Even before announcing a presidential campaign, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis earned the nickname “DeSanctimonious” from rival candidate Donald Trump.
Now, even the governor’s own advisers are expressing concerns about the governor’s humorless appearance… but DeSantis is pushing back.
“He just needs to chill out a bit and be less stiff,” one insider reportedly told The Daily Mail Sunday. “He always looks awkward and needs to get out and meet more people.”
A senior campaign staffer added, “If his wife is a former TV reporter and she can’t teach him, who can?”
A third insider said that they had to instruct the Florida governor on “when to smile.”
Trmp’s campaign seized the opportunity to attack DeSantis as robotic.
“Ron DeSanctimonious’s fundamental problem is that he doesn’t like people. That’s a real challenge when you’re running for president,” Trump campaign staffer Jason Miller told the Mail. “And there’s no way to turn it around because you can’t coach personality.”
Take a look —
The video of Ron fake laughing is even stranger than the picture. Watch how fast he transitions from fake laughing to serious face.
Wtf is wrong with Ron DeSantis?!!
— Alex Bruesewitz 🇺🇸 (@alexbruesewitz) May 13, 2023
The governor just wrapped up his first tour of early-voting states as a presidential candidate on Friday where he was clearly trying to win votes with a warm personality.
At the time, he was making a whirlwind tour with stops in Iowa and New Hampshire, before a stop in Bluffton, South Carolina, on Friday.
The crowd in South Carolina greeted DeSantis with chants of “Ron!” at his first campaign event. DeSantis pointed out his wife Casey’s ties to the state, noting she was as a graduate of the College of Charleston and her parents used to live in Mount Pleasant.
After his remarks, his wife joined him for a more lighthearted chat. Seated near each other with a large U.S. flag as a backdrop, they discussed the challenges of raising three young children in the Florida governor’s mansion. Casey DeSantis said she has become expert in getting slime out of carpets and marker ink off expensive furniture, and they talked about the governor taking his jetlagged son to get something to eat in the middle of the night after returning from an overseas trade mission.
“These are just the things that we do as parents,” DeSantis said.
The couple welcomed questions from the audience while they were onstage. DeSantis to recalled meeting his future wife while hitting golf balls at a driving range when he was in the U.S. Navy.
“We had some great times coming up here. We spent a lot of time in the Lowcountry over the years,” he said.
After he spoke, he made his way through voters eager to meet him, including a mother of five whose husband serves in the U.S. Marines as an infantryman and is stationed on nearby Parris Island.
“People don’t appreciate that it’s a family effort,” DeSantis told Lupi Tupou, as she stood by with her young son, Israel. “Particularly for wives with kids, it’s really, really tough.”
DeSantis served as a Navy Judge Advocate General officer in Iraq and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
Later, after getting an emotional hug and taking a photo with DeSantis, Tupou said in an interview that her husband, Aloha, had been in the military for nearly 19 years and she was supportive of DeSantis in part because she felt he understood her family’s commitment to the country.
“To hear a candidate running, that has served, I’m like, OK,” she said of DeSantis. “At least someone to have a decent understanding of what it is that we’re about. I’m like, you need to fight for the families.”
DeSantis, seen as Trump’s chief rival for the GOP presidential nomination next year, has started responding to Trump’s attacks more directly than he did for months previously, but still largely avoids mentioning him by name.
For example, DeSantis criticized Trump’s statement about the possibility of undoing President Joe Biden’s record in “six months.”
“Don’t let anyone tell you they can do this in 24 hours or six months or anything like that,” DeSantis said, without naming names. “This is going to be trench warfare. You’ve got to understand how to use the levers of power. We pledge to do that.”
Trump, as a former president, can serve for only four more years, whereas DeSantis would be able to serve for eight years.
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article.