The prickly nature of DeSantis' personality, which can manifest itself in a strange mixture of detachment, mood swings and facial twitches, was an irresistible target for Trump, who seemed to enjoy bullying DeSantis as if he were stuffing a high school freshman. treasury.
However, DeSantis remains very popular in his home state, and outside Florida he is viewed relatively favorably. As a presidential candidate, he needed to succeed where every Republican before him had failed: turning loyal Trump supporters away from the former president without alienating them.
Donald Trump knows how to attract a crowd.credit: AP
Trump has long trampled on the boundaries of generally acceptable political behavior, relentlessly pushing racist lies about former President Barack Obama and urging his supporters to lock up Hillary Clinton. But his campaign reached new levels of cruelty against his fellow Republican.
These messages were often led by Trump's chief spokesman Steven Cheung, who drew on his background as a public relations executive for the Ultimate Fighting Championship to deliver brutal, guillotine-grip-strike-force blows to the sport.
Cheung said in November The Wall Street Journal That in Iowa, DeSantis would face “unimaginable pain that he has never felt before in his life.”
In a press release, he questioned DeSantis' masculinity, saying he walked like “a 10-year-old girl who had just raided her mother's closet and discovered high heels for the first time.”
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Cheung also referred to the Florida governor as a “desperate eunuch,” questioned why DeSantis was “putting himself out” in front of the entire country — sexist slang for a man's weakness — and accused him of looking for “new sugar daddies” for him. Funding his campaign. He called DeSantis a “traitorous dog.”
DeSantis fought back with a more traditional approach.
His campaign launched a “Trump Incident Tracker” in a daily email to news media that highlighted Trump's missteps along the way. He criticized Trump's “insults to young people,” saying voters did not like that. (The explosions of laughter at Trump rallies suggest otherwise.)
DeSantis eventually tried to up his game.
In response to accusations that he wore lifts in his cowboy boots to appear taller, DeSantis questioned Trump's manhood.
“If Donald Trump can call balls to the debate, I will be wearing a boot on my head,” DeSantis said.
The line doesn't seem to be going down. DeSantis himself has admitted that, unlike Trump, he is “not an artist.”
At the same time, pro-Trump online influencers have formed an army of trolls pumping out content including videos showing a man with DeSantis' face being kicked in the groin. By comparison, DeSantis' online operation has proven woefully inefficient.
The different approaches stem, in part, from the focus on DeSantis at Trump headquarters, where hostility toward the governor has been high.
Not only was Trump angry at what he saw as a blatant lack of loyalty from DeSantis, but the Trump campaign also includes former DeSantis campaign aides who were fired or felt mistreated by the Florida governor, including Susie Wiles, one of the former president's aides. Closest confidants. Many of them still have axes to grind.
“Bye, bye,” Wiles posted Sunday on social media about her former boss, who tried to distance her from Republican politics.
A quick endorsement from DeSantis on Sunday may help heal some of those wounds. Hours later, Trump vowed he would retire the “DeSanctimonious” moniker, and his allies began posting messages welcoming DeSantis back into the Trump fold.
But aides said Trump and DeSantis had not yet spoken.
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When asked if the two men could mend their relationship, Cheung held his fire.
“We're focused on New Hampshire,” he said.
This article originally appeared on New York times.
