a double digit lead in the state. But New Hampshire has a record of unpredictability, thanks to the large number of voters who proudly belong to neither party. They are not a monolith, but analysts believe that the more of them who choose to vote in the Republican primary, the better for Haley.“The only big X factor I see: how big is turnout?” said Dante Scala, a professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the University of New Hampshire.According to Scala, Haley is attempting something novel in New Hampshire. Republican presidential candidates who have pulled off wins in New Hampshire – such as John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 – managed to appeal to the state’s independents while still pulling in a sizable chunk of the party faithful. (Independents, called “undeclared” voters in New Hampshire, can vote in either party’s primary.)This year, Trump has a lock on Republican base voters. To win, or even to come within striking distance of Trump, Scala said Haley will need to run up the score with these independent voters, some of whom could choose to vote in the sleepy Democratic primary or not at all if they feel the contest is a foregone conclusion.Scala said Haley’s test is whether she “inspired enough people to show up, who don’t normally show up, to get a turnout big enough that it swamps the Trump people and your mainstream Republican in New Hampshire.”Joe Biden spoke to UK prime minister Rishi Sunak on Monday about Gaza, Ukraine, and the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, White House spokesperson John Kirby said, AFP reported.From White House correspondent for AFP Danny Kemp:Judy Sheindlin, widely known as Judge Judy, told CNN on Monday that she would endorse Nikki Haley if she “were a frog”.During the interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Judge Judy was asked if the reason she endorsed Haley was because Haley is a woman.“No, I would support her if she were a frog,” said the ever-colorful Sheindlin.“She’s capable. She’s poised,” Sheindlin added.Sheindlin said that neither Trump nor Biden have the “intellectual gravitas” to be US president.According to Sheindlin, she has only endorsed one presidential candidate before –the former New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, during the 2020 presidential election.Sheindlin has campaigned for Haley ahead of the highly watched New Hampshire primary on Tuesday.Nikki Haley is making the most of the hours remaining before tomorrow’s primary in New Hampshire, crisscrossing the Granite state alongside governor Chris Sununu in a bid to lure votes away from Donald Trump. But polls continue to show the former president with a big lead, underscoring the difficulty Haley will have in overcoming his status as the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. Trump is expected in New Hampshire later today, after appearing this morning in a New York City courtroom for a hearing in author E Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against him, where he was set to testify. The session was abruptly adjourned after a juror felt ill, and one of Trump’s lawyers was exposed to Covid-19.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      Judge Judy delivered her verdict on the presidential race by stumping for Haley in New Hampshire.
      Elise Stefanik, who is seen as potential running mate for Trump, said the adjournment of his defamation trial was “blatant election interference”. In reality, it was requested by the former president’s legal team.
      Someone is reportedly making robocalls to New Hampshire voters that sound like Joe Biden and encourage them not to vote in Tuesday’s primary. Supporters of a campaign to write in his name – he is not appearing on the ballot, in line with Democratic National Committee rules – say the calls are meant to undermine them.
