There was never a chance in heaven or hell that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who looks like a 1980s shop teacher who gets off on breaking the birdhouses the kids make to prove "you can't build shit, you little pussy," was going to win the Republican nomination for president. I mean, put aside that Donald Trump owns the GOP no matter how much a few feckless fucks fail to pry it away from his tiny hands. DeSantis has all the personality of an angry Starbucks manager and all the charm of the least charming dung beetle. If you bottled DeSantis's vibe as a scent, it would be "old scrotum and expired Axe body spray." I mean, in Vegas terms, DeSantis is pissed off that the drunks at the buffet at the Tropicana aren't enjoying his terrible magic show while Trump is Siegfried and Roy rolled into one sparkly orange suit.
Beyond personality, though, DeSantis has been repeatedly stepping on his dick, misreading this moment in American history. The retro right in this country think that it's time to turn back the clock on everything, on abortion rights, on multiculturalism, on gender identity, on our understanding of history. With a complicit legislature, DeSantis has embraced this as his agenda, and he preens and prances around the country, pretending that he's some great warrior when, really, he's just "that prick, you know, that prick from Florida."
You can't go around saying stupid shit like "We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die" like DeSantis did in South Carolina this week, a variation on shit he's been saying for months. It's one thing to use the garbage word "woke" to describe everything you don't like. It's something completely different to stand there and pretend that you are some mighty warrior against...who exactly? School teachers? Writers? Cultural theorists? It's one thing to be a simpering little bitch about racism or drag queens. It's another thing altogether when you steal the language that Winston Churchill used in rallying people to fight the Nazis, you know, the ones who actually threatened to bomb and kill their way to conquering England, and use it to show that you are so tough that you'll pass a law that bans books about same sex penguins from classrooms. It's not remotely comparable and you just look like a pussy-ass tool for implying it.
In everything that DeSantis does, he has paths laid out for him: the rational, walk away, sweep it under the rug, everyone will forget about it path or the biggest fucking asshole in the world path. DeSantis has never seen an issue where he doesn't walk that asshole path. He could have just let it go when the Disney corporation criticized the "Don't Say Gay" bill that prevented any discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity from K-3 classrooms. Nope. Motherfucker decided it was time to take a stand and attack Disney, one of the biggest employers in the state and, you know, fucking Disney. When Disney outmaneuvered DeSantis on the board that oversees the district Disney World is in, when DeSantis got pimp-slapped by a fucking cartoon mouse (with billions of dollars and the best legal team those billions can buy behind it), he didn't say, "Fuck it" and take the L. Nope again. He expanded "Don't Say 'Gay'" through 12th grade and threatened to do desperate shit like open a prison next to Disney. It's the kind of thing that can get other Republicans to say, "What the fuck are you doing?" to the governor, who got fucking married at Disney.
On abortion, on book bans, on concealed weapons, on academic free speech, and more, DeSantis is, yes, doing what he campaigned on, but it's fucking exhausting the Republicans in the state. The nation, especially young voters, look at Florida as if all you'll retch from the stink of sargassum, the seaweed that's smells like rotten eggs when it bakes in the sun, as it will when a giant patch of it lands on Florida's beaches soon. This is not to mention that Donald Trump is smacking around DeSantis with the sadistic glee of an abusive father whose son isn't wearing a suit to a baseball game. Jesus, that must be harsh, considering that DeSantis used his kids in a 2018 ad talking about how vigorously he sucked Trump's dick. And we oddly don't talk anymore about DeSantis kidnapping a bunch of migrants in Texas and flying them to Martha's Vineyard at taxpayer expense. He's just a fucking repulsive pit of pig shit.
Meanwhile, Florida is fucked. It's fucked in so many ways beyond the seaweed swamp headed its way. Because the state is somewhere between "totally underwater" and "on the way to being totally underwater"on the climate change timeline, every big storm is going to be a fucktastrophe of flooding and fear. That fear, fed by shortages of gasoline and panic buying, which led to more shortages, is only going to get worse and shootier in a state with, you know, all those fucking concealed guns. And this has led to a property insurance crisis that oddly can't be solved by forcing teachers to subject their 1st-grade classroom libraries to an approval committee. It's true. You can't mitigate a 40% hike in your homeowners insurance by not telling kids about Rosa Parks.
Florida is one of a dozen states that haven't taken advantage of expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and the crisis that's going to cause is coming soon, along with the nursing shortage that is especially going to hit a state with a large elderly population. DeSantis likes to brag about Florida's supposed great reaction to Covid, but that relies on the short-term memory loss of Floridians. Shit got bad there, really bad, and it's not prepared if it gets bad again.
And yet he could have gotten past all of this if he wasn't such a proud cunt about everything. He's a void of charisma, so lacking in personality that he could say, "Florida is where charm goes to die" and you couldn't argue with him. So, no, he's not getting elected to anything outside of his increasingly dumb and deranged and dirty state.
One of the great pleasures of this filthy, fucked age we're damned to exist in is watching the implosion of political figures who the posh pundits praise. We've gotten to see the collapse of Rudy Giuliani, the deflation of Chris Christie, and now the utter humiliation of Ron DeSantis. The best part is he's such a smug bastard that he'll stay on this damned path, snarling into oblivion. We can all eat our pudding cups with a spoon as we enjoy the crash.
