This Rolling Stone piece about DeSantis’ angry former staffers is something else:
DONALD TRUMP LOATHES Ron DeSantis for the Florida governor’s “disloyal” challenge to Trump’s iron grip on the Republican Party. The former president’s ire, however, is dwarfed by the intense desire harbored by some of Trump’s key aides and allies to see DeSantis politically ruined.
These advisers, lawmakers, and operatives personally know DeSantis or used to work for him. Now, some of them are working to reelect Trump and have brought their intimate knowledge of DeSantis’ operations, and also what makes Trump’s likely 2024 primary rival tick. Just as importantly, some of the Team-DeSantis-turned-Team-Trump contingent have talked to the ex-president about how best to relentlessly mess with DeSantis, assuring Trump that the Florida governor is uniquely “insecure” and “sensitive,” and that it’s easy to get in his head, two such sources who’ve spoken to Trump tell Rolling Stone.
It’s one of the reasons why the open political warfare between Trump and DeSantis is only expected to get nastier in the coming months. “If Ron thinks the last couple months have been bumpy, he’s in for a painful ride,” says a third source, who used to be on Team DeSantis and is now in the Trump orbit.
his person continues, “The nature of the conversations among the people who used to work for Ron is just so frequently: ‘OK, how can we destroy this guy?’ It is not at all at a level that is normal for people who hold the usual grudges against horrible bosses. It’s a pure hatred that is much, much purer than that … People who were traveling with Ron everyday, who worked with him very closely over the years, to this day joke about how it was always an open question whether or not Ron knew their names … And that’s just the start of it.”
One Trump adviser who also knows DeSantis tells Rolling Stone, “Oh, I’ve told the [former] president several times how easy it is to mindfuck Ron,” adding they’ve told Trump that “[DeSantis] takes little slights and digs incredibly personally and doesn’t really let things go.
[…]
Trump has already demonstrated that virtually nothing is off limits in his campaign against DeSantis, who hasn’t even officially declared his 2024 candidacy yet. (The governor is clearly running a “shadow campaign” at this time, however.) Last month, the ex-president publicly suggested DeSantis might be gay. The month before that, Trump implied the Florida governor is a pedophile. That the allegations are baseless is not much of a concern to the 2024 Republican frontrunner.
“The only people who like Ron DeSantis are the people who have never met him,” Taylor Budowich, the head of the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. and Trump’s former spokesman, harshly commented to NBC News last week. Budowich, too, is a DeSantis alum, having worked with the DeSantis transition in Florida.
Stories of DeSantis colleagues and staffers describing the Florida governor as either cold or hostile are legion. Republican political operatives have slammed him as a man who is “missing the sociability gene” and “never says thank you,” even to major donors.
In a blistering 2021 piece, Politico reported on the existence of a so-called “support group” of “scarred” former DeSantis aides who meet to exchange stories on what they described as a nightmare boss that treated anyone not in his innermost circle “like a disposable piece of garbage.”
The irritation with DeSantis is evident in some of the embarrassing stories former staff have floated to the press. Former employees told The Daily Beast of the pudding incident, which reportedly involved the Florida governor shoveling the chocolate dessert into his mouth with three fingers to the disgust and amazement of those accompanying him on a flight to Washington, D.C. The detail went viral and provided the grist for a Trump-aligned super PAC ad riffing on the pudding incident and attacking DeSantis over Social Security policy.
The DeSantis campaign-in-waiting has been rocked by a series of rebukes from donors to members of the state’s Republican congressional delegation.
Over the past two weeks, members of Florida’s Republican congressional delegation have announced their support for Trump one by one and the steady drip-drip of endorsements hasn’t been accidental. As Rolling Stone reported, the slow rollout — planned to inflict maximum humiliation of DeSantis — was helmed in part by Susie Wiles, a former DeSantis aide whom the Florida governor blackballed from his political operation after she helped him win the 2018 governor’s race. According to people with knowledge of the matter, though, Wiles is more restrained, and less colorful, than other Trump acolytes in privately describing her bad experiences with DeSantis.
The article reminds us just how thin-skinned Trump is as well which is indisputable. (Apparently, that mushroom-shaped penis thing really got to him.)But I don’t think anyone enjoys destroying their enemies as much as Donald Trump so I expect he’ll go after DeSantis with gusto. And it sounds like there are plenty of former DeSantis staffers who are more than eager to help him do it.
Ron DeSantis must be a real asshole. It’s just not natural to have so many of your former staffers hate your guts.