So Mark you're packing for Des Moines. What are you going to be doing in Iowa?

I'm going to be following Ron DeSantis and seeing how he recovers from arguably one of the worst days I've ever seen a presidential campaign suffer.

Wow. Well, that's Mark Caputo, National Political Reporter for the Messenger, a veteran of NBC and Politico. He's been covering campaigns for decades.

So when you hear him say that about DeSantis, it's a big deal.

And I'm Brian Salter. Welcome to Vanity Fair's Inside the Hive. This week we are going inside the Ron DeSantis campaign and the race for the GOP nomination.

Because as you know, DeSantis was long seen as the best chance to beat Donald Trump in 2024.

But something's gone wrong. Maybe many things have gone wrong, right Mark?

And maybe some things that were perceived to maybe go right were wrongly perceived.

Maybe the Republican Party is not ready to quit Donald Trump.

Bingo. Well, you mentioned his worst day ever. That was Tuesday. I have to read from your lead for the Messenger.

You wrote DeSantis started Tuesday morning with a car crash and by lunchtime his campaign looked like a train wreck.

Let's just be specific here. There wasn't actual car crash. Everybody was okay, right?

It was true in Tennessee and he was in kind of a motorcade of his own staff and campaign and they kind of hit each other.

So no one was injured. So we're not engaging in shot and Freud or making fun of tragedy. But it's a metaphor alert.

Why was he in Tennessee raising money and campaigning? He's on the campaign trail constantly.

Yeah, he's Florida's governor. But right now his main job is trying to get elected president. And it's not going so well.

What about Tennessee as a very early primary state for the GOP?

Right. Well, it's a place where people have money. So he needs money. And that's where he is.

And speaking of money, you know, and kind of justifying that lead. So he had to lay off a bunch of employees about two dozen of them.

One of the employees I had secretly made a kind of a fascist hip, depending on your definition of hip.

This video where he featured DeSantis's face against a son and Rod, a Nazi appropriated runic symbol of a black son, which they discovered.

So he's among those who was dismissed, but most were dismissed for money reasons. And then on top of that, there was a new Iowa poll that showed him just badly trailing Donald Trump by 27 percentage points.

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