I Regret Having Made Fun of Ron DeSantis For Standing Weird

His mannequin-receiving-a-prostate-exam-like posture should have been put into perspective

I’m not sure why Ron DeSantis lost, but it surely had something to do with him being generally weird. I struggle to find words to describe DeSantis’ affect — “stilted” and “trying to crush coal into a diamond with his sphincter” come to mind. But no single adjective really captures his nature. In the same way that Steve Buscemi’s physical appearance can be described as “funny lookin’ in a general kind of way”, Ron DeSantis is just weird, broadly speaking.

I’ve taken a few pot shots at DeSantis on this blog. I called him a “smile-free little league dad” and said that he stands like a Ken Doll waiting to be taken out of his packaging. In my defense: DeSantis does stand really weird. I mean, look at this guy: He looks like a robot in the Hall of Presidents trying really hard not to shit its pants.

DeSantis spent his candidacy standing weird, smiling weird, and being weird with kids. And then there was Lift Gate, in which DeSantis perhaps put lifts in his cowboy boots. DeSantis’ boots were examined like the Zapruder tape and Vivek Ramaswamy mentioned the lifts in a debate, which probably accelerated DeSantis’ freefall in the polls. And now, DeSantis’s campaign is dead, with his stage 4 Al Gore Disease being an obvious comorbidity.

Meanwhile: The guy who beat DeSantis is openly arguing that the law should not apply to him. He also made a serious attempt to overturn an election in an episode that many people — incredibly — now interpret as a Duck Soup-style faux-authoritarian farce. He has bragged about sexually assaulting women, had a jury find that he assaulted a woman, and is in the Jeffrey Epstein documents more than the n-word is in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

So, there’s that. But, once again: DeSantis stands really weird.

Why can’t we tell the difference between big things and little things? I’m not here to argue that DeSantis doesn’t stand like a guy trying to get a dog to lick peanut butter off his genitals — he definitely does. But it’s absurd that DeSantis’ posture would be given roughly equal weight as Trump’s open desire to turn the US into a Hungarian-style one-party state. Our collective ability to assess candidates’ faults is broken, and it’s been broken for at least eight years now.

The problem is that Trump’s crimes are so large, his behavior so egregious, that if other candidates’ faults were viewed in proportion to Trump’s, they wouldn’t be seen at all. Imagine that faults — all of them, from goofy posture to light treason — were weight. In that case, we would measure a candidate’s faults in pounds. A regular candidate might have 100 pounds of baggage, DeSantis’ weirdness might put him at 120, and a clear crook like Rob Menendez might tip the scales at 200. In this analogy, Trump would weigh about as much as a neutron star. Trump’s faults are so immense that he requires new scales of measurement — in this analogy, solar masses would be needed to measure Trump’s weight. And, of course, DeSantis, Menendez, and every other candidate effectively weigh zero solar masses; they’re simply too small to register on that scale. If we assessed the flaws of Trump and other candidates on the same scale, we would simply ignore the other candidates.

So, we don’t do that. Trump gets assessed on the Trump Scale, and we use the old scale for everyone else. I’ve experienced this in comedy: Trump arrived on the scene, he was orange, and we made fun of him for that. Around the same time, Marco Rubio had that weird water moment, Hillary made a bad Pokemon joke, and Jeb Bush tacitly admitted the flaccidness of his campaign by adding an exclamation point to his name. I, a union-certified comedian, wrote jokes about all those things. But then Trump kept going: He wouldn’t concede primaries when he lost, he stoked violence at his rallies, and he was so complimentary of dictators that it seemed like he was trying to sleep with them. Once Trump was president, he obstructed justice, extorted an ally, and staged history’s most inept autogolpe. But while that was happening, Amy Klobuchar ate a salad with a comb, so…yeah, I wrote a bunch of Amy Klobuchar comb jokes. Much of comedy is set up to cover politics from a breezy, Johnny Carson-style detached perspective, and most of what happens fits into that framework. But Trump simply doesn’t.

On the other hand: It can’t be argued that Trump has received too little attention from comedians. Some comics chronicled Trump’s every move with the voyeuristic energy of Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. Paradoxically, I don’t think this raised Trump awareness; I think it made it easier for people to identify that comedy as Resistance Content and tune it out. If you treat Trump like he’s ordinary, he becomes ordinary, but if you treat him like he’s extraordinary, people become so inured to the incessant outrage that he starts to seem ordinary. If Trump were five times more awful than the next-most-awful candidate, people might see him as five times more awful. But he’s actually five quadrillion times more awful, so our normal methods of perception simply go haywire and shut down.

That’s my experience as a comedian, and I’d guess that a lot of people in media have experienced the same thing. We don’t know how to talk about phenomena as disparate as Trump’s contempt for democracy and DeSantis’ weird posture in the same way.

My only solution to this problem is to periodically note that we’ve lost all perspective. So, this column is that note: Please mentally register that our perspective completely sucks. Ron DeSantis is rigid and weird, and he maybe also ate pudding with his fingers, which would be a Klobuchar-esque gaffe. But as far as I can tell, he’s never stoked a mob that was trying to lynch the Vice President. His worst sin is probably endorsing Trump, which he pathetically did. But when compared to Trump’s worst sins, DeSantis’ habit of standing like a pervert who’s enjoying letting the updraft from a subway grate tickle his anus is really nothing at all.