Ron DeSantis’ Iowa bus tour is a sad (but hilarious) spectacle
Oh, readers. I've been trying to write a post updating you all on the state of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' Iowa bus tour, I really have. I've been trying for days, even. DeSantis, prickly misanthrope ...
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Oh, readers. I've been trying to write a post updating you all on the state of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' Iowa bus tour, I really have. I've been trying for days, even. DeSantis, prickly misanthrope whose every smile looks like he practiced it in a mirror using a badly taxidermied squirrel as his reference model, is currently tooling around Iowa. On a bus.
I have tried so hard, but at this point it almost feels like punching down. It feels like picking on a child. And sure, the child is the meanest son of a hamster you've ever seen, a bully and a fascist whose only friends are rich-as-snot real estate tycoons and random Florida Nazis. This is a child who arranges for desperate migrant families to be dumped off on random street corners because he thinks it would be funny. But still.
We have to do this anyway, though, because this is a site about politics. This is politics, and I'm very sorry but I'm going to tell you in advance that this is going to be a shambles on my end. We're all going to run with it anyway, because if David Brooks could make a whole career out of saying whatever popped into his vapid head, having his editors slap some self-important headline on it, and then everybody claps and invites him on television again, we can burp up pretty much anything here and then go around praising each other for being so insightful. Shall we?
The important news from the campaign trail is that DeSantis is in Iowa, on a bus. We've yet to see any footage of DeSantis actually traveling on the bus as opposed to just coincidentally showing up wherever the bus does, but we'll be charitable and assume that somewhere in that hulking Transformers-colored spitemobile is a pod where DeSantis is stored when he's not needed, a place where his engineers can check over his hydraulics and patch up any parts that threaten to shoot hot oil on babies he's supposed to kiss.
Semafor reporter Dave Weigel drew the short straw and got put on DeSantis bus duty, and here's his picture:
Damn, that is a low-slung bus. I know Iowa is flat, but this thing looks like it would wreck itself on the first stray cat to cross its path. We'll presume it's one of those buses that has a flip to switch to bottom out the suspension so that DeSantis doesn't have to try to navigate an extra 6-inch drop in those heels. If you've got the hydraulics on board for running a whole DeSantis, running a hose to the axles is no big deal.
As Weigel points out in that post, there's a catch here. Technically speaking, DeSantis is not on an Iowa bus tour—not like former candidate Mitt Romney once was. Technically speaking, DeSantis has a super PAC and it's the super PAC that has organized a bus tour, completely independently from the campaign because otherwise it's illegal. Then they invited DeSantis to come along as their "guest."
This is a ploy that DeSantis has been riding hard throughout the campaign: outsourcing even things like door-knockers to his PAC so that his not-campaign can accept unlimited cash contributions from rich snots who like fascism. Yet DeSantis' actual campaign is still running out of money because he’s been blowing the money on private jets and premium hydraulic fluid that smells like mint juleps.
So it's the super PAC that's driving a bus around Iowa, and DeSantis just happens to be on it, or near it, because how about that: He just happened to have some free time on the campaign trail that completely coincidentally matched up with the exact dates and locations of the bus (which I have named Optimus Subprime because I am allowed to do these things).
And he goes around to Iowa fairs or whatever, and Weigel reports that it was 97 damn degrees during the period when DeSantis here was chatting it up with people in a long-sleeved shirt and campaign vest.
It's not all corn dogs and hanging out in front of "SWINE" barns, though. The event before this one was noticeably less ambitious.
What the hell sort of decor is that? What is the vibe they were going for? The campaign had indeed announced that their "reboot" would see DeSantis speaking to smaller crowds in smaller spaces because, again, his campaign's been blowing through money at a completely unsustainable rate, but what are we even looking at here? Did they wall off part of a parking garage?
That isn't a campaign venue. That is an escape room. Those two dozen people are going to be asked to solve word puzzles about Ron DeSantis in order to win the key that lets them leave.
But there's a stage there, as you can barely see. So DeSantis popped up onto the stage that his campaign definitely did not set up for him, in the room his completely independent super PAC just happened to rent out in case he wanted to show up. DeSantis speaking to the crowd elevated the vibe from "escape room" to North Korean Chuck E. Cheese.
So no, things have not been going well in DeSantis-land. If you were an Iowan looking for information on the DeSantis bus tour of Iowa, either because you wanted to meet him or because you wanted to make damn sure to steer clear of him, you might do a Google search for "DeSantis Iowa bus" and look for local coverage. Google has its interminable "people also ask" section on the page. At the time this was being written, a Google search on "DeSantis Iowa bus" would bring up three suggested questions in the “people also ask” section. They are:
- "Is Ron DeSantis Italian or Spanish?"
- "How does DeSantis pronounce his own name?"
- "What religion is DeSantis?"
I tried so hard, dear reader, to give a flying damn about Ron DeSantis on a bus. But I just couldn't make it happen. Now if the engineers figure out a way to merge him with Optimus Subprime, turning him into a bus-sized mech that stomps through county fairs shoving corn dogs in his radiator and making children cry, that I could do justice. But DeSantis-themed escape rooms filled with two dozen Iowans who have absolutely nothing-the-eff-to-do in the middle of a damn Thursday? I'm sorry, there is just no magic that will make that scene interesting.
