Fear of an Awkward President

The teen, it seems, wanted to ask the Florida governor an earnest question. “I can’t legally vote,” the 15-year-old said to Ron DeSantis at an Iowa coffee shop recently.

“It’s never stopped the other party from not letting you vote,” DeSantis interjected.

I think he was trying to say “from letting you vote,” meaning that Democrats supposedly allow 15-year-olds to vote illegally. (DeSantis’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.) But he bungled his words, and either way, this is not a good joke. It’s especially not a good joke when you consider the second half of the teen’s sentence: “But I struggle with major depressive disorder.” Oof.

[Helen Lewis: The humiliation of Ron DeSantis]

This wasn’t an isolated moment of interpersonal clumsiness. On the campaign trail, DeSantis frequently behaves like he’s been dragged to a house party and is counting the seconds until he can look at his phone. He dryly remarked to an Icee-slurping , “That’s probably a lot of sugar,” and to a crowd of gathered fans that it was . When a reporter asked?” He has a that transforms abruptly into an okay-what’s-next industriousness. He passes up even obvious opportunities to show empathy, like when an 81-year-old veteran struggled to read the Pledge of Allegiance at his inauguration as Florida governor. Rather than take the man’s arm and offer help, my colleague , “DeSantis stood rigid and stern.”