Ron DeSantis finally goes after Trump on age. Here's what's good and bad about that.

As with most things DeSantis, this effort looks like a mixed bag, likely to deliver at a B- level.

I was supposed to do an interview on this subject with cable news yesterday, but it didn’t quite work out. So I figured I’d bang out a quick post on it here and send it around.

Ron DeSantis is finally going after Donald Trump on age.

From Axios:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, trying to cut into Trump's big polling lead in the GOP presidential race, has been targeting Trump's age.

Last week, DeSantis' campaign revealed a "Trump accident tracker" to compile the former president's verbal slips on the trail, and asked whether Trump had the "stamina" to be president — using a word Trump often has invoked against his opponents, particularly Hillary Clinton in 2016.

"This is a different Donald Trump than 2015 and '16 — lost the zip on his fastball," DeSantis told reporters in New Hampshire last week.

OK, so first things first: This general concept is smart. It’s going to be really hard if not downright impossible to move more than maybe 30 percent of people currently saying they’ll back Trump in a primary off of him. The only argument I’ve found works at all is age and infirmity and it only works when the target voter is presented with visual evidence of Trump acting like, well, Joe Biden.

But as with everything Ron DeSantis does, this is likely to prove to be a mixed bag and the campaign will only execute on this initiative at a B- level. That’s not going to do it because a) we’re past the point where I think DeSantis can turn this around and beat Trump anyway but b) for him to have positioned himself to do so earlier in the primary, he needed to be executing on an A-grade— not A+, but A— level, and doing it consistently. The whole campaign has been B-. This will be, too. Here’s why.

First, the DeSantis people made the typically DeSantis-y error of putting their name all over this instead of finding problematic footage and moving it around without fingerprints, or having some new SuperPAC that no one knows or can link to DeSantis do that and just get the footage out there for voters to see and respond to without a big fucking brand label that says “RON DESANTIS” all over it.

This matters because Ron DeSantis hasn’t proved to be as likable or popular as people who love him think he is, and so when voters who aren’t already diehard DeSantis backers— i.e. the target audience— see this, they’re more likely to dismiss it out of hand as just another attack by a desperate, flailing candidate. They may even assume the footage has been doctored or a deep fake is involved. Ron DeSantis is not speaking with a voice of commanding authority at this point in the GOP primary, so him doing this as we at Mair Strategies say “with fingerprints” will make it very fucking thin gruel relative to what it could have been if they’d done it, well, without fingerprints. Or harder to detect fingerprints. Maybe call them “partials" (Yes, I did just finish reading Robert Graysmith’s book about the Zodiac killer, what of it?).

Trump will definitely be dismissive of this effort and whatever evidence of Trump being past it that it presents. I fully expect that if Trump responds to this at all— and he might because Trump is irrationally vain when it comes to matters touching on supposed brains and supposed physical fitness (yes, we can all guffaw now) and it’s easy to bait him into doing stupid shit on both fronts— he will say all the footage or other detail is all fake. And his audiences will believe him, because they believe pretty much whatever he says. Like people watching WWE, they want to believe. That’s the whole key here.

But here’s another reason I don’t think this is going to work for Ron DeSantis: It feeds directly into Nikki Haley’s narrative and argument, not his.

Now, DeSantis’ team may be doing this fully aware of that fact and perfectly happy about it. Maybe they’ve realized they’re probably fucked, but she might not be, and some of them have decided to start setting things up so Ron will take one for the team. If so, great, I commend them, this is a good move.

But I don’t really think that’s what’s going on here given that DeSantis-world writ large seems to be spending considerably more time every day bashing Haley than they are bashing Trump.

Maybe a staffer has gone rogue, but probably the operation that pushes literally everything out through the official, branded DeSantis War Room Twitter handle just doesn’t get that some shit needs to be done “on background/not for attribution”— which by the way also means having halfway decent relationships with key press so you can push that stuff out through earned media who aren’t largely viewed as DeSantis mouthpieces. (And then sure, back it up with some paid media, but preferably through a SuperPAC that is new and isn’t known as of today to be DeSantis-linked, but can be described on paperwork as “anti-Trump” to obscure things some for a couple days or weeks or whatever).

