Ron DeSantis Dumped His Campaign Manager Just Now. What Happens Next? Money is, sadly, a key driving force in our society today. And in politics, it is the lifeblood of any successful campaign. At the start of the year, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis was riding high. Undoubtedly the most successful Republican governor of his generation—with a record as chief executive that rivaled even that of former President Donald J. Trump—DeSantis was a walking ATM.
Generating both buzz and gobs of big donor money, everyone from the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post to the Democratic Party began viewing Governor DeSantis as the Republican to watch out for heading into the 2024 Presidential Election cycle.
Just eight months after the political world seemed to be at DeSantis’ fingertips, however, things have flipped. Donald Trump has waged a vicious, even unfair (no surprise) campaign against the man who many viewed as Trump’s protégé, his heir apparent, Ron DeSantis.
All because the governor had the temerity to run for the Republican nomination. With the visceral campaign that Trump and, by extension, his ardent supporters, waged upon DeSantis, the governor was in a position where he had little room for error.
Ron DeSantis: Righting the Ship
Yet, 2024 being DeSantis’ first major national election meant that he was bound the make mistakes. Normally that would be an acceptable part of an early national campaign in a crowded field. But with Trump, even the slightest hint of weakness could prove lethal to one’s greater ambitions if one’s goals were at loggerheads with Trump’s.
There can only be one victor in the contentious 2024 GOP Primary.
So far DeSantis has sustained a wave of controversy, from having apparently hired antisemites to his nascent presidential campaign, to firing over 30 staffers because of rank incompetence.
This, as Trump’s political war machine marched hard against DeSantis as well as the Democratic Party and the Administrative State prosecutors who had been deployed to sap the Trump Campaign’s funds and attention away from the campaign and toward the variety of indictments the forty-fifth president now faces.
As that occurred, the hearts and minds of many rank-and-file Republican voters who would have otherwise happily voted for the upright, tough, and conservative Ron DeSantis are enraged by the mere mention of the Florida governor.
These voters view DeSantis as a “RINO Globalist” (he’s not) who “betrayed” Trump by running against him in 2024 instead of “waiting his turn”. A GOP Primary used to be about picking the best candidate to represent the party in the election. It used to be something that was earned, not given. Republicans used to decry the way that their Democratic Party rivals simply coronated their candidates whereas Republicans fought each other in the primary to ensure the best person got the nomination.
That’s no longer the case now that Donald Trump is involved. Having convinced a sizable portion of voters that he was wronged out of his rightful electoral victory in 2020, Trump has secured for himself a fanatical following that is even greater than what it was during the fateful 2016 Presidential Election.
And while it’s obvious that there were some questionable practices surrounding the mail-in-ballots in the 2020 election, the fact of the matter is that Trump was never able to prove wrongdoing in a court of law—meaning that the former president is incorrect when he says that the election was stolen.
Trump Doesn’t Really Believe 2020 Was Stolen
In fact, several key advisers from Trump’s 2020 campaign have admitted under oath that the former president did not really believe he’d lost the election. That narrative was shaped and spread in order to keep Trump as a viable candidate for the 2024 election.
In the meantime, Trump’s potent narrative of a stolen election combined with his consistent claim that a “Deep State” of Faceless Men is out to get him (there is an Administrative State comprised of bureaucrats who really do hate Trump and all he stands for) has created a shield around the forty-fifth president that prevents would-be challengers from getting a clean hit on him.
Such is the case with DeSantis.
That shield is not just defensive. It’s also offensive in that it deflects any criticism away from Trump and gets Trump supporters to castigate the challenger, in this case, Ron DeSantis.
Getting Cold Feet
The whole thing is beyond silly. Except for the deep-pocketed donors who opened their wallets early in the primary campaign to dole out vast sums of their cash to DeSantis. One man, in particular, Robert Bigelow, has given ten times more money to the powerful pro-Ron DeSantis Super PAC, Never Back Down, than the next donor has.
In recent months, Bigelow’s massive infusions of cash have proven decisive in keeping the incipient DeSantis 2024 presidential campaign going in the face of growing adversity.
Now, Bigelow appears to have had enough. While Bigelow’s official reason for discontinuing his financial support for DeSantis is that the Florida governor is an extremist on abortion (in his opinion, of course), the question must be asked why Bigelow is only just now coming to this conclusion? DeSantis has been steadfastly Pro-Life his entire public career. Bigelow and all the donors knew that getting into his race.
The real reason, I suspect, is that Bigelow senses blood in the water and believes that Florida’s governor is mortally wounded. Bigelow, like most billionaires, wants to be associated with the winning side. He hates deploying good money in pursuit of bad, or wasteful, products. Therefore, he’s out—and Bigelow is trying to save face with his Liberal friends by making DeSantis’ supposedly hardline stance on abortion the official reason for him cutting financial ties with the DeSantis Campaign.
At the end of June, DeSantis’ Never Back Down PAC had a war chest of about $100 million. No other GOP candidate’s super PAC had anywhere near that much money on hand. Although, the money appears to be useless since it hasn’t helped DeSantis one bit to get over the popularity of Donald Trump.
It’s not entirely over for Ron DeSantis. He’s a proven fighter and, at least in Florida, was a successful campaigner. The upcoming GOP debate could help him out a lot. But things are not looking good for his campaign—and his big donors are starting to react accordingly to this perception. DeSantis needs to just survive the Trump’s wrath.
I believe that Trump’s staying power is nowhere near as strong as he and his supporters think it is. The fact that Trump is having to burn through so much of his own campaign cash to pay for onerous—and mounting—legal fees while DeSantis can sit on his war chest is evidence enough that DeSantis just needs to endure a bit longer.
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (Encounter Books), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
