Ron DeSantis is finished, but I’m still pissed off about how it went down – and you should be too

| 9:09 am EST January 22, 2024
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I’ve been accused of being in a more chipper mood of late, and I’ll cop to that. After all, Donald Trump is getting further picked apart by his trials, everyone is finally starting to talk about his worsening senility, and Joe Biden’s 2024 prospects seem to be turning an important corner at the right time. Things are indeed looking up in the political world. But there’s one thing that’s really pissing me off right now, and I think it’s important that we don’t let it slide without addressing it.

This weekend Ron DeSantis dropped out of the 2024 presidential race in humiliating fashion. Just how humiliating was it? He dropped out a few days before New Hampshire primary voting, not even bothering to wait for the results. Moreover, his 2024 campaign has turned out to be such a disaster that it’ll make it difficult for him to get any momentum if he tries again in 2028. So this is good news, right? Yes. But none of it was necessary to begin with.

The entire political media – and I mean the entire political media, every major news outlet on both sides – spent years hyping Ron DeSantis in what it knew was a fictional manner. From the start, the media portrayed DeSantis as super smart, super savvy, super strong, and ultimately inevitable when it came to the presidency. Right wing media portrayed this as a good thing, while the rest of the media portrayed it as a bad thing. But they all portrayed DeSantis as strong and savvy. And they all knew, all along, that he was the precise opposite.

The Ron DeSantis that you saw at the bitter end of his failed 2024 campaign was the same guy he’s always been. He’s always been tone deaf, he’s always had zero political savvy, and he’s always had a bizarre zero-charisma personality. Everyone who’s followed him closely knows that this is who he’s always been.

But the media, on both sides, wanted DeSantis to be a part of the 2024 race. The media knew that DeSantis would be so polarizing as to be great for ratings. So the media (on both sides) built him up for years and ensured that he was a contender by the time he entered the 2024 race. This included helping to make sure that DeSantis got reelected in Florida in 2022, so that he’d still be viable by 2024.

And yet after all these years of the media (again, on both sides) building up DeSantis as being super viable for 2024 just so it could spend 2022 and 2023 getting ratings out of him, it ended up being for nothing. DeSantis flopped on the national stage as soon as he tried to stand on his own two feet last spring. This was a guy who (thanks solely to the media) entered the 2024 Republican primary race polling at about 45%, and managed to lose the majority of that support within weeks of entering the race. Yet the media (on BOTH SIDES) spent all that time building up DeSantis, with all the carnage that came with it, just so he could flop like he was always going to flop.

Again, Ron DeSantis was always this much of a hapless buffoon. It’s not like he hit his head during his 2024 campaign and suddenly became less politically savvy. He always had zero political savvy. He only narrowly became Governor of Florida to begin with because Trump took out his primary opponent and then scandal took out his general election opponent. From there DeSantis picked the wrong fights with the wrong people and never managed to capitalize on what he’d been handed. All along, every “success” he had was nothing more than the media propping him up and portraying him as powerful and savvy when he was instead nothing but a hapless bobblehead the entire time.

The media knew it was hyping a fictional version of Ron DeSantis, and it didn’t care. It just wanted the ratings it could get by keeping DeSantis in the game. And MSNBC was just as guilty of it as Fox News. MSNBC’s portrayal of DeSantis as being smart and savvy was just as fictional as Fox News’ portrayal of him. From the start, DeSantis was entirely a media creation. Otherwise he might have been a failed one term Governor who left office with a 30% approval rating and would be out of everyone’s lives by now. Look at all this carnage in DeSantis’ wake. Think about all the carnage he’ll create in Florida before he leaves office – especially now that he’s humiliated and wants revenge. And it’ll all be simply because the media decided to spend years getting ratings out of a bumbling loser by fictionally portraying him as being super savvy. You’re darn right I’m pissed off. What the media (on both sides) did in fictionally hyping DeSantis all these years was nothing short of criminal.