So, if anything, this is going to feed right into Haley’s narrative and probably help her continue to rise as DeSantis falls, but not as much as it could or should because DeSantis’ staff and the candidate himself are delivering a consistent B- performance when a consistent A performance is what is needed.

Here’s one respect in which I might be wrong. Living in the land of hedge fund billionaires (Connecticut), I know a lot of very rich people who love DeSantis, but are pulling their money away from him and considering cozying up to Haley and/or Trump right now. This is because that’s where the action is and hell, if Trump is going to win it and be President again anyway, they really don’t want to be on his shit list and my gosh, if he might do more tax cuts, they’d love some of those please.

The only way DeSantis will convince these people to continue funding him, his SuperPAC, whatever other entities may be out there backing him, whatever, is by showing that he’s willing to punch Trump in the face— because candidly, the hedge fund billionaires haven’t been buying it. (I’m not a hedge fund billionaire, and I too have not been buying it).

So, if DeSantis brandishes around his “Trump accident tracker” enough, he might convince these guys to keep funding his overall operation. I still don’t think that delivers him an Iowa caucus win (and I definitely don’t think he’s winning New Hampshire), but it might give him enough resources to play with to get closer than the polls would suggest. For the record, the word “might” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the foregoing sentence.

I don’t really buy this, but I’m also not one of the people who makes the dollars-and-cents inexplicable decision to kit the nanny out with a Bentley SUV to drive the kids to and from hockey practice. So whether I would personally give DeSantis a dime for this is rather irrelevant; hedge fund boss up the road who did think the Bentley SUV for the nanny was a smart allocation of funds might also be good for another $250,000 to the DeSantis SuperPAC, and so might another fourteen of his friends. If so, well, that’s $3.75 million in the bank that isn’t there today. And you can buy a surprisingly large amount of ads in Iowa with that (though of course the ads may be total garbage).

But I’ll finish this by noting two things.

One: A “tracker” is a horribly 2008-era digital campaign move and I’m sort of surprised the super-online campaign couldn’t figure out something fresher and newer on this front. God, even the Twitter launch thing was fresher and newer and more attention-grabbing than this. It might even prove in hindsight to have been more effective than this with regard to the stated goal of getting DeSantis in a position to compete for the nomination.

I feel like back at the RNC in 2008, we had multiple trackers at different times. I don’t even remember them all. I’m sure we must have had a Biden gaffe tracker. How could we not? The point is, it’s been fifteen years. A tracker is more what I would have expected from Mike Pence, who has been stuck in 2003 basically ever since 2003, not from Ron DeSantis.

Two: Did you notice DeSantis’ version of punching Trump in the face is talking about how his fastball has slowed down? I say this as a former baseball pitcher and Trump critic: The issue is not that the fastball has slowed down, it’s that Trump is throwing the ball out from first base and whatever he’s aiming at, he’s as likely to hit the mascot as the catcher’s mitt. The issue isn’t “OMG, 60 mph.” The issue is “holy shit, that guy is away with the fucking fairies!”

I would finish by saying to the DeSantis team, “please try harder,” but I gave up on this guy later than everyone else and yet still weeks ago now. Maybe Nikki Haley can get the job done. At least if she cannot, it will be entertaining watching her display more balls on the debate stage than any of her male counterparts have, and possibly if she ever gets in a debate with Trump, literally impaling him with a stiletto (Dear Nikki, if you pledge throw a shoe at Trump’s head, I will max out to you right now).

Basically, as with the entire Ron DeSantis campaign, there was a kernel of a good idea here. But the execution was and will be lackluster. And this, to borrow a DeSantis-relevant point of reference, is the World Series, not a quite competitive Minor League game featuring guys about to get called up to play for the Seattle Mariners (let’s see how many baseball fans and native Seattleites get the inherent dig there; if DeSantis ever reads this, he definitely will).