Former President Trump’s campaign said Thursday that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s White House bid is “marred by idiocy,” as the governor’s campaign continues to falter amid an attempted reboot.
The Trump campaign dismissed recent comparisons between the Florida governor’s reboot and that of the late Arizona Sen. John McCain (R), who revived his ailing presidential campaign to secure the GOP nomination in 2008.
“DeSantis’s campaign is marred by idiocy,” Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, senior advisers to the former president’s campaign, said in a memo Thursday.
“John McCain did not spend the opening week of his reboot explaining why his staff produced a video with Nazi imagery, and defending his comments that slavery provided ‘some benefit’ to enslaved Americans — while attacking black Republicans publicly in the process,” they added.
The DeSantis team fired a staffer last week who reportedly created a pro-DeSantis video that featured the Republican candidate at the center of a sonnenrad, an ancient European symbol used by the Nazis in their imagery and propaganda.
The Florida governor has also spent recent weeks defending his state’s new education guidelines, which require that students be taught that Black people benefit from slavery.
The Trump campaign instead compared DeSantis’s reboot to the widely ridiculed reformulation of Coca-Cola in the 1980s, often referred to as New Coke.
“New Coke fell flat after much fanfare, and studies showed that the more people consumed it, the more they disliked it,” Wiles and LaCivita said in Thursday’s memo. “Does that sound familiar?”
While DeSantis has largely managed to hold on to second-place in the polls, his support has continued to slip in recent months. A polling average from FiveThirtyEight showed the Florida governor trailing Trump by about 38 points Tuesday.