It’s been a long time since virtually anyone in the elite of right-wing media, the national Republican Party, or conservative grassroots leadership has thought Ron DeSantis wasn’t going to be a loser. But Iowa was the 2024 state that was supposed to be his biggest gimme.
On Monday night, even that fantasy came crashing down. Trump dominated Iowa, so much so that the Associated Press called the race barely 30 minutes after caucuses began. Entrance polls showed Trump 30 points ahead of DeSantis and Nikki Haley, who have been jostling for second place — numbers that closely matched the caucus results as of 10:30pm.
The quick call incensed the DeSantis campaign, who was trounced despite hosting four times as many events in Iowa since the start of last year as the former president. “It is absolutely outrageous that the media would participate in election interference by calling this race before tens of thousands of Iowans even had a chance to vote,” Andrew Romeo, his communications director, said in a statement. “The media is in the tank for Trump and this is the most egregious example yet.”
Team DeSantis went all in on Iowa for a payoff that included not only losing the state but also enduring more than a year’s worth of abuse from Trump that seemed gratuitous and uniquely malicious, even by the standards of a modern U.S. presidential race.
Trump’s efforts to trash and denigrate DeSantis were relentless, with virtually no attack being deemed off-limits or too childish by the former president and his campaign. In one short year, Trump and his 2024 senior staff publicly went after the Florida governor’s penis size and testicles, DeSantis’ alleged bathroom mishaps, his height, his weight, his reported eating habits, the governor’s “high heels” footwear, and his “nervous” body language.
In this crusade to bury DeSantis, the former president openly suggested the GOP governor might be a pedophile. Last year, Trump took to social media to troll DeSantis’ sex life and imply he could be secretly gay. The ex-president and 2024 GOP frontrunner had also told reporters that he was aware of juicy, humiliating dirt on DeSantis — the kind that only the governor’s wife could know — and that he was ready to disclose it. And all along the way, much of Trump’s campaign staff and inner circle harbored intense resentment toward DeSantis, due to knowing or working for him and coming away from it with awful experiences.
This created a campaign-wide culture of not just wanting to beat DeSantis, but to salt the wounds, scorch the earth, and set ablaze as many of the governor’s future prospects as they could.
“The nature of the conversations among the people who used to work for Ron is just so frequently: ‘OK, how can we destroy this guy?’ It is not at all at a level that is normal for people who hold the usual grudges against horrible bosses. It’s a pure hatred that is much, much purer than that,” a source who used to be on Team DeSantis and then went over to the Trump side told Rolling Stone in April. “People who were traveling with Ron every day, who worked with him very closely over the years, to this day joke about how it was always an open question whether or not Ron knew their names… And that’s just the start of it.”
The Trump campaign went so far as to develop a strategy to “ratfuck” the DeSantis campaign by helping boost their shared rivals for the nomination. In May, sources close to the Trump campaign told Rolling Stone that the former president’s campaign leaned into efforts to boost the profile of MAGA businessman Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign to force the DeSantis camp to go on defense.
And while the Trump camp did everything in its power to sink DeSantis, the internal turmoil within his campaign also did plenty of damage to his prospects. In July, the DeSantis camp fired swaths of staff after burning through millions in cash in the first few months of their campaign. Throughout the latter half of 2023, several prominent Republican donors pulled or paused their contributions to the governor’s coffers as his poll numbers plateaued.
In November, reports emerged that Never Back Down, DeSantis’ primary super PAC, was coming apart at the seams. According to sources who spoke to NBC News, Jeff Roe, a consultant for Never Back Down, nearly came to blows with DeSantis advisor and super PAC board member Scott Wagner during a meeting. The tension between Roe and Wagner boiled over after weeks of worry that the super PAC had been ineffective in blocking the rise of Nikki Haley.
Monday’s results represent a substantial blow to DeSantis’ shot at the 2024 nomination, and with a crash this hard, it seems the campaign may be totaled.
