Karen Tumulty

The spiralling collapse of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been one of the most absorbing subplots of the 2024 presidential campaign. Looking back at how things have played out, it becomes clear that the first indictment of Donald Trump was also a death warrant for the hopes of the candidate who was his closest rival.

Though few might remember this now, as DeSantis’s campaign gasps for life in Iowa, it was but a year ago that he was actually leading Trump by a healthy margin in some polls and was the darling of the donor class.

Back then, DeSantis was coming off a landslide re-election in Florida, a contrast from the disappointment that Republicans nationally had suffered in the midterm. The assumption: Trump would be toast in 2024 against President Biden. What the GOP needed was a combative conservative who could appeal to the MAGA base, without the accompanying Trumpian chaos.

Where the Florida governor’s support started showing a marked decline was in late March, right around the time Trump was indicted for the first of four times. Paradoxically, it worked to the former president’s political advantage. GOP leaders, and even his presidential rivals, rallied behind him. With Trump facing a total of 91 criminal charges, DeSantis decried “the weaponisation of government”, and said: “This country is going down the road of criminalising political differences.”

In other words, DeSantis - along with nearly every other serious GOP contender - bought into and amplified Trump’s narrative of victimhood, rather than seizing upon the substance of the 91 felony charges against him.

With Biden’s approval stuck in a slump, Trump edged into a narrow lead in most polls. As Republican fears that Trump was unelectable receded, DeSantis discovered there were fewer takers for the imitation version of MAGA that he offered.

His campaign’s disastrous launch in May - a cringeworthy interview with billionaire Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces, where the platform’s server repeatedly crashed - turned out to be a metaphor for a candidacy that had been built upon one miscalculation after another.

His deficiencies as a candidate became increasingly obvious as the months wore on. DeSantis had the personal touch of a robot vacuum cleaner. He dropped acronyms such as “ESG” and references to “central bank digital currency” into his stump speeches, often drawing blank looks from his audiences.

The governor promised to “Make America Florida” and revelled in the harsh policies that had been enacted on his watch. None of which would play well with general-election voters upon whom the presumption of DeSantis’ electability rested.

Then there was the money.

DeSantis pushed the legal bounds of the campaign finance system as no one had before, outsourcing his ground operation to the super PAC Never Back Down, to which he transferred $82.5 million in funds from his Florida re-election campaign, which under the law could not be used directly by a federal campaign. He thumbed his nose at the legal requirement that the candidate and the super PAC operate independently, trundling through Iowa and New Hampshire as a “special guest” on Never Back Down’s huge death star of a campaign bus.

His actual campaign, meanwhile, was burning through money to the point where, by the fall, it was effectively running on fumes. That meant advertising - its message - would also become the responsibility of the super PAC. The candidate had become, essentially, a bystander to his own campaign.

It was inevitable that tensions would boil over. The DeSantis campaign operation has gone through several shake-ups, and in recent weeks, top officials of the super PAC have resigned or been fired. Over the weekend, Jeff Roe - the strategic brain of Never Back Down - resigned, saying he “cannot in good conscience stay affiliated” with the group. What’s left of the super PAC itself has made dark insinuations of “mismanagement and conduct issues” by those who have departed.

Meanwhile, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley has supplanted DeSantis as the candidate in the pack who appears to have even an outside shot at posing a threat to Trump.

The odd thing is, amid all this, DeSantis has stepped up his game as a candidate. His debate performances are smoother, he appears more relaxed on the stump, and he is making himself more available to less-than-friendly media outlets, such as an appearance this week on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”.

But these are marginal improvements, and with the Iowa caucuses less than a month away, whatever DeSantis has learned has likely come too late to make a difference. Yes, miracles happen with some frequency in politics, and DeSantis might still pull one off. But presidential campaigns are built to be tests of resilience, and brittle candidates usually wind up in pieces.

The writer is The Washington Post’s associate editor and columnist covering national politics.