“When the going got hard, beginning with COVID, he just tucked in behind Trump and drafted behind Trump all year long,” said Mac Stipanovich, a Tallahassee consultant and anti-Trump Republican. “Whether it was not paying a great deal of attention to potential initiatives to reduce the spread [or] echoing Trump’s dismissive attitude about it all, he quickly reverted to a cartoon of a right-wing, populist ideologue, a mini-Trump, where he finds himself now.”