      Donald Trump is clearly smarting from the ongoing defamation lawsuit against him by author E Jean Carroll, and a jury’s verdict last year that he sexually abused her. As the Guardian’s Sam Levine reports, his campaign yesterday barred a NBC News reporter who had pressed his ally Elise Stefanik for her thoughts on the verdict:Donald Trump’s presidential campaign reportedly blocked an NBC News journalist from covering campaign events in New Hampshire on Sunday.Sunday’s exclusion of NBC News correspondent Vaughn Hillyard came when he was set to serve as a pool reporter. Instead of having a pack of reporters follow a candidate everywhere, campaigns will often allow television, print, and radio news organizations to send a single pool reporter to travel with them – and those reporters in turn then send a readout to other news outlets.But on Sunday, Hillyard wrote in an email to the pool: “Your pooler was told that if he was the designated pooler by NBC News that the pool would be cut off for the day.”The email, which was subsequently published by several news organizations, added: “After affirming to the campaign that your pooler would attend the events, NBC News was informed at about 2.20pm that the pool would not be allowed to travel with Trump today.”Hillyard a day earlier had pressed New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik – said to be a potential Trump running mate – on whether she believed the ex-president had sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll.NBC News and Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, did not immediately return a request for comment.You don’t have to be Joe Biden for someone to make a robot of your likeness. As the Guardian’s Dan Milmo reports, Democratic congressman and presidential candidate Dean Phillips has his own AI impersonator:OpenAI has removed the account of the developer behind an artificial intelligence-powered bot impersonating the US presidential candidate Dean Phillips, saying it violated company policy.Phillips, who is challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic party candidacy, was impersonated by a ChatGPT-powered bot on the dean.bot site.The bot was backed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Matt Krisiloff and Jed Somers, who have started a Super Pac – a body that funds and supports political candidates – named We Deserve Better, supporting Phillips.San Francisco-based OpenAI said it had removed a developer account that violated its policies on political campaigning and impersonation.“We recently removed a developer account that was knowingly violating our API usage policies which disallow political campaigning, or impersonating an individual without consent,” said the company.The Phillips bot, created by AI firm Delphi, is now disabled. Delphi has been contacted for comment.A factor working against Nikki Haley in her quest to win the New Hampshire Republican primary is Donald Trump’s resounding victory in last week’s Iowa caucus.His triumph in the first state to vote in the GOP’s nomination process confirmed his status as the frontrunner for the nomination. But election turnout was low in the Hawkeye state, a fact Haley was keen to remind voters of in New Hampshire:Nikki Haley is spending the final moments before New Hampshire’s make-or-break primary getting out the vote with the state’s popular Republican governor, Chris Sununu by her side.“This is it. Twenty-four hours to go,” Sununu told the crowd at a packed, dimly lit veteran’s hall in Franklin. “All the momentum is at Nikki Haley’s back.”He told the voters not to pay any mind to the polls – unless it’s the ones showing Haley trouncing Joe Biden in a general election – and reminded them of their fiercely guarded reputation as the state that delivers political upsets.“We always buck the trend in New Hampshire,” he said. “It’s going to start tomorrow.”Haley reminded voters of the stakes of tomorrow’s primary – not that they needed any reminding, since some say they’ve received upwards of 10 campaign mailers a day in recent weeks, in addition to the political ads flooding the airwaves.“Don’t complain about what happens in a general election if you don’t play in this primary tomorrow,” she charged. “It matters.” More

