It seems like Florida governor, Trump wannabe, and potential presidential aspirant in 2024, Ron Desantis, likes to use stunts to get attention. There’s just one problem — they seem to backfire on him. Yes, I’ve seen it written that DeSantis is a smarter version of Donald Trump, but that must be an awfully low bar. Here’s two examples:

Back in August, DeSantis bragged loudly about arresting 20 people for voting illegally because of previous felony convictions. One of them was dragged out of his house by police in his underwear. But there is a big problem — the arrested people had been told by their local election boards that they were eligible to vote. Why did this mix-up happen? Because the state (notably run by DeSantis) is required to notify the election boards of people who are not allowed to vote, but they failed to do that. Oops!

And the most recent one is DeSantis bragging (again loudly) because he dumped a group of Venezuelan refugees, without warning, in upscale Martha’s Vineyard. Note that these migrants were not from Florida at all. DeSantis chartered a plane, which picked up the non-English-speakers in Texas, had the plane stop briefly in Florida, and then fly them to Massachusetts. Just the cost of the flight was $615,000, which comes out to $12,300 per migrant.

Even worse, Immigration law experts say that DeSantis broke the law by trafficking migrants. But DeSantis doesn’t care. He doubled down, saying he will keep doing it. The Florida legislature allocated $12 million to transport “unauthorized aliens out of Florida”. But these people didn’t come from Florida, he picked them up in San Antonio, Texas.

DeSantis was trying to “own the libs” by dumping these migrants on Martha’s Vineyard, an upscale island that passed legislation making it a “sanctuary city”. Apparently DeSantis thought this would make the community look hypocritical when they couldn’t take care of the migrants, but this also backfired.

What happened, instead, was that residents of Martha’s Vineyard rallied to provide food, shelter, clothing and services. The asylum seekers are now on their way to Cape Cod, to receive further assistance. The stunt failed to make its intended point.

Is this the best he can do? If he keeps screwing up, there’s no way he will be president. In fact, he might even lose his governorship in the upcoming election.