Notes from the floundering campaign of Jeb Walker Rubio

Why is this man pretending to laugh?

Give Pudding Ron this much, his years of slavishly imitating Donald Trump has taught him the lesson of making sure to loot your own campaign funds:

Throughout the spring, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and his advisers waved off his sagging poll numbers with the simple fact that he wasn’t yet an actual candidate for president.

Two months in, however, his sputtering presidential campaign is still struggling to gain traction.

Allies are complaining about a lack of a coherent message about why Republican voters should choose Mr. DeSantis over former President Donald J. Trump. Early strategic fissures have emerged between his own political team and the enormous super PAC that will spend tens of millions of dollars to help him. His Tallahassee-based campaign has begun shedding some of the more than 90 workers it had hired — roughly double the Trump campaign payroll — to cut swelling costs that have included $279,000 at the Four Seasons in Miami.

Now, his advisers are promising to reorient the DeSantis candidacy as an “insurgent” run and remake it into a “leaner-meaner” operation, days after the first public glimpse into his political finances showed unsustainable levels of spending — including a taste for private planes — and a fund-raising operation that was alarmingly dependent on its biggest contributors and that did not meet its expectations.

Treating yourself in the style to which you feel yourself entitled is certainly a better investment of resources than trying to actually win the nomination, have to be fair. He should make an extra effort to “campaign” in Hawaii, prestige TV would seem to indicate that the Four Seasons in Maui is real nice.

The actual campaign spending side of things is a trainwreck anyway:

One recent move that drew intense blowback, including from Republicans, was the campaign’s sharing of a bizarre video on Twitter that attacked Mr. Trump as too friendly to L.G.B.T.Q. people and showed Mr. DeSantis with lasers coming out of his eyes. The video drew a range of denunciations, with some calling it homophobic and others homoerotic before it was deleted.

But it turns out to be more of a self-inflicted wound than was previously known: A DeSantis campaign aide had originally produced the video internally, passing it off to an outside supporter to post it first and making it appear as if it was generated independently, according to a person with knowledge of the incident.

Delegating your advertising operation to alr-right incels taking a break from their threads about how Margot Robbie is a 3 is an interesting approach, let’s see how it turns out.

Back to the self-dealing:

Second-guessing from political donors has intensified as Mr. DeSantis traveled this week from the Hamptons to Park City, Utah, to see donors. Records show the DeSantis campaign made an $87,000 reservation at the Stein Eriksen Lodge in Utah for a retreat where donors were invited to cocktails on the deck on Saturday followed by an “investor appreciation dinner.” It’s the type of luxury location that helps explain how a candidate who has long preferred to fly by private jets burned through nearly 40 percent of every dollar he raised in his first six weeks without airing a single television ad.

You have to spend money to raise money (you can then spend on luxury “investor appreciation” trips.)

You might also wonder how attempting to counterprogram the Taylor Swift concert with an Oak Ridge Boys cover band is playing among other Republican politicians:

DeSantis supporters have watched anxiously as Mr. Trump has swamped the governor in coverage and outmaneuvered him in defining the contours of the race. Since his entry, Mr. DeSantis has received zero congressional endorsements. One person close to Mr. DeSantis, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about a candidate whom the person still supports, said the governor had experienced a “challenging learning curve” that has left him “a little bit jarred.”

This is some of Armando Iannucci’s best work.