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      How Winston Churchill became a mascot for anti-woke warriors | Zoe Williams

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      ‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts,” Ron DeSantis said, as he pulled out of the race to lead the Republican party. It was a strange way to announce that what counts – the continuing bit – is the thing you don’t have. Also, it is quite contestable, for such a short statement; failure isn’t necessarily fatal, but it does depend on what you have failed at. Still, what set most pedants afire wasn’t the substance but the attribution: DeSantis said it was Winston Churchill; the International Churchill Society disagreed. Meh, let’s not split hairs. It is a sort of obvious notion, made of words, so it is surely the kind of thing Churchill would have said, had he said it.This is my favourite kind of Churchill-eering, where politicians summon his ghost simply by adopting similar rhetoric. Penny Mordaunt’s fabulous “Stand up and fight! Stand up and fight!” before going on to add, “Never forget those who went before us and remember that without a Churchill, you can’t have a Zelenskiy” during her speech to last year’s Tory conference was a classic of the genre: a pitch-perfect throwback to “We shall fight on the beaches”, having first removed the beaches, the landing grounds, the fields, the streets, the hills, any obvious enemy, any clear sense of what was being defended and any endgame. Churchill here stands in as an all-purpose fighty-man, and as such wouldn’t make much of a cultural export, since everyone’s history has those.It took Boris Johnson to repackage Churchill for an international audience, not so much with his book, The Churchill Factor, as in his strategically idiotic attack on Barack Obama in 2016. He was mayor of London then, when the most he could screw up was planning on the Vauxhall gyratory which, to be fair, quickly cohered as a literal and figurative shrine to the emptiness of late capitalism, and is probably the most coherent thing he ever did. But in his downtime, he wrote a column for the Sun, enraged that Obama had moved a bust of Churchill out of the Oval Office (a full seven years previously), contending that the “part-Kenyan president” was motivated by anti-colonialism, “ancestral dislike” of the British empire. To follow the logic, Johnson, having German heritage, would also have reason to dislike Churchill, but he is not doing logic, he is focusing on Obama’s race, which I feel Obama should have met with unending hellfire, rather than a mild: “No, we just moved Churchill to a different corridor.”Too late to worry about that now: Churchill, in Johnson’s new frame, stood not only for nostalgia, a comforting world order with the posh at the top, but also for white supremacy and colonial brutality as an essential part of that past. Winston was now a mascot for the anti-woke warriors, the embodiment of their core principles: the past is better than the present; the world makes more sense with the posh at the top, just listen to their lovely cadence; the dicey bits – racist exploitation and carnage – are expiated by nostalgia (it was all a long time ago) and implicitly celebrated by it (weren’t things better then?), and anyone who disagrees hates their country.It makes no sense as an export, least of all to the US, which had made its feelings plain about the yoke of the British empire 99 years before Churchill was born. It doesn’t even make much sense as a British narrative, which had previously been happy to dial down Churchill’s imperialism, concentrating on its more nuanced expressions, and use him mainly as the totem of Britain’s successful fight against fascism. In Johnson’s revision, Churchill the Coloniser is as valorised as Churchill the anti-Nazi. Its nonsensical nature is why it’s the perfect cultural export: stripped of all meaning, just some loud, posh vibes, caricatured to the point where you can’t remember what the original looks like, political rhetoric’s answer to Saltburn.Loth as I am to get into combat about who knows Churchill the best, between me, Johnson and DeSantis, we all know this, right? He was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid; he would have hated this. He would be turning in his grave. More

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      Trump holds wide lead over Nikki Haley in New Hampshire, polls show

