On Sunday, Ron DeSantis officially announced that he was dropping out of the race for president in a way that only DeSantis could: by offering a quote from Winston Churchill that Churchill never said, and taking a couple of potshots at Donald Trump… then endorsing him for president.
“DeSantis was once Trump’s biggest rival for the nomination, which is why Trump went after him from every angle,” Stephen Colbert explained on Monday of DeSantis and Trump’s hot-and-cold relationship.
Among the many stories Trump alleged about DeSantis, Colbert reflected, were that the Florida governor partied with underage girls, and may face lascivious allegations as a result of that. The former president also reportedly spent a lot of time workshopping the perfect nickname for “Meatball Ron,” with “Ron DeSanctimonious,” “Don DisHonest,” “Ron DeEstablishment,” and “Tiny D” among the top contenders.
With DeSantis’ quick decision to endorse Trump for president, Colbert finally understood where “Tiny D” came from.
“Oh, I get it,” said The Late Show host. “Tiny D! ‘Cause he’s got such a small amount of dignity.”
Over on Late Night, Seth Meyers was even more forthright with his DeSantis deprecations when he announced that “the weirdo community suffered a major blow on Sunday when, in a completely unsurprising move, one of the most off-putting people on the planet, Ron DeSantis… dropped out of the GOP presidential primary.”
Meyers described DeSantis’ last gasps as a presidential candidate as a “fittingly pathetic end” for the Florida governor, “who tried to overtake Donald Trump and failed in every respect except for one. There’s one thing DeSantis beat—or at least tied—Trump at.” And that is being an incredibly weird individual.
“It didn’t seem possible for any human being to be any weirder than this flag-hugging, umbrella-ditching, dandruff-brushing, belt-unbuckling, eclipse-staring, VP-kissing weirdo,” Meyers said of Trump. “But then Ron DeSantis came along—America’s first extraterrestrial governor—who somehow managed to compete with Trump in the weirdness category.”
“DeSantis stands like he’s wearing a backpack full of horseshoes and has the demeanor of a guy trying to hide a zombie bite,” Meyers continued. “I have to agree with Trump on one thing: on a personality level, [DeSantis] is a meatball. He’s only a few years and a few stages on the evolutionary ladder away from Rudy Giuliani.”
But in addition to now knowing just how “weird and off-putting” DeSantis is, Meyers says there’s one other big lesson we can all take away from his failed presidential campaign: That his battle on so-called “wokeness” was just a bunch of “fake, performative B.S.”
“And in his cynical pursuit of power, he did real damage,” Meyers explained. “Essentially: banning books from school by creating a culture of fear for teachers, waging a pointless war on drag queens, arresting Black voters in a hunt for nonexistent voter fraud, and fighting Mickey Mouse. All so he could finish an embarrassing 30 points behind Trump in Iowa and then sheepishly drop out before Trump could make fun of his high-heeled boots again.”
Unfortunately for DeSantis, not even endorsing Trump is any guarantee that the GOP’s presidential frontrunner is done talking about those fancy boots.
