For as long as the Ron DeSantis presidential campaign existed, it was a fireworks display of hired hands trying to avoid blame for why irate donors’ hundreds of millions weren’t stopping Donald Trump. Campaign managers and strategists came and went, as did their super PAC counterparts. Reboots? They had a few.

Even before DeSantis suspended his campaign prior to the first presidential primary, the obituaries—a sort of arbitration process for Team DeSantis members to iron out their competing cover-your-ass claims—were streaming out. Just hours before DeSantis dropped out on Sunday, for example, we learned from NBC News that the latest head of DeSantis’ paper-tiger super PAC, Never Back Down, was “spending a significant amount of time in the precious final few days” before the Iowa caucuses “constructing a peaceful 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of a landscape.”

“The fact that one of the top people in charge of securing a win for DeSantis in Iowa was spending time on something unrelated to the caucuses,” the first draft of history reads, “was emblematic of the mismanagement and wasted efforts that many of DeSantis’ own supporters say have plagued the campaign from the very beginning.”

The anecdote, replete with a clandestine photo of office puzzle-work being done, is absolutely funny. Not, however, because it’s ludicrous that someone might do a puzzle for sanity’s sake in moments of downtime. The Iowa winner was already well determined, and DeSantis ended up outperforming his polling in the state anyway. What’s funny is the pettiness of the finger-pointing, as if a tactical mistake in this or that moment—or even the summation of all of them—might have made the difference.

It wouldn’t have. DeSantis proved to be no one’s vision of a natural, smooth candidate on the stump. Ideally, you want a pol who does not lick his whole face when he finishes speaking. But the answer to the question DeSantis had decided to test—do Republican voters want someone other than Donald........

© Slate