Pour One Out for Casey DeSantis, America’s Premier Wannabe First Lady

Is it possible that Ron DeSantis is more relieved than anything else to be out of the presidential race? Throughout the Florida governor’s campaign for the Republican nomination, he’s faced frequent criticisms about his lack of ease and authenticity. But in the video he shared to announce that he’s dropping out, it’s hard not to pick up on a certain gleam in his eyes, and a smile that looks more natural than it has in ages.

This meatball is glad to be out of the oven. The voters who weren’t planning to show up for him sure won’t miss him. Is anybody upset about the DeSantis campaign’s collapse?

Well, yes, there’s at least one person I’d imagine to be pretty broken up over the whole affair: DeSantis’ wife, Casey DeSantis. While Ron never quite took to the campaign trail, Casey was ready to be first lady of the United States.

Casey plays a more prominent role in her husband’s political life than most elected officials’ spouses. “She is every bit as involved in Ron’s rise as Ron is himself,” one former Florida politician told Politico last year. Though the DeSantises would hate this comparison, in this way their partnership recalls that of Bill and Hillary Clinton during the former’s 1992 presidential campaign, when Bill was fond of saying that if voters chose him, they’d get “two for the price of one.” Casey and Ron, too, are a package deal, a “we,” inasmuch as they can be as members of a party that still favors pretty retrograde gender politics. It’s an alliance they both benefit from. Though he’s the politician, in some ways Casey is a much more naturally compelling figure than her husband: With her background in broadcast journalism, she’s comfortable in front of the camera, attractive, and a strong public speaker. As a cancer survivor and young mother, she’s also sympathetic and likable. Where he lacks charisma, she’s got it to spare.

But a spouse this involved can be a double-edged sword. That same Politico piece called Casey her husband’s “greatest asset and greatest liability,” responsible for just as many good choices as she is bad ones. It was reportedly her idea, for example, for the governor to shun mainstream media during the campaign, a decision that he recently spoke of with regret. And she is faulted with driving a wedge between the DeSantis campaign and Susie Wiles, a formidable Florida operative who left the couple to decamp to Trump’s 2024 operation. It’s also very possible she picked out his much-maligned cowboy boots. It’s unclear how many other doomed campaign choices Casey might have insisted on, though in the end, not everything can be laid at her feet: As Jim Newell wrote earlier this week in Slate, DeSantis never had a chance against Trump.

But still, Casey wanted it in a way her husband didn’t seem to. One way this was most evident was in how she seemed to have taken it upon herself to dress for the part of first lady. The media and observers on social media took notice, and with her gloves and pastel gowns, she earned lots of comparisons to Jackie O. Frequently not in a good way—it was less “She looks like Jackie O” than “Who does she think she is, trying to dress like Jackie O?” But Jackie O never would have worn a leather jacket that said “Where Woke Goes to Die” on the back, as Casey once did. Moments like this ensured that she was also sometimes compared with Melania Trump, and in November, she talked about this in a speech, saying it was “awesome” that she was being called “Walmart Melania”: “That’s the greatest thing you could call me! For me to be in the same sentence [as] Melania is a wonderful thing!” It’s ironic, of course, because Melania’s disdain for her role as a public figure shows that both the DeSantises and Trumps are in mixed showman/loner marriages.

It’s also a little hard to believe that Casey loved the Walmart part of that nickname: Reporting has revealed that the DeSantis campaign spent more on private jets than it did advertising, and some have suggested this was because Casey refuses to fly commercial. While we don’t know if that’s true—maybe Ron likes PJs just as much as his wife does—the duality of the Walmart shopper who is also a private jet passenger may be hard for some people to swallow. In any case, their private plane spending should go down considerably in the coming months, now that they won’t always have to be jetting off to Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina.

Though Casey may be confined to the skies above Florida for a little while, the conventional wisdom is that Ron DeSantis will be back to run again in 2028, and she’ll no doubt be right by his side. Though the ambition she displayed was neither admirable nor rare in a field that tends to attract monsters and narcissists, the nakedness of it was pretty notable. Even if you hate everything she stands for, there’s something about the intensity that she brings to embodying the cliché of “striving political wife” that’s hard to look away from. Her chances at being promoted from Florida first lady to first lady of us all have been snuffed out for now, but she’s made her mark on national politics as someone to be afraid of. I know I, for one, am scared.