One of the first candidates to bite the dust in the 2016 Republican primary was Scott Walker, the popular former governor of Wisconsin. Walker had a nice campaign war chest from big-dollar donors, he was doing great in the polls, and he was the presumed frontrunner going into the first debate. Then it all went to poo quickly.

Last week we talked about how Gov. Ron DeSantis’s campaign cash burn rate was way too high, and he’s running out of runway fast. Walker agrees with that position, and he should know—he lived it in 2016.

Walker appeared on some third-rate liberal media outlet called “Fox News” the other day. I haven’t watched that channel since last April, but the headline caught my interest. Walker is pointing out exactly what we said last week.

The Ron DeSantis campaign has burned through a ton of cash in a short amount of time, and they don’t have the big money donors to replenish what they have. This was another entirely avoidable self-own by the DeSantis team. The burn rate was like 30%, and they had no new funds coming in to replace that in such a short amount of time.

Now they’ve had to fire a bunch of staffers and are trying to do a campaign “refresh.” It won’t work, but this is all entirely predictable based on having watched tons of campaigns fall into the same death spiral over the years.

You have to have a large base of grassroots, patriotic small-dollar donors to pull this off. DeSantis doesn’t have that. No one on the GOP side does except for Donald Trump.

I keep hearing the “electability” argument from people on the right who support Ron DeSantis. “He’s Trumpy without being Trump!” Yeah, yeah. I’m sure I’ve thought and said that myself a time or two. You’re not electable if you don’t have a huge base of voters who are willing to donate to your campaign.

Whoever the Democrat nominee ends up being, that person is going to be infused with $1 billion, largely in illegal foreign donations. The GOP nominee needs to be able to go up against that, and there’s no one but Donald Trump who can pull that off.

Electability! What does that even mean if someone is running against Donald Trump?

DeSantis continues to sink in the polls after every media hit and campaign ad that he runs. In the latest Iowa polling, Trump is at 46 points, DeSantis is at 16 and Tim Scott is at 11. In South Carolina, Trump is at 48, Nikki Haley has climbed to 14 and DeSantis is at 13.

Vivek Ramaswamy has just about pulled even with DeSantis in some polls. We’re seeing a lot of calls for Trump to choose Ramaswamy as his running mate, because he seems solidly conservative and he’s very polished.

Can we just please stop with this Ramaswamy infatuation? He is a Soros Fellowship recipient and a Big Pharma ripoff artist.

Ramaswamy’s company had like 8 employees during the pandemic, including his mom and his brother. The company paid $5 million for a patent on a failed GlaxoSmithKline drug. He then raised $360 million in investment capital from donors. On a failed drug.

Ramaswamy and his family then short sold their own stock and made a bundle when it went into freefall. It wasn’t a Sam Bankman-Fried level of fraud, but it’s still pretty horrible. All those investors lost their money, which Ramaswamy and his mom and brother pocketed. Nice work if you can get it.

So, let’s just ditch this Ramaswamy love affair, please, Republican voters?

As for the first debate coming up on Fox News, it’s looking like Trump is going to be a no-show. I wish he would, just because he’s so hilarious in debates, but I also see his point. He’s actually in talks to do a livestream or interview with Tucker Carlson during the Fox News debate, which would be a classic Trump move.

Here’s the interview with former Gov. Scott Walker, talking about what it’s like to trying to run a campaign against a juggernaut like Donald Trump.