Florida Governor Ron DeSantis sounded like he was channeling Liz Cheney a few days ago when he lashed out at the very MAGA voters who he should be trying to court. During a sit-down interview with the Florida Standard, DeSantis called Trump supporters “listless vessels.” We are all mindless robots, devoid of purpose, who simply wait around every morning for President Trump to tell us what to do on Truth Social.

Welcome to the “basket of deplorables” moment of the 2024 Republican presidential primary. You might be wondering why Ron DeSantis is not up 50 points right now.

It looks like I called it correctly a couple of years ago when I mentioned that I really don’t like Ron DeSantis personally. I worked with his congressional office on an initiative back in 2014, when he was in the House of Representatives. He was standoffish and unlikeable. That’s fine. We’re conservatives and we’re adults, so we don’t have to like our candidates.

If a candidate has good policy and gets results, that is the metric we should measure them by, not a personality contest of some sort. Good grief, Richard Nixon won the largest landslide in American history, and it wasn’t because of his sunny disposition.

Here is the full Ron DeSantis quote, and you can watch it in the video clip posted below as well:

“A movement can’t be about the personality of one individual. If all we are is listless vessels that’s just supposed to follow, you know, whatever happens to come down the pike on Truth Social every morning, that’s not going to be a durable movement.”

And there you have it. The professional Republican class in Washington, DC hates conservative MAGA voters even more than they pretend to hate Democrats. They really, really hate us and Ron DeSantis is one of them.

What DeSantis and all of his friends in the professional political class in Washington, DC still fail to recognize after all these years is that this is our movement. We are the ones who were disaffected by politics and felt that our voices were not being heard. Republicans kept making empty promises to do what we wanted on the campaign trail, only to turn around and get drunk with Chuck Schumer when we sent them to the US Senate while laughing at the rubes in flyover country.

Every time. The policy priorities of the shrinking American middle class are something that professional DC has never cared about.

What DeSantis and GOP, Inc. still fail to understand after all these years is that Donald Trump is our vessel. A more accurate description of him, however, would be that he is our cruise missile. He’s not listless. He’s a laser-guided juggernaut of doom that we have aimed right at the butts of Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney and Paul Ryan and the rest of the “Watch me while I line my pockets first” fake Republicans.

To suggest that we are listless vessels is absurd. Everyone of us can tell you the three main planks of the MAGA movement.

First, immigration. Build a wall. Choke off all entry points. Block illegal aliens from entering and kick out the welfare leeches that are already here. That tightens up the labor market here inside the US, which raises American wages and lowers American rents.

Second, economics. Baseline tariffs on all imported goods. Higher tariffs on imported goods from countries that are openly hostile to us. Use the American economic engine as a national security tool. You want your goods to reach American consumers? Knock it off with the slavery, child trafficking, organ harvesting and suppression of free speech—and then we’ll talk. Impose reciprocal tariffs on all nations that we have “free” trade agreements with, instead of the one-way tariffs that only end up offshoring jobs to whichever country offers its workers the cheapest wages.

Third, foreign policy. Respect the national borders and sovereignty of all other nations. Stop putting sock puppets in office in foreign countries that turn those nations into vassal states of America. That never ends well and continuously causes us to get into “forever wars” that are ultimately unwinnable. (See also: Ukraine).

Sorry, Ron DeSantis. We are not listless vessels. We are the ones with sound principles, and Donald Trump is our vessel. The bad news for the Republican Party is that Donald Trump is now our baseline. Any candidate that does not share the three planks of the platform outlined above will never gain our votes in any future election. We know how good things can be, and we will never settle for less again.