When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis quit the race for the Republican presidential nomination, he did something very Donald Trump-like.

No, it wasn’t DeSantis’ endorsement of the former president’s increasingly bewildering campaign to return to the White House despite Trump’s relentless, personal and savage attacks on the Florida governor and DeSantis’ wife, Casey.

Trump, being Trump, disparaged DeSantis with a series of unflattering nicknames, calling the Florida governor, among other things, “Meatball” and “DeSanctimonious.”

But this is typical of the Trumpian era. The former president specializes in political rhetoric that consists primarily of insults no more elevated than the average second-grader could deliver on the playground at recess. Demosthenes or Abraham Lincoln the man is not.

Given that much of his success in politics can be attributed to his ability to pull his opponents down into the gutter with him, it’s not surprising that Trump lashed out the way he did.

Nor is it surprising that DeSantis took it.

What still surprises me, though, is that the Florida governor swallowed the assaults Trump made against Casey DeSantis. Trump accused her of election fraud and turned his surrogates, most notably convicted (and pardoned by Trump) felon Roger Stone, loose to assail her character and morals.

Political campaigns always have been rough-and-tumble affairs. Those who climbed into the ring expected to have to hit and be hit, often hard. Any part of a candidate’s record, past or character was considered fair game.

But not all that long ago, candidates’ spouses and children were off-limits.

Part of what turned the Republican hierarchy against President Richard Nixon during the last days of Watergate was Nixon’s decision to use his daughters to plead his case and engender public sympathy. By putting his girls in the arena, he was threatening the understanding that protected the families of public figures from the brutalities of political warfare.

The Republican bigwigs abandoned Nixon in part because they thought he might be exposing their families to harm—and they would not tolerate that.

Now, though, a former president bludgeons a rival’s wife—herself a breast-cancer survivor and the mother of three small children—and no one in the GOP says boo.

If there is a sign that the Florida governor intends to keep running for office as long as there is breath in his body, the fact that he supports the man who insulted his life partner and the mother of his children would be it. Clearly, ambition has such a hold on DeSantis that he is willing to do anything to preserve his political career options.

Including let another man trash his wife.

But that was not the most Trumpian thing DeSantis did in quitting the contest.

Right after he endorsed Trump, the Florida governor also took a gratuitous shot not just at another candidate, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, but her followers, too.

“We can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear — a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism — that Nikki Haley represents,” DeSantis said. “The days of putting Americans last, of kowtowing to large corporations, of caving to woke ideology, are over.”

A stupid, self-defeating attack such as that one is right out of the Trump playbook.

It’s a good part of the reason the former president lost the popular vote in the two national elections in which he was atop the Republican ticket. It also explains why Republicans lost congressional elections in 2018, 2020 and 2022 to a national Democratic Party that’s about as organized as a kindergarten lunch line.

Politics, the cliché goes, is about addition, not subtraction. The game is won by those who can bring the most people over to their side.

Trump and his followers, though, have spent much of the past decade telling huge numbers of voters not to consider voting for Republican candidates under any circumstances.

Now, not satisfied with chasing away independents and conservative Democrats, Trump and DeSantis have decided to tell Ronald Reagan Republicans and the GOP donor class to take walks, too.

For much of the past six months, political observers have been trying to solve this mystery: Why did Ron DeSantis do so poorly on the campaign trail?

The way the Florida governor left the race provides a clue.