Ron DeSantis spent 2023 running for president on the theory that he was Donald Trump but competent. He dropped out in January 2024 after Iowa, endorsed the man he had spent a year implying was unfit, and went back to Florida to govern. He has now concluded, publicly, that Trump is destroying his state’s Republican Party. The journey from challenger to endorser to aggrieved party official took about 18 months. Most round trips take longer.
DeSantis, per Raw Story, is accusing the Florida Republican Party of “selling out” the state’s voters to serve interests beyond Florida. That is a barely disguised description of Trump, whose endorsement of Rep. Byron Donalds in the 2026 governor’s race has made Donalds the runaway frontrunner, displacing the candidates DeSantis preferred. The governor is watching Trump pick his successor from the outside, using the same loyalty machine DeSantis once benefited from, now pointed in a direction DeSantis does not like. This is called consequences, and DeSantis is experiencing them.
The DeSantis arc deserves a moment. He entered the 2024 race as the most feared challenger in the Republican field, raised $130 million, and polled in the thirties nationally before Trump’s legal troubles, which were supposed to hurt Trump and instead made him more popular, vacuumed up all available oxygen. DeSantis’s campaign collapsed in real time, a slow-motion unraveling documented in enough detail to be taught in political science classes. He could not decide whether to attack Trump or flatter him. He chose flattery. Flattery did not save him.
Trump’s endorsement after Iowa was presented as party unity. It was also the price of continued relevance in a party where the only relevant question is whether the principal likes you. DeSantis paid it. He got back to Florida, signed bills, stayed out of Trump’s way. For a while, that seemed workable. Then Trump started picking Florida’s next governor for him.
Donalds is a Trump ally and a congressman from Naples whose main qualification for the governorship appears to be that Trump wants him there. DeSantis has not endorsed Donalds. He has also not come out against him, because opposing a Trump-backed candidate in a Republican primary is a particular kind of political suicide he has already committed once and does not appear to want to repeat. So instead he is attacking the party apparatus in language that makes clear who he means without saying the name, which is the DeSantis move: implication with deniability, the same technique that did not work in Iowa.
The tell is the framing. DeSantis’s complaint is that outside interests are overriding Florida voters’ preferences. Florida voters elected Trump by comfortable margins in 2020 and 2024. Florida voters are, by every available metric, enthusiastic about Donald Trump. The “outside interests” DeSantis is complaining about are the preferences of the man Florida voters like most. That is a difficult case to make in a Republican primary, and DeSantis is attempting to make it sideways.
The man who was going to be the next president is now trying to protect his own state’s gubernatorial race from the guy he endorsed after losing to him. The loyalty machine runs in one direction. DeSantis spent two years learning which direction that is and has apparently not finished learning it yet.
When the man you endorsed to prove your loyalty picks your state’s next governor without asking you, what exactly did the endorsement buy?
Sources
Raw Story: Ron DeSantis takes veiled shot at Trump as Florida GOP civil war goes nuclear
