DeSantis Forgetting His Roots Has Derailed His Post-Trump Path to the White House...Probably For Good

Unconditional fealty to MAGA won’t get the new establishment to nominate him over Vance, but it could fatally handicap him if MAGA collapses before 2028.

Every conservative who vocally opposed re-nominating Donald Trump in 2024 has lost count of how many times we were told “Ron DeSantis is destroying his political future” and “Ron DeSantis will never be president” by the returned president’s most zealous fans. Since the election, those two lines are still many MAGAdonians’ favorite retort to any criticism of their leader, regardless of whether anyone in a given conversation even mentioned the governor.

Such juvenile taunting has never matched reality; in the world outside X, most Republicans consistently liked DeSantis throughout the primary even while preferring Trump for president, and whether anyone outside the MAGA family has a shot at the 2028 nomination will depend entirely on whether Trump’s job performance has made association with him a blessing or a curse by then. Nobody knows for sure what the future holds, save that DeSantis himself has some say in his own.

Unfortunately for conservatives who find the Trumpian “golden age” less than shining, DeSantis’s use of that say appears poised to turn the jabs into reality.

The shift was previewed in his move to be the first to officially recognize the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” reflecting Trump’s name change on his first day back in office. While that silly gesture was harmless, it previewed a change from maturely working with Trump on positive substance toward broader, gratuitous displays of MAGA fealty—like his reaction to February’s disastrous Oval Office meeting between Trump, JD Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

While Zelensky has long faced bipartisan accusations of diplomatic insensitivity, in this case it was our Vice President who initiated hostilities, when asked to explain the prospects of negotiation with a dictator who breaks every agreement he makes.

Instead of answering, Vance seethed that it was “disrespectful” to “litigate” the question in public, suggested visiting Ukraine to educate himself on the situation would’ve been nothing more than a “propaganda tour,” and, most dishonestly, asked “have you said thank you once” to America (by that point Zelensky had said it at least 94 times).

One can fairly argue Zelensky was foolish to air disagreements in such a venue, with US aid and particularly the mineral deal at stake. But that’s a question of prudence, not a moral infraction or slight against America, and it’s for Ukrainians to judge how their president is advancing their interests. Americans should care infinitely more about our own leaders’ inability to conduct themselves like adults in representing ours.

Which brings us back to DeSantis. Since the primary, the governor has had to balance being a team player in Trump’s Republican Party with maintaining his credibility as a principled conservative. And for the most part, he succeeded by focusing on meaningful support for shared priorities, such as immigration enforcement.

But DeSantis (who just days earlier declined to criticize the administration for opposing a United Nations resolution blaming Russia for the war) abandoned that balance with his unprompted X post declaring, “The disrespect shown by Zelenskyy to [the president] was jarring — especially given how much support the US has provided. President Trump was right to set the record straight and to defend the USA.”

As a governor, DeSantis didn’t have to comment on foreign policy at all. The only purposes his parroting of the MAGA spin served were signaling alignment with Trump and trying to further appease the isolationist mob Tucker Carlson sicced on him for his muddled Ukraine messaging in the primary.

The next month, DeSantis held a roundtable event at New College of Florida, during which he rightly scolded the GOP congressional majority for being nothing more than “performative,” but presented their lack of work on substantive legislation as a contrast to Trump: “I see the president doing things that are really, really transformative, but I don’t see the same energy from Congress.”

The implication that a party so subservient to Trump that it let him gut its platform, with a House Speaker blessed by Trump, a Senate that’s rubber-stamped nearly all of Trump’s nominees, and a congressional composition substantially shaped by Trump’s primary endorsements, is acting independently of or contrary to Trump’s wishes is ludicrous, as is the idea Trump couldn’t get Republicans to introduce whatever standalone bills he wants with a single Truth Social post.

Trump supported the House’s February budget blueprint that added $4.5 trillion to the debt over the next decade while telling committees to find $2 trillion to cut over the same period, instead of cutting directly. Now he’s agitating for a “Big Beautiful Bill” that reduces purported cuts to $1.3 trillion while adding $2.3 to $5 trillion to the deficit. If he was upset with Mike Johnson’s judgment that Republicans “don’t have time” to codify DOGE cuts yet, he uncharacteristically kept it to himself.

In May, DeSantis ducked a question about Trump’s acceptance of a $400 million luxury plane gifted by the Qatari government for use as the new Air Force One and transfer to Trump’s presidential library after his term ends. After the obligatory genuflection to Trump’s “great job in the first term,” Ron would say only that “Qatar’s influence, they have spent a lot of money in this country, and I think that that’s something that people should take notice of,” and that Trump should be “clear-eyed” about Qatar’s “double game.”

On June 5, DeSantis’s RON PAC sent out an email signed by the governor once again ripping on “Republicans in Congress” for “backing down” on spending, and once again omitting any mention of the guy those Republicans take their marching orders from.

But while Trump dominates the GOP for the moment, the writing’s on the wall. According to RealClearPolling’s averages as of June 14, Trump is 12.2 points underwater on the economy, 19.2 on inflation, and 8.6 on foreign policy. (Trump is still net positive on immigration at 2.3 points, but even that is precarious given his recent pivot to amnestying cheap foreign labor that some of us told you was coming.)

Unless Trump starts taking budgets seriously and not only backs off but stays off his tariff obsession, the midterms could be a bloodbath for Republicans, as Americans wonder why their vote to repudiate the cost of living under Biden-Harris has instead got them higher daily expenses across the board, shuttered small businesses, and devastated retirement accounts.

(Admittedly, Democrats show no real signs of getting their act together enough to capitalize on the GOP’s weakness, but the party’s recent ouster of David Hogg suggests it’s not completely outside the realm of possibility, and both parties have been burned multiple times just this decade by assuming their opponents’ dysfunction would do all their work for them.)

In 2018, DeSantis gave Trump’s first administration the benefit of the doubt that tariffs had value as a negotiating tool, but did not want to see “high tariffs across the board” as the final result. But now that we’re well into the second administration’s far broader and more incoherent tariff spree, DeSantis has yet to comment, beyond changing the subject to federal vs. state resource management when asked about tariffs’ impact on Florida’s fishing industry.

Assuming DeSantis hasn’t somehow forgotten why he ran against Trump in the first place, he appears to have decided his political future depends on demonstrating he can be every bit the “listless vessel” he once warned about. Which not only dilutes his original brand as the last fearless, principled conservative in the GOP, but fatally misdiagnoses the political landscape.

If Trump course-corrects enough to maintain his hold on the party by 2028, coddling him won’t get Ron anything anyway, because no amount of appeasement will keep the establishment from coronating an insider (most likely Vance). But if Trump does crash and take the GOP with him, being nominated to pick up the pieces will require being able to credibly distance oneself from the disaster. That doesn’t mean forsaking areas of agreement or delving into performative NeverTrump hysterics, but it does mean telling the truth about the bad as it’s happening, not waiting until after the country wants vengeance on those responsible and those they perceive as going along with it.

Ron DeSantis became a national hero by taking a clear-eyed look at the facts behind a disastrous federal policy, throwing out a bad plan, and charting a new course in defiance of what he was “supposed” to do, weathering the howls and doomsday predictions because he was confident he’d be proven right in the end. Forgetting that is both his loss and the country’s.