Ron DeSantis Has a Bizarre Strategy for Political Domination. It Involves Fistfuls of Fried Seafood.
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Let us check in briefly with onetime presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis, who is currently in the final year of his term as Florida governor. DeSantis was once inescapable in national media thanks to an extremely heterodox COVID-19 policy, which briefly ushered him into the front of the GOP pack vying for Donald Trump’s heirship. (We all remember how that turned out.) These days, DeSantis is largely out of the picture. So what’s he been up to? Is he plotting revenge? Is he still smarting from the swift curtailing of his electoral prospects? No, not at all. According to his account on X, DeSantis is spending his waning months in public office driving around Florida and dining at local hot spots, in his own low-rent version of the Food Network.
The series is called, almost unbelievably, Diners, Drive-Ins & DeSantis. He has filmed nine episodes so far, each uploaded directly to X, and all of them follow the exact same formula: There is Ron, with his giant head, sitting down for a meal in one of Florida’s many nondescript tropical enclaves. (Naples, Cocoa Beach, and other cities you typically only encounter when reading the Wikipedia pages of dead professional wrestlers.) His production mirrors the tenets of Guy Fieri’s venerable food-travel serial, which is the obvious inspiration. The episodes feature cloying interviews with restaurant owners, loosely evoking the can-do, small-business ethos. (There’s always a lot of talk about how “this place” has been here “for 50 years.”) Then DeSantis—dressed in a suit and flag pin—gives his review of the cuisine, in a way that can only be described as surreal. In the most recent entry in the series, the Florida governor stops by a New Haven–style pizzeria in West Palm Beach. DeSantis lifts a slice of pepperoni pizza in the air, exposing its undercarriage.
“You see how the pizza has the char on the bottom on the crust,” he says, with his usual vibeless candor. “That’s good, you don’t want it to be all floppy and doughy.”
Unlike most of the other ventures mounted by DeSantis, his food show is mostly devoid of partisanship. And to his credit, he does promote foodstuffs close to the Floridian soul. Two weeks ago he posted a video from a diner that is best known for grouper, a bottom-feeder that often goes unheralded at your local fishmonger. (“Florida has the best grouper,” said DeSantis, flaking the filet into his mouth.) The production staff is happy to highlight the few moments when the restaurant staff feels the need to compliment his leadership. The woman who served him his grouper applauded the governor’s laissez-faire COVID policies, and a man in Florida’s panhandle who serves stone crabs for a living talked about the pride he takes in serving the citizens of the “Gulf of America.” But for the most part, this looks like placid, lame-duck behavior, a governor running out the clock and fêting his résumé—stuffing fistfuls of fried seafood into his mouth along the way.
With that said, I do think there might be some political intention here. If you follow DeSantis’ personal account on X—and God help you if you do—you’ll notice that lately, the governor has adopted a much more defanged texture in his diction. Yes, obviously DeSantis still takes up insane culture-war charges—a few days ago, he made a big deal about “banning sharia law” in Florida, despite the fact that sharia law, obviously, does not exist in Florida, or anywhere else in America. (“We have a responsibility to defend and reinvigorate Western Civilization,” wrote DeSantis, with revanchist aplomb, dog-whistling toward the unhinged and increasingly aberrant white nationalist wing of the GOP.) Elsewhere, though, DeSantis has been tweeting a lot about baseball; how the 1995 Atlanta Braves were one of the best teams in history, and how the old Yankee Stadium is much better than the new one. And frankly, when he does get political, those inflections of Stephen Miller–ish blood-and-soil rhetoric have softened. Instead he’s been heralding Milton Friedman quotes, and riffing on old Ronald Reagan interviews—restraining the contours of his conservatism to good old-fashioned fiscal policy.
In other words, DeSantis has begun to sound like a fairly ordinary Republican dad, far removed from the hardcore firebrand of the Joe Biden years. And with Trump rapidly leaking oil (and brain matter), I do find myself wondering if this is a savvy pivot. MAGAdom is up for grabs: J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio are jostling for pole position, and both possess their own particular doctrines. If DeSantis is envisioning a comeback, maybe he believes that—in 2028 or beyond—America might be ready to once again pull the lever for a boring, polo-and-khakis conservative, rather than whoever can do their best Trump impression. If you squint, you can already see DeSantis testing out this posture. In late March he slyly criticized Trump in a characteristically nerdy, numbers-crunching, trad-con way, by noting that the stock market seems to be pricing in further inflation. DeSantis has embraced what he always has been: A stiff, middle-aged white guy munching on a fish sandwich, griping about government spending.
Of course, if DeSantis were ever to make good on this pivot, he would also need to solve some more foundational issues with his viability. Namely, that he is a charisma vacuum that absolutely flatlined at those sad Potemkin debates that were held before Trump’s 2024 nomination became a fait accompli. I can’t help him there, nor do I want to. But DeSantis has nonetheless managed to appear more normal. And, as the Trump Train careens into a ditch, Americans want normalcy more than ever.
