Yeah, it’s still really early in the campaign season but the fact that DeSantis wasn’t the force of nature many thought he’d be wasn’t exactly a good sign. Poll after poll after poll revealed that DeSantis trailed Trump as the GOP’s choice by large gaps, and there’s still a lot of time left for anything to happen that could change things, there was a pattern that DeSantis and his camp weren’t benefiting from and would do well not to stick to.

Back in early July, I wrote a piece analyzing DeSantis’s strategy and compared it to the other two contenders, Trump and Ramaswamy. As I concluded, DeSantis benefits nothing by trying to be a standard glad-handing politician. It betrays his dynamism and suppresses his image of being a man on the offense.

A better strategy would be for him to embrace his nature and, on top of that, take a few lessons from Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign and see to it that his social media feeds are filled with videos of him talking to people, debating with someone, making appearances on hostile networks to serve them their asses, and the like.

(READ: DeSantis Is Going About This All Wrong)

DeSantis must have thought the same as later that month he let a third of his staff go and began some course corrections. They seem to be working. I’m happy to say that the real DeSantis seems to be making his way back to the forefront. He’s making people deal with him, which was the attitude his campaign should have struck from the beginning.

As Bonchie wrote on Wednesday, DeSantis went from refusing to debate California Governor Gavin Newsom to accepting his offer with a smile. Newsom and DeSantis are both governors of states that couldn’t be considered more opposite ideologically, and their two respective states are often compared and contrasted in political debates.

It was always my opinion that DeSantis should have claimed Newsom’s scalp from the get-go. Not only would it show that DeSantis is a man on the warpath, but it would make it clear that DeSantis is a man who could bring even the left’s most popular champions to their knees. DeSantis’s victory over Newsom could have been marketed as “just a warm-up” and used constantly as an example of what kind of terror he could inflict on the radical left once in office.

This would have wet the appetite of many a voter. Now that DeSantis has accepted, we’re seeing more indications that he’s not playing the nice guy anymore. His knives are out and he’s planning on using them, and I’m taking that figurative tool from DeSantis himself.

On Thursday, The Hill reported that DeSantis has vowed to “start slitting throats on day one.” While this will reflexively make the left clutch its pearls, everyone else will be looking up like interested meerkats:

DeSantis made the remarks at a barbecue campaign event in Rye, N.H., hosted by former Sen. Scott Brown (R-N.H.).

“We’re going to have all of these deep state people, you know, we are going to start slitting throats on day one,” DeSantis said.

Atta boy!

This is the kind of thing conservatives want to hear. They want to see Ron “Danger” DeSantis. The nightmare of the modern left and leader of the anti-woke resistance. Conservatives have long stopped being the party of caring about whether or not they could sit down and have a beer with their preferred candidate. They want a leader with a killer instinct and a need to be in the fray.

(READ: Who Cares if You Can Have a Beer With Your Politician?)

That was DeSantis in Florida before his presidential campaign started, and that’s what won him a lot of his fame. He just needed to embrace that again, and it seems that’s exactly what he’s begun doing.