DeSantis reaps the rewards of his cowardice: Humiliation

The lopsided landslide blowout that resulted from the year-long primary race between former president Donald Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis unofficially began in November of 2022, when Mr Trump — then planning his next campaign but speaking in support of then-Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz — bestowed a pejorative moniker on the Sunshine State executive.

As he spoke in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Mr Trump referred to Mr DeSantis, who also had not yet announced his candidacy in this year’s presidential contest, as “Ron DeSanctimonious”.

For professional Trump-watchers such as your correspondent, the bestowing of a nickname upon an opponent by the ex-president was, at the time, a sign that Mr Trump considered the Florida governor to be a threat to his hopes of regaining his party’s nomination to take on the man who beat him in the 2020 election, President Joe Biden, in 2024.

And as 2023 began, Mr DeSantis did indeed appear to be a formidable foe for the twice-impeached, disgraced former president, who had been the focus of a series of blockbuster congressional hearings which laid out how Mr Trump had schemed and plotted to illegally overturn his election loss to Joe Biden — a kind of self-coup — and fomented a violent riot at the US Capitol by a mob of his supporters who assaulted police officers and destroyed property in an effort to prevent final certification of his loss.

The Florida governor, a former GOP congressman who’d helped found the House Freedom Caucus, might not have ever been thought of as a challenger to Mr Trump but for the ex-president’s vulnerability after his violent exit from the White House.

As Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel made every effort to unperson the former president, Mr DeSantis