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      The ignominious end of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign is unlikely to boost Donald Trump’s last challenger, Nikki Haley, to the Republican nomination , according to two New Hampshire polls released on the eve of the primary in the north-eastern state.DeSantis also endured a round of scathing critiques of his campaign which started off being seen as a major source of opposition to Trump. But his White House bid never fully took off and fizzled into failure and a major blow to the rightwing Florida governor’s political reputation.In a poll released on Sunday, the day the hard-right Florida governor contradicted his own Super Pac, Never Back Down, and backed down, NBC News, the Boston Globe and Suffolk University put Trump 19 points clear of Haley, at 55% to 36% support.Ending his campaign, DeSantis looked past months of personal attacks from Trump to offer the twice-impeached, 91-times criminally charged former president – whose lie about a stolen 2020 election DeSantis has disowned – his endorsement to face Joe Biden.On Monday, the Washington Post and Monmouth University put Trump at 52% support in New Hampshire, to 34% for Haley.That represented a near-doubling of support for the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador since November. But, the Post said, that was primarily a result of the withdrawal of Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who campaigned as an anti-Trump candidate.DeSantis had 8% support in the Post-Monmouth poll, which was carried out before he ended his campaign.“If DeSantis’s supporters in the poll are allocated based on their second choice,” the Post said, “Trump’s support rises by four points while Haley’s increases by two.”On Sunday, Haley staged a rally in New Hampshire with Judy Sheindlin, better known to millions of Americans as Judge Judy, a former Manhattan family court judge made famous by a small claims, arbitration-based TV show.“What a crowd, Exeter!” she said. “The energy on the ground is electric, and it’s clear Granite Staters are ready to make a difference on Tuesday! An extra special thanks to America’s favorite judge, Judge Judy Sheindlin, for joining us! She gets it: this country needs no drama, no chaos, no nonsense – just results!”But despite such determined boosterism, polling results undeniably show Haley well adrift of Trump in New Hampshire and even further behind in South Carolina, her home state which next month will be the third to vote.According to the polling site FiveThirtyEight.com, Trump leads Haley by 61% to 25% in the southern state.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “I wish I had a dollar for every Republican who’s told me over the last three years, ‘We’ve learned our lesson. No way will Trump be our nominee again.’”Speaking to CNN, Sabato added: “If [Haley] loses on Tuesday, it almost certainly marks the end of her run. She may continue through her home state of South Carolina though I think she’d be hesitant to do it because she wouldn’t want to lose her home state. That’s really difficult to explain to people.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“But for all practical purposes, once DeSantis left and once the other candidates were knocked out of the race, it was Trump’s to lose and Trump has to lose significantly and he’s not going to lose it.”DeSantis exited the race with a statement containing both a Churchill quote it turned out Churchill never said and his endorsement of Trump.Sabato was asked about DeSantis’s decision to back Trump after, only last week, attacking Republicans he said had chosen to “kiss the ring” and endorse the former president.“I guess he saw some good examples of ring kissing and decided to imitate it,” Sabato said.“Look, who knows what was going through his mind other than the fact that he certainly wants to run the next time. Now, whether he’ll be credible as a candidate after this disastrous run? Remember, he was supposed to be Trump’s main challenger and most of the establishment in the Republican party was betting on him. And his campaign crashed and burned.“This was really a disgraceful enterprise in so many different ways. But in [DeSantis’s] mind, at least right now, as he’s coming to terms with the the demise of his dream, he’s thinking about running in 2028. Well, being associated with Nikki Haley is not going to help you, because this party has already become the Donald Trump party or the Maga party and it will be in all likelihood even more so as the years go on.” More

