Trump advisers attack DeSantis in new campaign memo ahead of looming announcement
Mabinty Quarshie
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Top advisers on former President Donald Trump‘s 2024 presidential campaign heavily attacked Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), an undeclared presidential candidate, as the battle between the two men continues to devolve into open sparring between their affiliated super PACs.
Trump senior advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita lambasted DeSantis’s falling poll numbers in a memo released on Thursday. The former president has consistently led DeSantis and all other 2024 GOP hopefuls in recent polling, which Wiles and LaCivita were happy to point out. They noted Trump was leading DeSantis by 36 and 34 percentage points in a CBS News poll and a Morning Consult poll, respectively.
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Several polls “have each shown the same troubling trend for Ron DeSantis: the complete collapse of his position in the GOP nomination for President, as well as his ability to defeat Joe Biden,” the advisers wrote.
But DeSantis is the only likely Trump challenger to garner double digits in polls consistently. And in a troubling sign for Trump, a Public Opinion Strategies poll obtained by McClatchy last month showed DeSantis narrowly beating President Joe Biden in two battleground states, Arizona and Pennsylvania. Case in point: DeSantis beats Biden 45% to 42% in Pennsylvania and 48% to 42% in Arizona.
The Trump advisers also criticized the DeSantis-supporting super PAC Never Back Down for spending $7.2 million over the last three weeks on ad buys in key early primary states, including Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. “The $7.2 million doesn’t include thousands of pieces of voter contact mail, sent to GOP primary voters in multiple states — including an 8-page ‘novel’ — where the postage costs alone are hundreds of thousands of dollars!” Wiles and LaCivita wrote.
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“So, stated directly, what you are witnessing is a fleecing on an epic scale,” they continued. “Tens of millions of donor dollars spent, while poll numbers … drop.”
DeSantis has not entered the 2024 presidential race yet, but he is widely expected to announce a campaign after Florida’s legislative session wraps up Friday. On Thursday, he told reporters during a press conference, “Things will happen in relatively due course.”