This is where a lot of the postmortems on DeSantis’ campaign are going to go wrong. They’re going to focus on the infighting and mismanagement that seemed to be endemic to his campaign culture. They’ll revel in the palace intrigue about his leadership style. None of this is helpful to a campaign, there’s no question about it. But there is an open question as to whether even a perfectly executed strategy could have come anywhere near toppling Trump in a year that was certain to feature a flurry of indictments. The evidence suggests it would have been nearly impossible.

Could DeSantis have known this a year ago? By the time he launched, the post-Bragg gap was already widening. He had success and money and support, and voters were open to an alternative. It’s easy to second-guess his decision now. Yet with the benefit of hindsight, it’s also easy to see the window was closing for reasons that had nothing to do with DeSantis before he even entered the race. He said as much in his departure speech.