GOP Inc. Decides to Throw More Candidates at Trump after DeSantis Missteps

Being offered a giant sack with dollar signs on it must be an incredible temptation, especially for someone in the political world. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was lured by the billionaire class into challenging President Trump for the Republican nomination. This was despite the advice of every MAGA person out there, including yours truly, who thought he should wait for 2028.

Now that the DeSantis campaign finds itself on life support, the Republican elites who are as far from MAGA as Karine Jean-Pierre are looking around for some more candidates to throw at the race.

GOP consultants are now saying that the billionaire class is very close to cutting their losses with DeSantis. They’re now starting to court Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp with sacks of money.

So far, Glenn Youngkin doesn’t seem interested in taking the bait. He’s obviously seen what has happened to DeSantis so far. Youngkin has kind of managed to stay above the Never-Trump fray and hasn’t done anything too memorable to tick the MAGA movement off. If he stays in his current spot and keeps governing Virginia well, you could see him being a viable candidate in 2028.

Brian Kemp, on the other hand, is a Trump-hating neocon who would fit right in at a luncheon with Obama, Hillary, and Jeb! In fact, Kemp regularly hangs out with former Speaker of the House John Boehner.

In the aftermath of the stolen 2020 election, Kemp hid from Georgia voters and let his corrupt Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger handle the fallout. When Georgia MAGA voters went to Kemp’s office in 2020 to serve him with millions of petition signatures, asking him to not certify the stolen votes without an audit first, I’m pretty sure Kemp climbed out the window to get away from them.

He seems like exactly the sort of guy who would take the money and try to play campaign roulette against Donald Trump. He’s in his second term, so what has he got to lose?

It’s not just that Ron DeSantis has angered the incredibly loyal MAGA base, which we all warned would happen. It’s that the campaign consultants with marketing degrees from Harvard, who take selfies of their lunches to post on social media, are running such an incredibly bad campaign for him. These people are stunningly bad at their jobs.

They can’t do anything right. They haven’t observed their main opponent, Donald Trump, to see how he drives media cycles and generates excitement. All that they can come up with is what they were taught in their marketing and poly-sci courses when they were in college.

Here’s just one example, and I hope this is the last time I ever give these idiots any advice. Not that they’re gonna read this and do some self-reflection anyway.

To compete with Donald Trump, you have to do things that will make the media attack you. If the media’s not attacking you, you’re not gaining any ground with Trump voters. If the media is not threatened by your existence, Trump voters will simply ignore you—which is what you deserve.

Donald Trump sucked all the oxygen out of the room over the weekend. He went to UFC 290 with his fiercely loyal friend Dana White and hung out with Mel Gibson and other rightwing stars.

This is right as the movie “Sound of Freedom,” about child trafficking, has sparked the interest of most of us in the political right. Mel Gibson did the final editing on the film and is a longtime collaborator with its star Jim Caviezel. Immediately after UFC 290, Dana White announced that he was buying tickets to the film for every member of his staff.

All this happened after everyone realized that the movie was turning out to be a runaway summer hit with conservatives. The DeSantis campaign could have countered that easily last week. Buy a pair of tickets to the movie and take a photo of the ticket stubs. Tweet the photo with something simple like, “Date night.”

The media would have spent the entire weekend calling Ron and Casey DeSantis a couple of QAnon conspiracy nuts and then wondering why DeSantis suddenly rose a point or two in the polls. Too late now.

The DeSantis campaign probably has until the end of the month before the donor checks dry up. If he doesn’t make some progress before then, look for Brian Kemp (more likely) or Glenn Youngkin (less likely) to jump in the race before the first debates take place.