Ron DeSantis has every quality a presidential candidate needs - good looks, youth, a nice family, and a strong governance track record in Florida. What he doesn’t have, however, is more charisma than his chief rival, Donald Trump.
To be fair, not many candidates, or people for that matter, have as much charisma as Trump does. It’s a once-in-a-generation thing that defies explanation. It’s just there. Even those who hate him can’t stop watching him. It’s not his looks, particularly, or his speeches — it’s the X-factor you can’t buy or attain. You have to be born with it.
In case you’re wondering why “Boot Gate” and other trivial stories about “Rob DeSanctus” have landed, it’s simply that he has a slight charisma deficit, which means it’s not exactly water off a duck’s back. It sticks and threatens to become the only thing people think about when they picture him in their minds.
Having charisma deflects those kinds of attacks. Think of all of the incoming Trump has taken over the past seven years about his hair, his weight, his hands, his penis (yes, that happened), how he drank a glass of water, how he dances, his relationship with his daughter, how he walks down a ramp, how he gives a speech, his lack of education, every picture he ever took -and, of course, his orange spray-tan - they threw everything they had at him. None of it moved the needle even a little bit.
We’ve watched the richest and most powerful government in the world go to war with one man’s charisma and come out on the losing end.
Charisma isn’t all of it, of course. Trump had to be tough enough to take it and take it and take it some more. Chalk it up to growing up with his notorious father, who could not abide any weakness whatsoever, and every day in the Trump family was a survival of the toughest - who would end the day a winner and who would end the day a loser. Trump wasn’t always a good boy. He often acted out in ways that got him into trouble.
For that, he was sent off to military school, where he discovered his gift for storytelling and innate charisma for the first time. Trump would gather his classmates around him and tell stories. He’s so good at storytelling that his rallies, even when he’s saying the exact same thing from town to town, are compelling entertainment. No one knows what Trump will say next, and his charisma keeps us watching.
Trump can also get away with things most other people can’t, and for the same reason. When someone has an abundance of charisma, they are often forgiven every other failure. Trump is forgiven for bullying, for stretching the truth to outright lying. He’s forgiven for getting things wrong, like typos or spelling errors.
If you separate Trump’s charisma from his words, as the media does, stripping away the humor, sarcasm, humility, and charm, you’re left with sanitized statements that sound like they came from The Furhur himself.
And that’s been the whole game for seven agonizing years, watching them cherry-pick and misinterpret everything Trump says. Did he say it? Yes. But stripping away context and his natural-born charisma means the words have a different meaning. This is why emojis were invented, as a way to patch what social media strips away: our evolved trait of interpreting each other’s intent.
“I’m going to shoot everyone in this place,” says the boy holding a water gun. The words say one thing, but the meaning is entirely different. I’ve noticed the context stripping by the media in real time recently by watching one of Trump’s rallies and then watching how the media and social media users interpret what he says.
Shockingly, they get away with overtly lying to the American public about what they can see and hear for themselves. When Trump jokes about Hannibal Lecter, for instance, it sends the hive mind cascading into paroxysms of hysteria, but for Trump, it’s just a throw-away line to make his audience laugh.
If you’ve seen as many of Trump’s rallies as I have, you’ll have noticed how in tune he is with the crowd. He can tell when they’re bored, when they’re energized when they’re moved, and what moves them.
Most politicians just read the speech, regardless of what the crowd is feeling, but Trump’s gift, probably going all the way back to high school, is in having an innate sense of the shifting moods of the crowd, like a good stand-up comedian. I’ve observed him rewriting what he is about to say just based on the crowd’s reaction.
There isn’t anyone in politics now, or even in show business, who can do what Trump does when talking to a crowd. He has a combination of unpredictability mixed with brutal honesty, mixed with moxie, mixed with charisma. He just plain isn’t afraid of anything or anyone. No matter how many times DeSantis Chris Christie or Mike Pence try to taunt Trump by saying he’s “afraid,” it’s never going to stick because it just isn’t true.
