In the last week we’ve had South Carolina Senator Tim Scott and Republican Governor Ron DeSantis formally declare for President of the United States.

Hoo boy.

Tim Scott

Let’s start with Tim Scott. This guy thinks that his party — which in the last six years has explicitly become the party of racists — is going to elect a black man to be their standard bearer in a Presidential election?

This guy must be completely delusional.

Which right there should disqualify him from being elected President. 

I mean, yes Obama was elected President twice, but he was elected by Democrats and Independents. And Republicans still haven’t forgiven him for Presidenting while black.

On top of which, Scott is competing with the only other Republican candidate of color who happens to be from the same state: Nikki Haley. But at least she isn’t black.

This guy ain’t going nowhere.

Ron DeSantis

Then, we have Ron DeSantis. This guy’s primary claim to fame so far is that he has banned books and picked a fight with his state’s best known and most beloved employer.

Which fight he is losing.

Ron DeSantis is like Trump without the charm.

Wait, what? Trump has charm.

Well, yeah, he has a certain kind of anti-charm. I mean, if  he hadn’t been President of the United States and he were just some right-wing billionaire blowhard — like Elon Musk, for example — he can be kind of funny, sometimes. Even his predictable übernarcissism can be sort of entertaining.

In any case, Ron DeSantis doesn’t have any of that.

He mostly comes off like an asshole’s asshole, somebody without any discernible likeability. Since he started to become the main alternative to Trump, his poll numbers have begun to sink.

Then came the disastrous official launch of his campaign on Twitter.

Elon Musk’s glitch-filled roll out didn’t do DeSantis — and his image for competence — any favors. To be fair, that seems to have been Musk’s fault and not that of DeSantis, but it doesn’t really matter. That’s all that anybody is going to remember from the DeSantis launch. 

Just as what is remembered from Trump’s 2016 launch is his rolling down the escalator and calling Mexicans rapists. (Of course, it turned out that Trump was the actual rapist.)