You can tell why President Donald Trump secured the Republican nomination through a simple glance at the RealClearPolitics 2024 Republican presidential nomination poll average chart. It shows Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) steadily gaining support right up until the end of March. At that point, DeSantis was in striking distance of Trump, 30% to 45%.

But then something happened in April that sent Trump up 10 percentage points and DeSantis down 8. It wasn’t DeSantis’s disastrous Twitter/X rollout with Elon Musk. That wouldn’t come for another month.