Meatball Gone

Someone get failed Florida Man Ron DeSantis an emergency pudding cup STAT.

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It only took Ron DeSantis nine months to discover what the rest of the planet has known for quite a bit longer: that he would never beat Donald Trump for whatever Republican voters have in place of “hearts” and “minds”— spleens and bile sacs, maybe.

On Sunday, just six whole days after condemning “worthless Republicans” who “kiss the ring” of their party frontrunner, DeSantis welcomed himself to those very ranks, shuttering his historically inept run for the White House by endorsing the “superior” Trump in a rambling five-minute video which—even had it not included the words “ending my campaign”—would still have killed any chance he had to be president due to its radioactively pathetic servility and uncanny valley weirdness. In that, the announcement was a perfect encapsulation of DeSantis’ whole thing of being an unlikeable weirdo with a stack of pudding cups where his spine should be.

Were DeSantis or anyone on his team even semi-literate, they would have seen the enormous writing on the wall ahead of this moment for months. This is someone whose polling high-water mark came before he actually launched his campaign, and has been swirling down the toilet bowl ever since.

There are two types of bullies in the world: There’s the thuggish bruiser, all muscle and instinct, who punches and mocks and denigrates because they don’t have the mental or emotional capacity for anything more sophisticated than violence. That’s Donald Trump, someone mean and shitty because it’s in his DNA to be an asshole. It’s all he knows, and all he’ll ever know. He’s the real deal, not trying to act like a monosyllabic tough guy, but genuinely incapable of being any other way. It’s an authenticity (of sorts) that similarly shitty people respond to, and it’s in no small part the reason he is where he is to this day.

Then there’s the other kind of bully—the sniveling worm, the scheming conniver convinced of their own intellectual superiority and furious at a world that doesn’t respect their obvious greatness. They are at their core weak and needy, eager to goad others into a fight but too desperate for approval to actually take a swing themselves. That’s Ron DeSantis, a fraud who punches exclusively downward, all while looking desperately around and screaming “dear god, am I good enough? Do you like me??” through clenched teeth and a rictus grin. His meanness stinks of a fundamental weakness which, in a GOP field dominated by Trump, is like wading into shark-infested waters while bleeding from a million open wounds. There’s no magic number of lives he could ruin in the name of anti-trans bigotry or anti-woke racism that would make him enough of a killer in the eyes of a Republican electorate conditioned for an extremist pursuit of purity. Add to that DeSantis’ inability to act like a normal biological human being for even just 30 seconds at a time, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for electoral mustard gas.

All this makes the past few years of DeSantis’ reign in Florida even more anguishing and terrible than they already were. Not only did he turn the state into a living hell for trans people, pregnant people, immunocompromised people, immigrants, and generally anyone who values other human beings as human beings, but he did so specifically to help himself get elected president. It’s not that he simply hates all the above people (although he clearly does) but that he used their misery for his own self-serving political ends—ends that everyone but him knew were never going to pan out. It takes a special kind of freak to take that level of callous cruelty and deliberate harm, and still be a DOA flop in a Republican primary. Ron DeSantis is that freak.

If DeSantis were smart, he’d go back to Florida, lick his wounds and/or pudding fingers, and start plotting his inevitable 2028 campaign away from Donald Trump’s supermassive gravitational pull. He isn’t smart, though. Instead, he’ll end up joining Trump on the campaign trail, where he’ll say things like “well, we’ve had our disagreements but…” before his voice gets real muffled and hard to understand because of the loafer Trump has shoved in his mouth. Then Trump’ll take the mic, and call Ron’s wife horse-faced or something similarly articulate, and Ron will have to stand there and laugh and clap and realize that no amount of boot-licking will ever endear him in the eyes of the MAGA faithful. Good. It’s perfectly alright to take pleasure in someone else’s suffering if that person is Ron DeSantis. I’d say he deserves a special place in hell, but he already lives in Ron DeSantis’ Florida. What could be worse than that?