Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, Puck’s daily politics email from Julia Ioffe, Tina Nguyen, and yours truly, with occasional cameos from the inimitable Peter Hamby (currently honeymooning through South Africa). In tonight’s edition, a DeSantis travelogue with a twist, plus some Sununu b-sides from my reporting trip through New Hampshire.

But first…

• Trump Ambassador Knife Twist: Why does it seem like so many of Donald Trump’s ambassadors are failing to win his endorsement? To wit: Kelly Craft, his former ambassador to the U.N., lost her bid to become governor of Kentucky after getting the endorsement of Ron DeSantis and hiring the Jeff Roe. Trump also didn’t support Carla Sands, his former ambassador to Denmark, in her Pennsylvania Senate primary bid. He wouldn’t support Lynda Blanchard, former ambassador to Slovenia, in the primary for the Alabama Senate seat vacated by Richard Shelby in 2022. He even passed on Gail Huff Brown, the wife of his ambassador to New Zealand, Scott Brown, when she ran for a House seat in New Hampshire last cycle.

  I’ve been told by a former Trump State Department source that the philosophy is as follows: Trump doesn’t feel any extra loyalty to his ambassadors, who, in his mind, owe him for their service, and not the other way around. The favor was extended and he owes them nothing more, even if endorsing them would have shown that he actually believed in his own personnel decisions. In fairness, Trump did endorse his ambassador to Japan, Bill Hagerty, for Senate in Tennessee in 2020. (Hagerty won that cycle, but Trump did not.)

  I reached out to Trump’s campaign for a comment, which they were happy to provide. “President Trump’s endorsement is the single, most powerful endorsement in political history, from ambassadors running for office to state party chairs to mayors to statewide officials to congressional members and to governors,” said his spokesperson Steven Cheung.

It was a litmus test of sorts for Sununu, who’s had his own problems with state Republican legislators ever since he backed down on a deal to limit the length of time a governor can unilaterally call for a state emergency, which he did during Covid. So for now, it’s mostly Trump and DeSantis fighting for those endorsements in advance of the oncoming primary, which will formally initiate a Republican presidential race that already feels two years in the making. Sure, these endorsements matter less than they once did, especially since state reps “tend to be political neophytes,” as one New Hampshire presidential consultant told me. (“There are 400 of them. They can hardly find the statehouse, and oftentimes that is a good thing.”) But the symbolism still carries some weight. Jason Osborne, the legislature’s majority leader, actually left a pledge on Sununu’s desk last week asking him to endorse DeSantis, and it hasn’t been answered, I’ve been told.

Anyway, I’d come for Sununu but I was staying for DeSantis. The Florida governor, after all, is obviously one of the most important if enigmatic and sequestered national candidates of our age—a Harvard-Yale class warrior and apparently socially anxious former JAG who hired Jeff Roe and yet relies on the same provincial Tallahassee inner sanctum. I personally wanted to know if he was concerned about how his 6-week ban on abortion would impact his chances with voters. I also wanted to know if he was concerned that the issue constantly comes up on my calls with some of his biggest donors, tormenting the likes of Ken Griffin and Steve Schwarzman. And how the Disney battle plays with the libertarian crowd in the Live Free or Die state.

On Friday, I arrived at the Bedford Village Inn to hear DeSantis make his pitch to legislators. I was standing alongside the broadcast networks, a reporter from The Washington Post, and one from The New York Times who had flown in from Miami. On television, DeSantis can come across as savvy, reasonably well media-trained, and sometimes aggressive. (His wife, Casey, is a former local news anchor.) But in person, I immediately sensed a very different potential candidate: a guarded politician who had no interest in actually engaging with other humans, and was perhaps even a little scared of the spotlight. He had trouble making eye contact with people in the crowd. After five minutes of unmemorable remarks, we were quickly ushered out of the room so that DeSantis could have a private conversation with a group of people who had already endorsed him. It was unlikely that hard-hitting questions were coming his way.

