I am not making this up. When Rolling Stone published an article suggesting that Trump campaign officials are trying to throw Governor DeSantis off his game by insinuating that he is less than well-endowed, it seemed like a joke.

Now it seems like it is, in fact true. Apparently, the Trump team has decided that Governor Rob DeSanctimonious will now be referred to a “Tiny D.”

Isn’t that special?

Source — https://t.co/wI9nOPv8ov

— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) June 8, 2023

As a certified grade-A overeducated ex-academic I can assure you that this line of attack doesn’t appeal to me, but I have to admit that my insight into the mind of other potential Trump voters is insufficient to guess whether such a bizarre strategy has a chance of working. At least for the Trump-interested but uncommitted.

That’s a very long way of saying: I think this strategy is grotesque, but I don’t know if it will actually move any voters in one direction or another. At this point in American history, anything is possible I guess.

The source of the original story is not exactly stellar. Rolling Stone has a long and glorious history of just making sh!t up, so it would be easy to discount.

But as the tweet above indicates, there is evidence beyond the anonymous Trumpworld sources to suggest it is true: the tweet of Donald Trump Jr. himself, which sure enough is using the nickname.

THIS IS HOW petty and aggressively stupid the 2024 GOP presidential primary has become: several close aides and allies to Donald Trump want to challenge Ron DeSantis to a literal dick-measuring contest.

It wouldn’t be the first juvenile move by Team Trump in this young primary season. Already, Trump has suggested that DeSantis, his chief rival, might be secretly gay. He’s gone after DeSantis over pronunciation of his own last name. He has claimed to have salacious dirt on Florida’s governor, that he might release during the primary. Recently, Trump’s campaign went after one of DeSantis’ top aides, apparently insulting her physical appearance.

Now, some of Trump’s longtime advisers are even urging him to continuously make reference to the size of DeSantis’ penis, telling him such insults could stick with GOP primary voters and mess with his rival’s head, two sources with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone. Trump’s team discussed having Trump refer to the Florida governor as “Tiny D,” Bloomberg reported in March. While some understood it as a shot at DeSantis’ height, the sobriquet was specifically intended to suggest diminutive genitalia, four people familiar with the topic say.

The Daily Caller asked the former president himself about the nickname, and he approves apparently.

Former President Donald Trump weighed in on a nickname he reportedly might use for Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis during a flight back to Florida from his first campaign stop in Iowa this cycle.

It was reported Trump is considering calling DeSantis, “Tiny D,” something Trump has not publicly called the Florida Governor, who is likely to enter the 2024 presidential race. The Daily Caller asked Trump about the nickname during an interview with a few other reporters on his airplane.

“Tiny D is good,” Trump told reporters.

Other Trump proxies have taken up the nickname, indicating that it is official policy. Alex Buresewitz is a paid Trump operative.

Tiny D wants to be Trump so badly except when he tries to “own a reporter” he comes off sounding like a whiny and irritable little jerk. He has no charm or humor.

Trump is the master of destroying the fake news. DeSantis will never be able to take that from Trump. https://t.co/bA6VOp3LoB pic.twitter.com/cl54Jcq3FW

— Alex Bruesewitz 🇺🇸 (@alexbruesewitz) June 1, 2023

Trumpworld is weird, and by that, I am not referring to voters who for one reason or another have decided that Trump is the best choice for president.

I mean his campaign staff and advisors. They are currently having a freakout that DeSantis’ super PAC used some AI-generated images of Trump, completely ignoring the fact that they have been doing this to DeSantis for weeks. To say that these tactics amount to the persuasion tactics of 4-year-olds is rather unfair to children, who after all are still learning how to be civilized.

You sorta expect this kind of behavior from them and chuckle at it while scolding them.

Frankly, I think the whole AI image stuff is awful, but given how deep into the muck the campaign has gotten and how appalling the Trump tactics have been, I suspect that their only goal is to drag DeSantis into the mud with them–depriving the governor of a clear advantage he has with many voters who are so OVER Trump.

I do have to laugh when I see Trumpworld bitching about DeSantis going low. As far as I know, Governor Ron has not pointed out that Trump’s hands and feet are rather small, which some people think correlates with…

Indeed, some of Trump’s former senior officials have reacted with cringing disapproval to the flurry of hyper-personal attacks — despite the fact that such salvos were gratuitously lobbed by Trump during his past campaigns and his time in the White House.

“The Trump campaign wasted $20 million in attack ads and still failed to keep DeSantis out of the race and DeSantis’ favorability ratings are still better than Trump’s with Republicans,” Jenna Ellis — a former senior legal adviser to Trump during his attempt to overturn the 2020 election results — says on Wednesday. Much of the MAGA faithful now despises Ellis, partly due to the fact that she likes DeSantis.

“Who would have thought saying ‘Florida is the worst state,’ calling DeSantis ‘Rob,’ attacking Kayleigh McEnany, and pushing the absurd allegation that Casey DeSantis ‘faked cancer’ wouldn’t convince voters. Shocker!” she adds. (Last month, the Trump-aligned anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer floated the conspiracy theory that Florida’s first lady was “exaggerating” her cancer diagnosis.)

My guess is that DeSantis has skin about a thousand times thicker than Trump’s. He lashes out at his most loyal aids for repeating poll numbers that happen to be true, but are unfavorable to the president. Attacking Kayleigh McEnany was a bridge too far for most people. Not only did she not deserve it–she was reporting on news as a journalist–but it was just one more instance of Trump decrying the apparent fact that he simply cannot hire people he can trust.

I have been stumped by this Trump tactic: everybody he has hired apparently sucks according to, of all people, the person who hired them. If Trump is so awful at hiring people perhaps he doesn’t belong in a position where that is one of the primary qualifications.

If everybody fails you, the end result is a failure. “I am a failure but it’s not my fault” is not a great pitch for undecided voters.

Trump actually has a record to run on, and before COVID it was a really good one. Far better than any other 21st-century president. Looking back, most Americans are coming around to that idea.

But many of us who supported him while he was president are also coming around to the idea that 2023’s candidate Trump is just a bitter old man who wants revenge on everyone and everything that failed him.

A bitter old man with tiny hands and feet.