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      ‘May the best woman win’: Haley reacts as DeSantis ends presidential campaign – video

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      Ron DeSantis has ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and endorsed Donald Trump. The Florida governor’s withdrawal leaves Nikki Haley as the last remaining challenger to Trump for the party’s nomination. ‘He’s been a good governor and I wish him well,’ Haley said of DeSantis at a campaign event on Sunday. ‘Having said that, it’s now one fella and one lady left.’ Trump set aside months of criticism of DeSantis and welcomed his onetime rival as his newest supporter More

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      DeSantis drops out, Trump rallies and Haley brings out Judge Judy – podcast

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      Two days before voters in New Hampshire were due to head to the polls, Ron DeSantis announced he was suspending his campaign to become the presidential nominee for the Republican party.
      Donald Trump had already focused his attack lines on his remaining opponent, Nikki Haley, but can she pull a shock win out of the bag? Jonathan Freedland heads out on the campaign trail, talking to voters along the way

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Ron DeSantis put nearly all his eggs in the basket of a ‘war on woke’

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      It began in a glitch-filled disaster on Twitter. It ended with a misattributed quotation on X. Just like Elon Musk’s social media platform, efforts to rebrand Ron DeSantis’s US presidential election campaign could not mask its fundamental flaws.When in May the Florida governor announced his run during a chat with Musk on Twitter Spaces, the platform’s audio streaming feature, there were technical breakdowns that drew comparisons with one of Musk’s space rockets blowing up on the launchpad.Eight months, dozens of staff departures, tens of millions of dollars and one crushing defeat in Iowa later, DeSantis announced he was dropping out in a video posted on the renamed X that quoted Winston Churchill as saying: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal – it is the courage to continue that counts.” According to the International Churchill Society, the British wartime prime minister never said that.Two days before the New Hampshire primary election, DeSantis’s humiliation was complete. “This is probably the biggest collapse of a presidential campaign in modern American history, if not all American history,” David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida, told the MSNBC network on Sunday. “Ron DeSantis had everything going for him.”A year ago, DeSantis had stormed to re-election as governor of Florida by nearly 20 percentage points in what not so long ago was a swing state. He was beating Donald Trump in some opinion polls. He was drawing attention, donor money and headlines such as “DeFuture” in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post newspaper.The argument seemed compelling: DeSantis could offer the former president’s Maga (“Make America great again”) politics in purer, perfected form, unencumbered by Trump’s age, chaos or court cases. Some said he was therefore more dangerous than Trump. Comedian Trevor Noah suggested that, if Trump was the original Terminator, DeSantis was the T-1000, a smarter and slicker upgrade.DeSantis was billed as Trump without the baggage. He turned out to be Trump without the votes.The governor made a series of bad gambles. He bet big on May and Twitter Spaces as the right time and place to start. He bet big on a moral crusade against wokeness. He bet big on outsourcing central parts of his campaign to a Super Pac (whose boss spent significant time during the last days in Iowa working on a jigsaw puzzle). He bet big on Trump’s candidacy imploding under legal pressures. He bet big on the Iowa caucuses. None of them paid off.Longtime political observers in Florida had doubts from the start. They knew that DeSantis had conquered the heavily populated Sunshine state with heavy TV advertising and an unusually weak Democratic opponent. They suspected that the retail politics of Iowa – shaking hands, kissing babies, holding long conversations in diners about ethanol – would expose his lack of people skills. They were right.Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican operative and cofounder of the Lincoln Project, says: “This guy was politically overpriced stock from the very beginning. He represented Diet Trump but no Trump voter wants the low sugar, low fat, no caffeine version of Trump. They want the real thing.”But while much has been written about DeSantis’s joyless, low charisma campaign, this was a failure not only of style but of substance. The governor ran to the right of Trump on many issues and put nearly all his eggs in the basket of a “war on woke”.His timing was off. Culture war issues had been all the rage during the coronavirus pandemic – masks, vaccines, school closures – then morphed into a parents’ rights movement around book bans, critical race theory and transgender children’s access to bathrooms and sports. If it worked for Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, why not DeSantis in the US?But by the time the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary came around, the pandemic had faded and masks were rarely seen. DeSantis’s accusations that Trump palled around with Dr Anthony Fauci and forced national lockdowns, while Florida stayed open had lost their resonance.The limitations of anti-wokeness were also exposed. Groups such as Moms for Liberty, which aim to keep race and LGBTQ issues out of school curricular, underperformed in last year’s elections in states such as Virginia, where Youngkin seemed to have lost his touch.Polls show that DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban is unpopular in Florida and nationwide. His actions against the Walt Disney Co after the company spoke out against Florida legislation that limited discussion of gender and sexuality in classrooms went down badly among pro-business Republicans.Aware of such trends, Trump is trying to be vague on abortion and talk less about culture war issues these days. At a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire on Saturday, it took him an hour and 15 minutes to promise a crackdown on schools “pushing” critical race theory and transgender content as well as vaccine mandates. The crowd cheered heartily, suggesting that these topics have not lost all their potency, but Trump quickly moved on.Wilson comments: “Trump may not be smart, but he’s got a kind of feral cunning and he recognises that the culture war stuff has run out too far. That’s why he said, oh, you have to have a few exceptions [for abortion].“A guy like DeSantis was on the very bleeding edge of six-week abortion bans and the most punitive approaches to all the culture war things – book banning and everything else – and he thought that was going to get him over the finish line. But when Trump is in the race, he still could never put it together.DeSantis is still just 45 and aware that other candidates – Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden included – have lost primaries only to try again and win the presidency. He recently claimed that Trump voters in Iowa told him they will back him in four years’ time, telling reporters: “They were coming up to me saying: ‘We want you in 2028, we love you, man.”The timing of his withdrawal and endorsement of Trump, which frees the former’s president voters to back him against Haley in New Hampshire in South Carolina, will earn him a few points in Trump World.Florida congressman Matt Gaetz said on Sunday: “Welcome home Ron, welcome back to the Maga movement where you’ve always belonged.” More

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      Ron DeSantis drops out of Republican presidential race

