Not so finger lickin' good

Note: I’ve tried to inject some humor into today’s essay. The accompanying video is more serious, and breaks down the 2024 race and DeSantis’ collapsing effort.

Governor Ron DeSantis began 2023 in the most commanding position for a presidential nomination since George W. Bush almost 25 years ago. He was fresh off a landslide victory that shattered Florida political records in a year in which MAGA Republicans went limp at their expected moment of triumph. He was being besieged by wandering billionaires, who were fleeing Mar-a-Lago, and looking for safety from more defeat, humiliation and despair.

In many ways, DeSantis was the presumptive nominee. It was lined up perfectly. The best part was that it required him to do nothing. All he had to say was, “I’m focused on the Florida legislative session,” and hold private meetings with prominent activists and donors who would compete for his attention by trying to praise him, while simultaneously dumping on Trump as the past. It was all set. Locked in. Lined up. A two-inch putt to win the Masters, yet he couldn’t get it done. 

It’s not quite April, and the Florida frontrunner has gone down a different path. Apparently his team was disinterested in having a plan, or giving consideration to how it would be that he captured the Republican nomination and ripped it from the small, feral and grasping orange paws of mad King Donald. Now, he is in the open and answering questions from Piers Morgan about whether he inserts his fingers into pudding and licks them in front of aggrieved staffers. 

I have no doubt whatsoever that this story is true. I say this unprejudiced by my distaste for DeSantis and his dime-store Mussolini act. Many politicians have appalling table manners and eat like animals. I’ve witnessed it many times. Once, I was with a Congressman who picked up his plate at the Capitol Grille, raised it to his lips and sucked the steak juice off of it. He put the plate down, and pulled a large bone off of his lap that he had laying on a newspaper for gnawing. It was a shocking sight.

When Piers Morgan started talking about pudding, I didn’t like it. At all. All I could think about were the great works of literature banned in Florida and Ron DeSantis licking his pudding fingers. It was too much. 

The bottom line is that nobody is creative enough to make stuff like that up completely out of nowhere. It’s the same type of issue as Romney and his dog Seamus, who was strapped to the roof of the family car. It was too vivid to be a deep fake.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to work with Trump on the nicknames. I’d tell him Ron Desanctimonious sucks, and he’s gotten really skinny, so “Meatball Ron” doesn’t make sense. If I was there, I’d try to start betting pools about how long it took from subliminal suggestion to crazed pronouncement. For example, how long would it take for Ozempic being slipped in until it was tweeted out?  

I’d tell him to call DeSantis “Puddin’ Finger.” People wouldn’t like it. It’s one of the few things that unites almost everybody above the age of four. Nobody eats pudding with their fingers, but Ron DeSantis does. It’s a bridge too far. Can you imagine the look on Xi JinPing’s face if DeSantis started doing that in a summit meeting?  He definitely would. Anyone who does stuff like that once, does it all the time.  

Anyway, all DeSantis had to do was what William McKinley did — a ‘front porch campaign.’ He needed to take meetings from people who wanted to support him. He popped out of the trench, and ran to the exposed ground and got lost instead. He’s nearly defenestrated before the first debate, and he’s utterly lost his rationale for running. He’s ‘Diet Trump.’ Either way, he’s pinned himself to extremism, exposed his lack of character, underperformed as a communicator and acted really weird over and over again in each contact. Ron DeSantis has a lot of Nixon in him. Nixon wore dress pants and lace-up shoes while strolling along the beach. DeSantis likes to wear tall white waders when he tours hurricane damage.

Piers Morgan didn’t let pudding slow down his historic journey from London to Tallahassee. After all, he is deeply experienced in American politics.

In a February 2018 piece for the DailyMail, Morgan wrote:

I’ve met a lot of vile human beings in my life, from dictators and terrorists to sex abusers and wicked conmen. But I’ve never met anyone quite so relentlessly loathsome as Omarosa; a vicious, duplicitous, lying, conniving, backstabbing piece of work.

Which beggars the question: what the hell was she doing inside the world’s most powerful building for 12 months? The answer, as we can now see, was amassing a whole mass of damaging information to now use against President Trump and his administration on ‘Celebrity Big Brother.’

My God. Nothing gets past Piers Morgan. He figured out that it was all about ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ from the beginning.  Yet, he couldn’t sense even a tingle stirring when the wily Omarosa put it to him.

He continued:

Omarosa sidled up to me at the New York Mercantile Exchange and said, quite seriously: ‘Piers, do you want a showmance?’ ‘A what?’ I replied. ‘A showmance. You know, a romance on the show — we get it on together. Happens all the time on ‘Apprentice.’ Everyone has sex together. Then we can make lots of money out of it.” I stared at her grasping, ferociously ambitious little eyes, and laughed: ‘You must be joking, you deluded woman.’ She didn’t take it well. ‘What are you? Gay?” 

Like Churchill in the spring of ‘40, Morgan did not wilt. Even though he felt blinded by a light hotter than a thousand Meghan Markles he made clear that he wouldn’t stand for Omarosa’s anti-gay bigotry. He stood up and fought back by sitting down with Ron DeSantis, who is working incredibly hard to dehumanize gays, stigmatize gay students and censor all manner of literature. It’s remarkable that he was able to maintain the stiff upper lip.

Morgan then went on to say: 

Beneath the laughs though lay a less savoury truth: Omarosa is a reprehensible human being, prepared to offer sex to win a reality TV show and use the most vile homophobic slurs against rival contestants.

Piers Morgan showed the world something true about Ron DeSantis. He’s a weird guy. How weird? Piers Morgan looks steady. 

Ron DeSantis had a path to the nomination that included the absence of direct engagement with Trump. DeSantis could have starved him of attention, oxygen and money by controlling the total pace of the campaign, but he’s blowing it. Now he has to face Trump eyeball to eyeball. He’ll never do it. He’s terrified of Trump. He’s not tough enough. It means that DeSantis will likely dry up and wither. He won’t throw a punch — and he can’t take one either. It’s over almost before it started. I wonder who the next contestant to enter the lion’s den will be.