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Was at the Moms For Liberty National Summit in Philadelphia on Friday.

After seeing Trump & DeSantis up close, my main takeaway was this:

Trump stole the show and it makes DeSantis look overmatched.

Last year it was DeSantis who was the toast of the Summit in Tampa after co-founding Moms & fellow Floridians Tiffany Justice & Tina Descovich awarded the Governor a “Liberty Sword” for his success liberating students in the sunshine state from lockdowns & woke ideology while championing the emerging parental rights movement nationwide.

Governor DeSantis & Moms For Liberty appeared in lockstep, poised to export the policies & ideas that made covid-era Florida great to the remainder of the country still suffering under complete progressive institutional capture.

One Florida politics beat writer reacted at the time saying the Summit “had the feel of a DeSantis campaign event”.

There was no such feeling Friday. Trump captured the energy that was DeSantis’s to lose.

It was Trump who spoke as the evening keynote after hours of anticipation heightened by a secret service security sweep & a long shoulder-to-shoulder entry-line through a metal detector bursting with eager fans like so many recent Taylor Swift concerts, while DeSantis was relegated to a comparatively lull prior morning session after a brisk stroll right in.

It was Trump who the popular Florida congressman Byron Donalds declared would be the next president from the elevated podium draped in American flags, while DeSantis was without a comparably capable hype-man to be the alley to his oop.

And it was Trump whose trademark one-liners & zingers drew the crowd to excited applause over and over again while DeSantis’s faster pace of speech leaves less time for onlookers to just let loose & get lost in the moment with cheer.

DeSantis did indirectly accuse Trump of overpromising & underdelivering a time or two during his morning speech, but on the day after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action & just hours after they ruled in favor of religious liberty & free speech, the barb fell flat.

If last year’s Summit was DeSantis’s backyard barbecue, this year Trump showed up & started flipping the burgers.

And though calling DeSantis’s alpha quality into question is crass & oversimple, as Logan Roy recently put it, the fictional conservative media titan at the center of HBO’s hit show ‘Succession’: “sometimes, it is a big d*ck competition”.