I have absolutely no clue how seriously to take this because it is Rolling Stone. The media is desperate to see a battle royale between Trump and DeSantis and is hoping that Trump comes out on top.

Even if they didn’t have an ideological axe to grind–and they have a big one–conflict makes for great copy. So does a good horserace. Add in a dash of personal bitterness and it makes for clicks and ratings that put Harry and Meghan look like C-listers.

So take everything with a grain of salt, both because reporting on conflict brings in bucks and Rolling Stone is a leftist rag with a poor record for accuracy in recent years.

Still, the claims are juicy and I can use the clicks as much as they, so here we go.

As you know, one of the lines of attack on DeSantis is that he is, to put it kindly, an uncouth jerk. Not knowing the governor I have no opinion on the matter, although it strikes me as odd that any Trump proponent would use personality traits in critiquing anybody. Trump is and always has been a total jerk. It is his trademark, and he has displayed that trait throughout his career.

Not only was his trademark line “you’re fired,” but his use of cruel nicknames is hardly a mark of a civilized and mature statesman. Insulting somebody you nicknamed Meatball Ron and DeSanctimonious as, simultaneously, an unpleasant man is rich.

But there it is, DeSantis is an uncouth jerk, according to Trump’s people and his (temporary) enablers in the media.

Rolling Stone is reporting that DeSantis is such a jerk that the people who work for him hate him with the red-hot passion of a blast furnace, and are looking not just to beat him but humiliate him.

That’s a good look for Republicans looking out for the Party, I suppose.

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 bythe 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.

Yep. People like that–those whose #1 goal is to destroy the single-most successful Republican governor in the country–are obviously great judges of what constitutes character.

You go with that.

This 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.”

There’s more tattle in this tale, but you get the point: Ron DeSantis doesn’t deserve to be president because people who worked for him don’t like him.

Which of course brings up a few questions:

1. How the hell can Donald Trump complain about somebody else’s loyalty? It’s hard to find a single person who worked for or beside him that Trump hasn’t trashed repeatedly in public. He attacks everybody, including those who have carried a lot of water for him over the years. Kellyanne Conway? Mick Mulvaney? DeSantis himself? Kemp? Youngkin? Nikki Haley? Elaine Chao? Who HASN’T he attacked? He is the least loyal politician I have ever seen.
2. Trump seems determined to advertise he can’t hire people well. Bolton? Mulvaney…you get the idea. This is the guy who puts Fauci into his reelection ads. He thinks anybody who ever worked for him sucks, apparently. Not sure that is the guy you want as your hiring manager.
3. Trump’s trashing of his former employees begs the question: how many of these people like him and speak well of him in private? If that is the standard, I wouldn’t be advertising it if I were Donald Trump. His failures–by his own admission, remember–are epic in this regard. His attacks on his former hires seem to indicate that Trump thinks rather badly of his own judgment regarding hiring and I suspect that the people who have been on the public receiving end of this are not big fans of the Donald right now.
4. Who cares? I really don’t care how much Trump’s or DeSantis’ minions and colleagues like them. I care about what they have and can accomplish for the country. Patton was a bastard, and he seemed to accomplish a bit. As a voter I can live with these rather privileged whiners feeling bad once in a while.

“Ron is not someone who can just ‘walk it off.’ I know because I made a lighthearted joke to him once, and he got mad and held it against me,” the Trump adviser adds. “Team Trump does not want to just beat him. Team Trump wants to humiliate him maybe more than they’ve ever wanted to humiliate anybody on a national stage … [and] that is what is driving a lot of this.”

Assuming these quotes are accurate, and I have my doubts, this tells me more about the people Trump is hiring this time around than about DeSantis. Trump, who values loyalty above all, is hiring jerks like this. Jerks who are calling Florida the “worst state in the country.” Because their feelings got hurt.

Boo hoo.

I would fire every one of them if these quotes are true. If they would do this to DeSantis, what would they do to Trump after he fires them and attacks them openly? Hiring admitted backstabbers is a bad policy, Donald.

It is both plausible and worrying that these supposed leaks are true quotes. Not certain, but given how absurd and spiteful Trump’s campaign against DeSantis has been it just could be run by people this incredibly nasty and stupid. I’m pretty sure that it is a bad strategy.

Karen wrote yesterday about how Trump’s attacks aren’t landing with the Republican faithful, and there is plenty of evidence that this is true. Jazz wrote a piece about DeSantis’ super PAC striking back with a clever invitation to Trump to move to a state he considers better than Florida–California, where his buddy Gavin Newsom is governor. they offered to pay moving costs.

In other words, Donald: put your money where your big mouth is. If Florida sucks and you can’t afford to move, they will pay for you to go someplace that sucks less.

I am genuinely puzzled by Trump’s strategy. Not only does it hurt Republicans, which admittedly doesn’t seem to bother Trump in the least–but it doesn’t really help him. His poll numbers are good, but so were Hillary Clinton’s at this time in the 2008 primaries. You remember what happened then, right?

Remember the PUMAs for Hillary? PUMA stood for Party Unity My Ass; they were threatening to walk if Obama got the nomination. That didn’t work out that well for HRC.

I am useless at predicting political outcomes. There are too many variables and too much emotion involved. Elections are won on the margins, and I don’t think like the people who can’t make up their minds until late in the game.

But with that said, it’s pretty clear that Trump is losing more voters than he is gaining with his current strategy. His current bump in the polls is driven by Alvin Bragg, not Ron DeSantis’ collapse. DeSantis isn’t even in the race yet. And until Iowa and New Hampshire, nothing is set in stone.

Everybody thought Howard Dean was the frontrunner in 2004. Nope.

It may wind up being true that the governor is another Scott Walker–an early player who got skunked when he had to face the voters. But it is just as likely that he is more like Obama, who overtakes the frontrunner and leaves him in the dust. If I were Trump, I would worry about my own humiliation.

Losing to Meatball Ron would sting. A lot. And it is quite possible.