Allies of former President Trump ridiculed Ron DeSantis on the eve of his 2024 presidential campaign launch, bashing the Florida governor for making his expected announcement on Twitter and mocking his campaign rollout.
“This is one of the most out-of-touch campaign launches in modern history. The only thing less relatable than a niche campaign launch on Twitter, is DeSantis’ after party at the uber elite Four Seasons resort in Miami,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump-aligned Make America Great Again Inc., said in a statement.
“Every day more and more Americans are realizing just how out of step Ron DeSantis is with their values and how unelectable he really is,” Leavitt added.
Trump campaign aides also piled on after it was widely reported that DeSantis planned to formally enter the 2024 race during a Wednesday night conversation on Twitter Spaces with the company’s CEO, Elon Musk.
Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s spokesperson, shared a screenshot of the announcement of DeSantis’s plans, which incorrectly listed the date for the event as March 24 instead of May 24.
“Amateur hour at the gator farm,” Cheung tweeted.
Cheung and another Trump campaign aide, Chris LaCavita, also swiped at DeSantis’s new website, which as of Tuesday afternoon featured only an image of a gator poking its eyes out of the water.
Cheung shared a picture of alligator skin boots, likely a nod to a viral image last year of DeSantis wearing boots with a heel, while LaCivita shared a photo of a gator being strung up by its tail.
Just before reports of DeSantis’s launch surfaced, LaCivita mocked DeSantis’s list of accomplishments by quote-tweeting a DeSantis-backer with the line: “his biggest accomplishment … is generating more candidates!”
The jabs from Trump’s team are likely a preview of things to come as DeSantis, who is widely viewed as the former president’s most formidable rival in a GOP primary, officially enters the race after months of speculation.
A RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Trump leading among GOP primary voters with 56 percent of the vote, with DeSantis running in second at 19 percent.
DeSantis’s team has for weeks argued that the barrage of attacks from Trump’s orbit only illustrates that the former president views the Florida governor as his stiffest competition.
“If Republicans want to get this country back on track economically, socially, the ability for tomorrow to be a better day, they’re not gonna get that by putting up the same fight we lost in 2020,” Erin Perrine, a spokesperson for the pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down. “It means a new direction, and that is showing that Ron DeSantis, this is a two man race, he’s the person to back in this race.”