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      Ron DeSantis, the hard-right governor of Florida, has ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and endorsed Donald Trump.“It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance,” he said in a statement posted on X. “He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear, a repackaged form of warmed over corporatism that Nikki Haley represents.”DeSantis’s withdrawal in the days ahead of the New Hampshire primary follows a disappointing result in the Iowa caucus, where he finished second place but trailed Donald Trump by a large margin. In New Hampshire, his numbers were far behind former South Carolina governor Haley and Trump.“He’s been a good governor and I wish him well,” Haley said at a campaign event on Sunday. “Having said that, it’s now one fella and one lady left.”DeSantis’ news was the culmination of a long, agonising decline.As recently as spring 2023, the former navy lawyer and rightwing congressman was widely seen as the Republican most likely to stop Trump becoming the nominee for a third election running, in large part by attempting to offer harsh Trumpist policies without the attendant drama.In November 2022, DeSantis cruised past the Democrat Charlie Crist to win a second term in Tallahassee. In his victory speech, he crowed: “We have embraced freedom. We have maintained law and order. We have protected the rights of parents. We have respected our taxpayers and we reject ‘woke’ ideology.”Referencing Winston Churchill, a near-mythic figure on the American right, he went on: “We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools, we fight the woke in the corporations. We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”He received a rapturous reception, supporters with an eye on 2024 chanting “two more years” and the New York Post branding him “DeFuture”, as speculation abounded that Rupert Murdoch was finally set to move on from Trump.But despite formidable fundraising, a seemingly strong campaign structure, strong polling and a rising Republican star in his wife, Casey DeSantis, after a long run-in to a formal campaign declaration, little went right.DeSantis’s hard-right agenda ran into trouble as he chose to take on Disney, a dominant employer in Florida, over its opposition to his “don’t say gay” policy regarding LGBTQ+ issues in schools. Generating a string of stories, scandals and lawsuits over book bans in school libraries, the subject continued to dog the campaign.In May the launch of that campaign, a Twitter Spaces session with Elon Musk, descended into farce as the platform glitched and buckled. The event host, the donor David Sacks, claimed: “We got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign.” Few observers agreed.On the campaign trail in the months that followed, the governor came across as stilted and awkward. For a campaign focused on social media and the influencers who lurk there, the resultant string of mocking memes and threads could not have been in the plan.Nor could a summer fiasco over bizarre campaign videos, posted to social media and featuring far-right, white supremacist, Nazi and arguably homoerotic imagery. A firing followed but the campaign’s image had taken another big blow, reports of fundraising problems appearing.There was a scandal over an attempt to change history teaching in state schools, regarding the place of slavery in Florida’s past. There were attempts to troll Democrats on immigration, including sending undocumented migrants to Democratic-run states by bus or plane. That policy ended up in the courts as well.As the polling gap to Trump grew, and as the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley steadily moved through the field, DeSantis sought ways to fight back.In November he took the unexpected step of debating a Democrat other than Joe Biden. The Fox News-hosted contest with Gavin Newsom, the California governor, proved little more than a sideshow. Brandishing a map he said showed the spread of “human faeces” on the streets of San Francisco, DeSantis succeeded only in feeding more “poop map” memes.DeSantis and Haley became more willing to attack Trump as the first vote neared, if still with the gloves kept on, even Trump’s lie about a stolen election in 2020 proving hard to simply disown. In Iowa, DeSantis picked up key nominations from the governor, Kim Reynolds, and evangelical leaders and eventually finished in second. But that still didn’t catapult his campaign into safe New Hampshire territory, and he dropped out before the numbers could prove just how far behind he might be. stuck fending off speculation about whether he wore lifts in his shoes.Democrats celebrated the news on Sunday.“As Democrats, we’ve been shouting from the rooftops that his strategy of waging culture wars on the backs of hardworking Floridians just to further his own ambitions was wrong for the state & would be disastrous for the nation,” said Fentrice Driskell, the lead Democrat in the Florida state legislature on Twitter/X.Sarafina Chitika, spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, said: “Just like Trump, DeSantis ran a campaign pledging to ban abortion nationwide, rip away access to health care, and gut Social Security and Medicare, while embracing election deniers and whitewashing January 6. Whichever candidate wins the race for the Maga base will be left running on the same dangerous and unpopular anti-freedom agenda that voters will reject in November.”For its part, the New Hampshire electorate did not seem too shaken by his last-minute announcement.Two hours before an event he had planned in New Hampshire, there were no signs of the DeSantis campaign or his fans at The Farm Bar and Grille. A member of staff said they had found out from news reports that DeSantis wouldn’t be coming and said he had not yet pre-paid for the space.“Nope, I’m about to charge him right now.”
      Adam Gabbatt contributed reporting from New Hampshire More