De Santis has pulled out of the US presidential campaign

De Santis was struggling in New Hampshire and decided to pull out of the race before he got humiliated.

I have my own theories about why he looked good on paper but struggled in practice. His chief handicap is that he is of Italian descent.

All countries have their ideas of "good" immigrants and bad ones, and in the USA, Italians fall into the "bad" category. They started arriving in the 1870's and brought a range of bad behaviours with them, from corruption and tax-evasion at the low end, to mafioso behaviour, extortion, drug-dealing and murder at the high end.

Worse, even those not involved observed an omerta of silence, believing they owed loyalty to their ethnic group, not to the USA.

It wasn't till the 1990's that the Americans defeated the mafia, so it took 120 years and four generations. That's a long time to be bad immigrants.

Americans enjoy watching movies like The Godfather and shows like the Sopranos. But trust this group with the White House and the nuclear codes? No.