The frustrated journalists were told not to worry: We’d soon be heading to the Red Arrow Diner, where we could see DeSantis in all his retail politicking glory, and ostensibly ask him questions either by way of scrum, round-robin, or extemporization. It was to be an early test of the press-averse governor’s ability to banter with the media in a laid-back environment, shaking hands with supporters at a place that serves the Trump Tower burger—a heart-stopping confection that combines two grilled cheese sandwiches, a beef patty, and fried mac’n’cheese, all with fries on the side.

As our small pool rushed over to the diner, however, DeSantis quickly bypassed the press while I volubly asked him whether he would take a meeting with Bob Iger. DeSantis didn’t acknowledge me, and instead seemed to be turning his body away from the scrum as he moved into the diner for photo-ops with the red-meat MAGA crowd. When I entered the crowded joint, I tried a more straightforward, if simple, query: “Governor DeSantis, why won’t you talk to the press?” This time DeSantis licked his lips nervously, and made sure not to look my way.

He immediately showed off his very limited retail skills. He asked one patron, “What’s your name?” The man responded, “Tim Anthony.” DeSantis just responded: “Ok!” and moved on. (He did make some news about Disney inside the diner when a patron asked about the situation, calling their tax status “corporate welfare” and vowing not to back down.) I shouted a few more of the same questions about Iger and Disney before DeSantis rushed past the scrum that was filming his photo-op with a child, his back to us, and slipped into his black-tinted S.U.V. and on to Concord for his meeting with Sununu.

It was my first personal observation of what DeSantis’s critics mean when they call him a paper tiger—a superficially perfect test-tube Republican candidate who, on closer inspection, is probably not ready for prime-time. Semafor’s Max Tani reports that DeSantis’s team is working to encourage him to engage more with national press, largely against his will, because everyone knows you need the coverage and the give-and-take, even if, like Trump, you’re using it to bash the media itself. But perhaps even Roe and his super PAC allies know that DeSantis isn’t yet capable of handling the heat, which is why they seem so intent on protecting him from himself. (A person familiar with Roe’s thinking said that he’s advising DeSantis to go dark with the press before his official campaign announcement, which may come as soon as next week.)

It’s one of the few conclusions I could draw after witnessing his poor performance at the Red Arrow diner, a low-wattage stage brimming with sycophants; or after his meeting with New Hampshire legislators, where, I heard, he apparently rambled on about his own Florida delegation, which is overwhelmingly Republican and less complicated to handle than New Hampshire’s. He was, I hate to say it, sanctimonious about his record, according to people in the room.

Can the same candidate who whiffed a diner photo-op learn to command the Iowa state fair, let alone a CNN debate stage? You can understand why major Republican donors have their doubts. Trump is Trump, of course, with all of his flaws, but he exudes a weird charisma that, love it or hate it, was plainly on display when he visited the same diner in April. Outside the Red Arrow, NBC’s revered correspondent Jon Allen called out to the former president to get his thoughts on Mike Pence’s testimony before the federal grand jury investigating the aftermath of the 2020 election. Trump walked right up to him, looked into his iPhone and said “I don’t know what he said, but I have a lot of confidence in him.” Trump, for all his lies and bullshit, is not afraid of the press, and that’s likely why he’s a stronger candidate, doubling DeSantis in some recent polls. It wasn’t until Trump started engaging with the press again that his numbers actually went up.

I decided to try once more with DeSantis at the State House. After he was done snapping photos with supporters in Sununu’s office (and after clearing my presence with his security detail), I peaceably followed DeSantis down a stairwell asking him more questions, each of which he gamely ignored. Indeed, DeSantis seemed almost to be running away from me. The slow-motion chase ended with DeSantis behind the black tinted-windows of his S.U.V., as I asked him once more if he wanted the opportunity to talk to the press. His two-car fleet then sped away.

Afterward, I sat down with Osborne, the majority leader and a presumed libertarian, one of the most influential figures in New Hampshire politics, who had just endorsed DeSantis. Unlike DeSantis, however, he was happy to talk. He eventually confessed to me that his favorite Disney character is Han Solo, an answer I could not get from DeSantis.