Whit Ayres:

It would be very difficult.

But Ron DeSantis may not be the one who has the best shot of doing it. Let's presume at the start that running for president is really hard. Lamar Alexander, our first presidential candidate, is used to saying that running for a statewide office and running for president is the difference between running for — or playing in eighth grade basketball and the NBA finals. It's really hard.

Let's also agree that no one has quite figured out how to deal with a Donald Trump full-fledged assault, not just on your character or record, which is par for the course, but on your appearance, your wife's appearance — ask Ted Cruz — presumably laying out allegations, totally unsupported, about pedophilia, like he did with Ron DeSantis. No one has done that.

That said, Ron DeSantis keeps making unforced error after unforced error. He said that Ukraine was just a territorial dispute, which really upset a lot of Republicans in the foreign policy world. He suggested that RFK Jr., a conspiracy theorist of the highest order, should run the Center for Disease Control.

And he keeps doubling down on the argument that somehow slavery was beneficial to some slaves. I mean, those are obvious cases where going one direction was the obvious answer, and he went the other direction. That makes me wonder if he's got the political instincts to play effectively at this level.

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