The Nation MagazineWhen Ron DeSantis is trying to keep things dignified, you know the show has gone off the rails.
When Ron DeSantis is trying to keep things dignified, you know the show has gone off the rails.
2024 Republican presidential candidates Doug Burgum, from left, Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Senator Tim Scott and former US vice president Mike Pence during a debate hosted by Fox Business Network in Simi Valley, Calif., on September 27, 2023.
Let’s start at the end instead of the beginning.
After two hours of screaming, two hours of puerility, two hours of talking over each other and coming up with one canned line after the other, the seven GOP candidates on the debate stage at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., were asked a game-show question by co-moderator Dana Perino. Take a piece of paper, Perino instructed them, and write down which of the seven of you that you think should be voted off this island after the debate. The Fox News audience, primed to regard all of politics as an entertainment spectacle, and having been subjected to a two-hour food fight, whooped their approval.
To his credit, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rose in fury at this indignity, telling off Perino in no uncertain terms. It was the highlight of what for DeSantis must have been another exercise in prolonged frustration. He looked ill at ease, his stretched smile more akin to that of a gargoyle hanging off a medieval French cathedral than that of a flesh-and-blood human. The only one on that stage who looked more like he didn’t want to be there was the hapless Mike Pence, situated at the far end of the line of speakers by virtue of his dismal poll numbers; most of the night Pence looked like he was being force-fed caterpillars.
DeSantis, given centerstage because with roughly 12 percent support, he’s still just barely in second place in the GOP nominating contest, struggled to make himself heard over the tumult. He did finally try to take the gloves off against the absentee Trump, but, alas for him, the few times he worked to land punches on the 45th president, he was outperformed by the bombastic Chris Christie, who gleefully labeled his erstwhile friend “Donald Duck” for ducking his obligations to debate his opponents in front of a GOP crowd. One could practically feel the energy seeping out DeSantis’s campaign as each minute ticked by. It must be disheartening to have such an inflated sense of self and then to confront the reality that most people, even in your own party, think you’re a wanker.
Everything about the evening seemed designed to make the candidates look small—from the vast Air Force One jet suspended above their heads, to the extraordinarily short answer times permitted each debater, to the three moderators’ inability, or perhaps simply lack of desire, to stop the outbursts of elementary school–type squabbling. By default, the only one who came out of the debate looking big was the absent one, Donald Trump.
It wasn’t that the Seven Dwarfs didn’t have anything to say. They did: They were full of opinions about what they all labeled Biden’s “open border policy” and what they agreed were the calamitous flaws of his pivot to electric vehicles.
