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The Ron DeSantis campaign for president ended the same way it began: as a punch line.
What started with a disastrous launch event using the Twitter Spaces audio-chat service in May sputtered to a finish yesterday afternoon with a video uploaded to the social platform, which has since rebranded as X. The Florida governor, in both his scripted remarks and his social-media posts yesterday, misquoted former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. “It is,” Justin Reash, the executive director of the International Churchill Society told me, “one of the most commonly used misattributed quotes of Churchill in existence.”
So recurrent is the misquotation, in fact, that it appears on the society’s website in a list of commonly bungled comments, right alongside this classic: “If you’re going through hell, keep on going.”
To end his campaign-trail hell, DeSantis or some unfortunate member of his staff quoted Churchill as saying, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
The revered statesman never said it. (Or, as Reash more politely put it, “There is no documented attribution of Churchill making this statement.”) The sentiment actually comes from a Depression-era advertisement for Anheuser-Busch. Language from the beer ad was somehow, through the decades, transposed and tweaked and assigned to Churchill.
But enough with pesky “facts” and “attribution.” DeSantis wanted the quote. He needed the imaginary Churchillian battle cry to dignify his GOP-primary loss to Donald Trump, to transform his demeaning return to the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee into something resembling an act of heroism. So he declared that failure isn’t failure and persevering is courageous, then said in his web video, “While this campaign has ended, the mission continues. Down here in Florida, we will continue to show the country how to lead.”
No doubt this was a stirring message to the faithful—“I like what you wrote from Winston Churchill,” one DeSantis fan commented on Facebook—but the screwup was spotted by political pros within minutes. I first read about it via the X feed of Ramesh Ponnuru, the editor of National Review, who wrote: “The International Churchill Society says this is a fake quote.”
That’s how I was introduced to the society, and how I met Reash, who told me via email—several hours after fact-checks of DeSantis began ricocheting around the web—that the society often enjoys a sudden surge in interest “when public figures make reference to Churchill or invoke his legacy.”
Why the flailing DeSantis campaign didn’t contact the society ahead of time is a mystery. “If his expensive staff had looked as far as the third link on a Google search, they would have known this,” former ProPublica President Dick Tofel wrote on Threads.
Indeed. It does take a certain type of campaign aide—perhaps one suddenly and unexpectedly facing unemployment—to decide to caption a candidate’s I surrender and I support Trump post with a made-up quote.
The low-stakes, laugh-out-loud blunder is a perfect distillation not just of DeSantis’s failed presidential bid but also of the Fox-powered right’s post-truth culture, where cribbing and cheating never seem to matter. DeSantis himself called out this phenomenon earlier in the month, but only as it related to Trump and the conservative media’s fear of angering their audience by pointing out the front-runner’s failings. “All these conservative radio guys and Fox News people, they will never criticize [Trump], because they’re so concerned that someone might yell at them,” DeSantis said.
Now the joke is on DeSantis, in more ways than one. When word spread on social media about the misattributed quote, detractors began to mock DeSantis on his Facebook page. “Thank your terrible team for making you look even more goofy on your way out,” one commenter wrote. “My goodness, you can’t even end your campaign on a solid note,” another wrote. On X, where the DeSantis post is now accompanied by a fact-checking note, DeSantis critics pointed out that he ordered a state probe of Anheuser-Busch last year. It sounds too strange to be true, but it happened: A right-wing rage mob objected to Bud Light’s brand deal with Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender social-media influencer, and the ensuing boycott dented sales of the beer, weighing on the parent company’s stock. Amid this outburst of transphobia, DeSantis told his government to investigate whether Bud had “breached legal duties owed to its shareholders.”
DeSantis won the headlines he wanted—“The Latest ‘Woke’ Target for Ron DeSantis: Bud Light”—making it even more amusing that he ripped off a Budweiser ad.
But, hey, he thought he was invoking one of the 20th century’s greats.
Leave it to the International Churchill Society to sort it all out. Reash told me that misquotes such as “Success is not final, failure is not fatal” are commonly thought to be accurate because “they are short, witty, and they ‘sound’ like something Churchill would have said, thus giving one a false sense of confidence that it was actually something he uttered or wrote.”
In a way, Reash said, it’s “a compliment to his legacy because these quotes denote resilience and perseverance, two things commonly associated, and rightfully so, to Churchill.”
Reash volunteered one of his favorite legitimate quotes of Churchill’s, which might apply to DeSantis the day after conceding: “I could not live without champagne. In victory I deserve it. In defeat I need it.”
