Last week I had a column at The American Spectator suggesting that, despite the obvious lesson of the Iowa caucuses being that Ron DeSantis no longer has a path to the Republican presidential nomination unless something catastrophic were to happen to Donald Trump, DeSantis nevertheless ought to stay in the race.

DeSantis should stay in the race with the express purpose of destroying Nikki Haley as a political entity.

He needs to do it for selfish reasons, because discrediting her and chasing her out of the GOP means DeSantis would be the de-facto frontrunner for 2028. Serving as Trump’s attack dog for the rest of the campaign could be a platform for a rapprochement between the two that the Republican Party needs going forward, and that could inure to DeSantis’ benefit in the form of Trump either endorsing him or merely not standing in his way when the 2028 cycle gets going.

But, most of all, Ron DeSantis needs to stick around and eviscerate Haley because the Republican Party cannot revert to the mediocre, base-betraying, donor-class-slave Washington Generals operation that it was between 1988 and 2016 and seems to want to become again.

As I’ve written about extensively — particularly in my bestselling first political book The Revivalist Manifesto, which CNN will inform you is “racist,” “homophobic,” and “filled with conspiracy theories” — that Republican Party is as or more responsible for the decline in American culture, politics, and economics than any other political faction. The GOP’s future — hell, America’s future — rests on closing the chapter of the Romneys, Bushes, McConnells, and Haleys and moving on to what I would call a revivalist posture.

DeSantis is a revivalist, as are Trump and Ramaswamy. Between them, they pulled 81 percent (or more, if you account for the Democrat interlopers who crashed the caucuses to vote for Haley) of the party’s voters in Iowa.

Trump doesn’t need to spend his time attacking Haley. He needs to busy himself destroying Joe Deadhorse and the Obama Cabal pulling Joe’s strings. (Read more about that in my new book, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama, which I will not stop plugging until all of you have bought a copy.) That has to be DeSantis’ job, because DeSantis is now fighting for his own political future and that of the America First/Revivalist movement that positively must become the active ingredient — the Establishment, even — of the Republican Party.

It’s more important that this fight be won than it is that DeSantis go back to Florida. He has to block Haley and the corrupt donor class — like Epstein flight passenger Reid Hoffman of the Big Tech leftist social platform LinkedIn — from using Haley to carve out a chunk of the GOP’s future.

It’s a dirty job. But if he does it, a grateful party and nation might just reward him for it down the road.

Well, over the weekend DeSantis didn’t take my advice…

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

– Winston Churchill pic.twitter.com/ECoR8YeiMm

— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) January 21, 2024

It’s a good speech, and there’s a lot of truth in it, but it’s a classic case of the DeSantis near-miss on branding.

That Winston Churchill quote is great, or it would be if it weren’t apocryphal. Apparently Churchill never said it. And it doesn’t really apply to an announcement that you’re quitting. DeSantis needed a quote about how one must improvise, adapt, overcome – or how one must alter one’s view when the observable facts change.

But that off-target quote as a headline for his suspension video is emblematic of DeSantis’ first foray into presidential politics: he was off-target largely from the first breath of that campaign.

There is, of course, the Ryan Girdusky tell-all article about how tone-deaf and mismanaged the campaign launch was, and if you’re a DeSantis supporter wondering what went wrong that’s a good place to start looking for answers.

But Girdusky’s advice to DeSantis – that while Trump was calling him stupid names and sending out Truth Social bromides attacking him with manifestly untrue statements, DeSantis was hurting himself by not responding – might have been true, in the end it wouldn’t have mattered.

Ron DeSantis could have gone to the mattresses against Donald Trump and all it would have done was alienate the 60 percent of the GOP which had aligned themselves with him. Even if DeSantis had taken Dan Flynn’s advice (offered posthumously to the campaign in this morning’s newsletter), and focused on a critique of Trump from the Right – not firing Anthony Fauci, setting the stage for massive inflation with low interest rates and runaway COVID government spending, and so on – it wouldn’t have made much of a difference.

This was not Ron DeSantis’ moment. Yes, he ran a below-average campaign and yes, his messaging was discordant at times and weak at others, and yes, he came off as stiff and his voice is a bit too nasal and whiny to convey the kind of strength you want in a presidential candidate (which isn’t something easily fixed). All of those things could have been remedied and it wouldn’t have mattered.

As DeSantis said in his post-suspension speech, the public isn’t done with Trump yet.

That’s something he could have seen had he waited on the decision whether to run. No sooner did DeSantis get in but the lawfare campaign against Trump began and that solidified public support behind the former president. And when that happened, DeSantis became the ghoul who was waiting to feed on Trump’s political corpse.

That’s an unpalatable role to have to play. And it’s very off-brand for DeSantis, who if anything is a loyal movement conservative willing to do the real work to advance an America First agenda. His value proposition is that he’s Trump 2.0; that his record in Florida indicates he can be a no-drama version of Trump who can set all of the MAGA agenda into the political firmament and effect permanent change in ways that Trump the trailblazer lacks the skill to do.

That DeSantis is Jesus and Trump is John the Baptist, to use a not-altogether-appropriate analogy.

But to be that guy, you have to wait for Trump to be finished. You can’t be the guy who finishes Trump. The act of finishing Trump, to a Trump supporter, is the act of an enemy. It’s something they’d expect from Chris Christie or Nikki Haley.

DeSantis can’t be that guy. It’s poison for his political future to be that guy.

My suggestion was that he stick around for a few more primaries and prevent the anti-Trump vote from coalescing behind Haley by spending his time on the trail trashing her. DeSantis did some of that, calling Haley out for “a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism” that she represents, in his suspension announcement. Maybe he’ll do that from outside the race, but the guess here is he’s going back to Florida and getting away from presidential politics.

Trump immediately embraced DeSantis when he dropped out, claiming that his dumb nickname for the Florida governor – Ron DeSanctimonious – was “officially retired” and showering him with praise for the job he’s done in Tallahassee. How much of a rapprochement there will be between the two is an interesting question: there has been a lot of bad blood between the two camps, with overenthusiastic supporters of each acting like utter jackasses toward the other for months now, but it’s clearly in the interest of the Trump and DeSantis camps to unite.

Perhaps time will heal those wounds and by the time the general election campaign begins DeSantis will be an asset to Trump. And perhaps Trump will relent or even support DeSantis as an inheritor of the MAGA/America First/Revivalist movement that The Donald currently leads.

We’ll have to wait and see what develops. What we know now, though, is that Trump has a clear, dominant majority of the GOP voting base standing behind him, and Haley represents the remnant of that old, obsolete “warmed-over corporatism” that the Bush Republicans rode to electoral calamity when Barack Obama came along.