The only way to end TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome, is to put a tourniquet on the media narrative, which I did in 2020. The more the public tunes out the media narrative, which is not easy to do since it’s everywhere, the better chance Trump will have to convince the public to vote for him.
Ron DeSantis, like Hillary Clinton, has the exact opposite problem. Even if they do possess some charisma, it’s greatly diminished when competing alongside Trump. They are more careful with what they say, they try to keep the focus on serious things rather than just talking to the people and connecting with them.
Though it would horrify historians, the truth is that Trump has more in common with FDR. Like FDR, Trump comes from wealth but can still talk to the “common” people and connect with them. He can make them feel like they matter. Who else does that?
Anyone seeking to outlive, outlast, and outplay Trump will need an equal amount of charisma. Unfortunately for DeSantis, the negative stuff sticks more than it should because he wasn’t blessed with that charisma. He has to do what Richard Nixon did: find a way to appeal to people anyway by talking to them and connecting with them. If he’s done that in his town halls or campaign stops, it’s never made its way out into the ether.
Hopefully, this isn’t the ultimate fate of DeSantis, but he’d have done much better if he’d either run as Trump’s Veep or else waited until 2028.
Bootgate probably isn’t even true, which must upset DeSantis the most. He’s trying to talk about the border and Israel and being asked instead whether he wears lifts.
Here, he is marching in a parade, and it’s obvious he’s not wearing lifts. Now, the public, or anyone who heard of this story on social media, thinks DeSantis is embarrassed by his height.
And five years ago, when standing next to Trump, there isn’t much of a height difference between the two men, unless the contention was that he’s been wearing lifts for over five years, which is hard to believe.
DeSantis up against Biden or Harris would come off as the more charismatic. But up against Trump, I’m afraid, it’s like the moon running against the sun. It’s no contest.
Charisma is more than surviving taunts about eating pudding with his fingers or wearing lifts in his shoes, or his awkward smiles at debates. It’s also about watchability, magnetism, and where those eyeballs are going in a competitive landscape like ours.
DeSantis and the internet
By now, DeSantis should have more followers on Youtube than 28K. The views on his videos are so low you’d think he was an amateur in politics, a nobody. But he’s not. He’s become, or so the media would tell us, Trump’s main rival for the nomination. But based on what exactly? Here is a pretty good campaign ad:
Only 6K people have viewed the video. It never went viral. It was never embedded anywhere.
As good as his campaign ads are, as strong as a candidate he seems to be, the public is just not tuned in to this channel right now, in 2023.
To make matters worse, his strategy of attacking Trump and MAGA, especially after Trump’s gracious endorsement of his candidacy in Flordia, was an easy way to alienate the Republican base.
DeSantis, or Chris Christie, or Mike Pence or any of these guys haven’t learned the lesson that you can’t defeat Trump by getting into a public fight with him. This is Trump’s comfort zone. He comes at politics like an MMA fighter and is prepared for a fight. He throws down and leaves nothing on the table. The minute his opponent becomes defensive, Trump knows he’s got them.
Just look at what Trump’s campaign did with one comment by DeSantis about “listless vessels.”
Fighting Trump is a surefire way to lose a race with Trump. Besides, the public doesn’t want to hear more people going after Trump. That’s all we’ve been hearing for the past seven years and we the people are getting sick and tired of it. The media love that kind of red meat, but DeSantis should never have taken the bait.
Meanwhile, things are going so well for Trump it’s hard to imagine anyone topping this:
It was recently announced that Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds would endorse DeSantis in Iowa this week. Some say it’s a game-changer. Maybe it will be. I have my doubts. He still has a major hurdle - a charisma deficit he can’t quite overcome. Maybe he could walk away a hero if he packed it in and said, “Our country is in crisis, and we have to try our best to unify and take the Democrats out of power and there is only one way to do that.”
He won’t, of course. He’ll keep fighting on and will continue to be the political equivalent of a “kick me” sign.
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DeSantis Has a Charisma Deficit