It was almost 15 months ago that The New York Post published a full-page cover photo of Ron DeSantis with the headline “DeFUTURE.” His 19-point victory in the Florida governor’s race was one of the few bright spots of the 2022 elections for a weary Republican elite, which was desperately looking to move on from Donald Trump after his handpicked candidates cost the party key Senate seats.
A year later, as Mr. DeSantis’s presidential campaign stalled, at least a handful of G.O.P. megadonors found new hope in Nikki Haley, with the Koch network announcing millions of dollars in support of her presidential campaign.
It would be fair to say that the project has fallen flat: Mr. DeSantis suspended his presidential campaign on Jan. 21, and Ms. Haley’s hopes have now dwindled to a thin thread after her loss in New Hampshire.
By Donald Trump and his allies, this primary will be portrayed as a victory over a Republican establishment with which he had been at odds for years. But although Mr. Trump has routinely positioned himself as a political outsider, it is clear — now more than ever — that he has become the Republican establishment, and the party’s fate increasingly seems inextricably tied to his.
The former president now controls the Republican Party by virtually every conceivable measure. He has a commanding lead in fund-raising and polling. His policies are a beacon to which most conservative lawmakers orient themselves in affairs both foreign and domestic. His endorsement remains the single most coveted asset that any Republican could hope to brandish in a primary race, and he has already received support from an overwhelming majority of prominent elected Republicans.
The Republican party has been putting brick after brick down about how they intend to run the country. It’s just that they couldn’t wrap their warped brains around the fact that someone so out of touch with reality got in and figured out the hard way. The Republicans are used to having people like both Bush in W and H.W, like McCain, like Romney, like Reagan, like Nixon and so on.
They played with fire on Trump and it horribly backfired on them because they thought that they could recover after one term. But if there was one thing Trump did was that along with his bullshit, he routed the bullshit of other Republicans and had their hands revealed to everyone.
The only direction for Republicans right now is to just one-up eachother, like DeSantis tried with Trump. There’s no going back because they’re too prideful to dial down their craziness.