It’s easy to forget this now, but, not so long ago, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appeared poised to win the Republican primary. Mega-donors were lining up behind him. The New York Post, on behalf of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, dubbed him “DeFuture” on its front page. Polls showed him neck-and-neck with the scandal-plagued Donald Trump. DeSantis had, apparently, figured out a way to stuff Make America Great Again into a sleeker, less objectionable package, one that appealed to both traditional Republican business interests and the newly influential far right.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Then DeSantis bombed on the national stage. He was a terrible retail politician, his utter lack of charisma a death knell in the early-voting primary states. He dropped out in January 2024 after blowing at least $160 million without a single victory to show for it.
Something similar looks set to befall Pierre Poilievre, the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party. Canadians head to the voting booth today, and, if the polls are accurate, the country will elect a Liberal government for a fourth consecutive term. Just a few months ago, this would have been unthinkable. The Conservatives enjoyed a 25-point lead over a Liberal Party led by Justin Trudeau. But then Trump started talking about annexing Canada, the deeply unpopular Trudeau resigned, former banker Mark Carney took his place, and a trade war got underway. Suddenly, Poilievre—who has spent the last several years remaking himself, and his party, in Trump’s image—started sounding like the enemy. Now he’s found himself in the very same predicament that DeSantis once did. The two men are an object lesson in the pitfalls of trying to do Trumpism without Trump.
Their similarities begin with their personalities. Neither man is exactly likeable. Both Poilievre and DeSantis look and sound like overgrown children, and that has made them vulnerable to ridicule. During his primary campaign, DeSantis was variously accused of wearing lifts in his cowboy boots, eating pudding with his fingers, and wiping his snot on other people. For his part, Poilievre appeared to stop wearing glasses after being compared to Milhouse from The Simpsons. (Unfortunately for him, Poilievre without glasses still looks like Milhouse without glasses.)
At the same time, both men struggle to talk like normal humans, especially when it comes to their pronatalist obsession with other people’s bodies and sexual proclivities. Poilievre, for example, can’t stop talking about women’s “biological clocks,” prompting a rival leader to quip, memorably, “I don’t think any woman wants to hear Pierre Poilievre talking about their body.” It would be petty to focus on their appearance and disposition were cruelty not so central to their political brands. Poilievre and DeSantis, both infamously thin-skinned, are the epitome of being able to dish it out but not take it.
Which brings us to another challenge both men face: they can’t stand up to Trump. Even as they copied his language and playbook, they couldn’t predict, control, or outdo the man himself. The basic premise of DeSantis’s primary candidacy—that Republicans wanted Trumpism without Trump—fell apart once the former president started hoovering up media attention and gained a wide lead in the polls. He was especially brutal with DeSantis, making fun of his height and name, and baselessly accusing him of being a pedophile.
Poilievre’s predicament might be worse. Even more so than DeSantis, he cribbed Trump’s talking points, railing against woke ideology and globalist elites so often that the Liberals, in an attack ad, intercut clips from Poilievre’s and Trump’s speeches, just to drive the point home. But his campaign has struggled amid resurgent Canadian nationalism and voters’ deep dislike of the president.
Over the past decade, the far-right resurgence around the world has prompted a lot of comparisons between Trump and other leaders. But most of these politicians—Hungary’s Viktor Orban, France’s Marine Le Pen, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and so on—speak in their own vocabularies and draw on their countries’ deep-rooted traditions of reactionary populism. DeSantis and Poilievre, on the other hand, are mere imitators. This was especially egregious in Poilievre’s case; he imported culture-war dogma from the U.S. even as the Canadian government slapped actual U.S. imports with reciprocal tariffs. There has never been a worse time for a Canadian politician to sound American.
In some ways, both DeSantis and Poilievre are pitiable. They’re classic Napoleon-complex figures: minor men with big dreams and a self-regard at odds with the limits of their talents. Like DeSantis, Poilievre was thought to be the face of conservatism’s future; he’s reportedly told allies he has no right to lose this race. But it looks as though he will.
Of course, it’s possible that the polls are wildly inaccurate, and that Canada’s Conservative Party will somehow eke out a win tonight. But, right now, Poilievre, like DeSantis, looks an awful lot like one of Trump’s favorite insults: a loser.
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