Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, MAGA Wednesday Edition, and happy March Madness to all who celebrate. (For those whose teams did not make the Final Four: my condolences.)

As it stands, Donald Trump still leads the Republican field, and Ron DeSantis is still trying his best to avoid saying his name, but the clock is quickly running out on how long he can stay out of the arena. Tonight, the state of play in Tallahassee, along with the prerequisite G.O.P. consultant bitching about a certain new guy in town.

Tina

P.S.: For a dose of razor-sharp legal analysis on Trump’s ostensibly looming indictment, catch Puck’s resident legal expert Eriq Gardner in conversation with our executive editor, Ben Landy, this Thursday at 2 p.m. ET. The private, off-the-record call is only available to Inner Circle members—you can upgrade your subscription here.

The Morgan interview, which came on the heels of news that Trump might soon be indicted, seemed to position DeSantis to enter a new gear. But a series of rare self-imposed mistakes ended up stealing the show, and generating headlines of their own: drama surrounding his book tour that alienated G.O.P. firms and Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds; an NBC story quoting allies questioning whether he is ready for prime time; and, as I reported last week, agita over whether DeSantis’s less-than-vociferous defense of Trump’s legal troubles had damaged his standing among the MAGA base. With his polling stalled, at least one major donor has reportedly paused their financial support.

It’s telling that these concerns are spilling out into the press at all: DeSantis and his wife Casey are known for their iron grip on the information flow surrounding their political operation, to the point that they’ve made their staffers sign N.D.A.s and mostly disengaged from mainstream media, providing access only to favored conservative outlets. But the DeSantis informational clampdown hasn’t been as airtight outside of their Florida bubble—out-of-state poobahs have less to fear from Casey, after all—hence the sudden outflow of internal griping and grievances that had previously been contained. As DeSantis’s organization grows, and his profile evolves from governor-level to the stratosphere of national candidacy, his megalomaniacal and controlling mom-and-pop management style appears woefully incapable of directing a scaling political operation. This recent sniping, to be sure, can be chalked up to the growing pains of a candidate truly inhabiting the spotlight for the very first time.

But second, and more importantly, the proliferation of negative stories reflects a very real and growing concern among DeSantis allies that maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t have the juice. In the months since he announced his campaign, Trump has consistently led DeSantis by double digits, a lead that barely wavered even after the news broke that he might be indicted, according to a pair of Morning Consult and Quinnipiac polls conducted last week. “It’s far too early to say death. They need to get organized this month and stop the current course,” a pro-DeSantis G.O.P. consultant told me. “But if Trump gets more momentum it’s going to be a huge problem. If Vivek [Ramaswamy] or someone like that gets a big pop, it’s a huge problem.”

The “DeSantasy” also involved a degree of wish fulfillment. National polling suggests that Trump would lose in a rematch with Joe Biden, while DeSantis, who is almost 40 years younger than either candidate, would eke out a win. Even for Trump supporters, that logic should be compelling: In the end, isn’t any Republican in the White House better than no Republican?

But primary voters, not moderates or independents, will decide who ultimately takes on Biden. And as one G.O.P. comms official recently put it to me, there is now an overriding fear that DeSantis, despite his executive record in Florida, doesn’t have the charisma or the appetite to battle Trump for a G.O.P. base that prefers Wrestlemania-style beatdowns to policy white papers and pre-scripted, passive-aggressive digs. “There comes a point where he has to defend his record and his character and his perspective on why he’s getting into this race, if he does indeed decide to, and acting like Trump’s not there is not gonna work,” said the comms official. “Not in the primary.”

Sure, it’s not like DeSantis’s popularity has collapsed—he’s still the leading viable Trump alternative, according to recent polls—but Trump’s schoolyard bullying of “Ron DeSanctimonious” appears to be evolving into more surgical strikes. Digs at DeSantis’s operational ties to Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz alumni, in particular, may have staying power. “The party can’t take another Mitt [Romney] or Jeb, which is why the Jeb staffing comparisons have been so damning to Ron nationwide,” the pro-DeSantis consultant explained.

It’s important to note that two former Trump staffers, Matt Wolking and Erin Perrine, had recently sided with DeSantis. “Trump was the president we needed 8 years ago, but to make America great again, our movement needs a disciplined leader who wins instead of loses, never backs down, fights smart, and puts the mission before himself,” said Wolking, the former deputy comms director for the Trump 2020 campaign, in a tweet explaining his decision to join Never Back Down. “On each count, Governor Ron DeSantis is the strongest choice.”

If there’s been one bright spot amid the flurry of dour news surrounding DeSantis, it’s that he’s still competitive in early primary states. A poll published Sunday in Axios, conducted by the G.O.P. firm Public Opinion Strategies on behalf of an unnamed client, found that DeSantis leads Trump in Iowa, by 45-37, and is tied with him in New Hampshire. That leaves open a lane for DeSantis to gain early momentum in the electoral college, even if he’s behind nationally—just as Obama eclipsed Clinton in 2008. “Ron has to win it in Iowa—Iowans are the most thoughtful, least likely to be influenced by outside forces—and then New Hampshire,” the pro-DeSantis consultant told me. “But it also takes retail [politics], and that is the challenge.”

In the wake of the news that he’d joined Never Back Down, which is widely expected to receive the $83.4 million sloshing around in DeSantis’s own super PAC, one consultant forwarded me a pointedly unsubtle meme. It depicted Roe as the McDonald’s Hamburglar, running to the DeSantis super PAC with a tray of precious money burgers, with a trail of losing campaigns (David McCormick, Josh Mandel, Jim Lamon) in his wake. The implication, of course, was that Roe is an opportunist, with his firm, Axiom Strategies, having profited off a string of high-profile losses. But, pettiness and professional jealousy aside, it also speaks to the serious task ahead for Roe: Even with all the money in the world—and DeSantis has a lot of money banked in his super PAC—it takes more than donors and deep pockets to close a double-digit electoral gap.

The danger for DeSantis fundraisers, and the upside for the consultant class, is that his campaign will be tempted to throw money at issues that don’t necessarily have a financial solution. Or worse, that they spend indiscriminately and strafe the wrong targets. “Every campaign super PAC, and campaign for that matter, ends up planning to spend at a rate of ‘x’ and they always end up spending at a rate of 4-6x. I’ve seen it time and again with Jeb, Rudy, Marco, Cruz, everyone,” said Rick Wilson, the co-founder of The Lincoln Project and a pro-Rubio super PAC alum. “Look, once you start spending super PAC money to support a presidential campaign that gets behind the burn rate, it’s just astronomical, and people like Jeff Roe don’t work cheap.”

Wilson used the analogy of Right to Rise, the doomed Jeb! super PAC that raised $100 million in 2016, only to see Bush drop out by New Hampshire, as a cautionary tale: “He got behind, they did the wrong targets, and hit Marco instead of Trump, and could never catch up after.”