Ron DeSantis has little chance of beating Donald Trump

BELATEDLY and nervously, the would-be assassins have been lining up. On May 22nd Tim Scott, a senator from South Carolina, became the latest Republican to announce a run for president. Greater fanfare accompanied the official declaration (on Twitter) on May 24th that Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is joining the race for the Republican nomination. He has been widely heralded as the candidate with the best chance of defeating the favourite, Donald Trump. But even as more plotters step forward, the chances of a successful coup to overthrow Mr Trump are growing slimmer by the day.

Just a short while ago Mr DeSantis seemed successfully to have engineered a form of Trumpism without Trump. In November he won re-election in Florida by a resplendent 19-point margin. In damning contrast, Mr Trump’s attempts to play kingmaker in the midterm elections went disastrously wrong, with many of the candidates he endorsed losing races that the Republican Party had considered in the bag. Mr Trump appeared suitably deflated when he launched his presidential campaign on November 15th at Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Back then some opinion polls put the two candidates neck-and-neck among primary voters.