IN-DEPTH: Trump, DeSantis, and Their Surrogates at War on Social Media

(L-R) Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Former President Donald Trump. (Giorgio Viera/Angela Weiss/Getty Images)

Former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are fighting a war of words, and the battlefield is social media.

Hardly a day goes by without sniping. Trump, a declared presidential candidate for 2024, lashes out relentlessly at DeSantis, while the likely-but-undeclared Republican candidate takes subtler swings at the former political ally.

Various surrogates pummel the presumed opponent of their favorite, day and night, on Twitter and Trump’s own Truth Social.

Some of Trump’s latest posts express outrage about DeSantis’s current trip abroad to meet with world leaders. He wrote about that on his platform on April 24.

“The ‘Consultants’ are sending DeSanctus [sic], and demanding he go immediately, on an emergency Round the World tour of U.S representative population countries, like South Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Israel, in order to up his game and see if he can remove the stain from his failing campaign. Bad poll numbers!” Trump wrote.

“Perhaps he can, and perhaps he can’t, who really knows, but he'll have plenty of time to think as he sits alone, on his tax payer funded airplane, riding it out and thinking, WHY???”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and his wife, Casey DeSantis, are escorted to their seats for a meeting with the Japanese foreign minister at the Iikura Guest House in Tokyo on April 24, 2023. (Eugene Hoshiko/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

A day earlier on Truth Social, he posted, “The Globalist, China hawking and RINO infiltrated Club For No Growth, which now wants to give up backing Ron DeSanctimonious because they realize there is no personality or people skills there, are beside themselves, and just don’t know what to do. Florida has the Sun & the Ocean, and was GREAT long before I put Ron there. The semi-elite ”No Growthers“ are considering sending Ron to the great Walter Reed Medical Center for an emergency personality transplant. His poll numbers are crashing!”

Social media accounts for the DeSantis War Room, which bills itself as “Rapid Response” for the Florida governor, posted a video on April 22 of DeSantis delivering a speech with a pointed reference to Trump.

“Leaders take the bull by the horns and make the decisions for themselves. They don’t subcontract out their leadership to health bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci,” he said.

DeSantis, for now, keeps his own Twitter missives, on accounts attributed to him as an individual, looking like a governor and potential president. Posts show him giving speeches, signing bills, and otherwise addressing the people’s business.

Anything that might be construed as a response to Trump is left for other social media pages, although some supporters are showing signs of having had enough.

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a Twitter firebrand and Trump loyalist, urged supporters for both to knock it off.

“The online personal fights between Trump and DeSantis influencers need to stop,” Greene wrote on Twitter on April 14. “It makes everyone look bad and helps no one.”

She listed a host of national woes, beginning with, “We are in $31 trillion in debt,” to urge the two camps to “focus on the real enemies causing all of these extremely serious problems.”

Noticeably, Greene avoided criticizing either of them personally, attributing the rancor to “influencers.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) speaks outside the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse on the day of former President Donald Trump's planned court appearance on April 4, 2023. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters)

With about nine months until any primary voting starts, others are also weary of the infighting, according to Susan MacManus, political science professor emerita at the University of South Florida.

“People are saying, ‘I don’t know if I can take a year and a half of it. Will it be tit for tat for a year and a half?’” she told The Epoch Times.

“A lot of Republicans are angry they’re going at each other like that. It makes the Democrats look unified, which is disturbing to a lot of Republicans.”

MacManus predicted that it’s going to get worse.

Shawn Donahue, a political science professor from the University of Buffalo, said a Twitter war with Trump won’t bode well for DeSantis.

The Name Game

“I hate to put it like this,” Donahue told The Epoch Times. “But think of how Trump’s nicknames for people have stuck.

“For the rest of your life, you’re going to think of Little Marco, Low Energy Jeb, Lyin' Ted, Sleepy Joe, and Crooked Hillary.”

Indeed, Trump’s former opponents, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), President Joe Biden, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, seem destined to carry those monikers in some circles forever.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Donald Trump, then-Republican presidential candidates, chat during a commercial break in the broadcast of the Republican Presidential Primary Debate on the campus of the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla., on March 10, 2016. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

“Some people see it as childish, but it works,” Donahue said. “With Trump, it’s asymmetric warfare. He’s willing to do and say things the standard politician is not willing to.”

Trump has tried out various nicknames for his presumed primary opponent on social media and in speeches, including “Ron DeSanctimonious” and “Ron DeSanctus.”

Impact of Press Coverage

Twitter and other social media have proven effective tools and weapons for politicians.

They wouldn’t be, however, if the press and media didn’t make them so, according to Tobe Berkovitz, a political media consultant and emeritus professor of advertising at Boston University.

“If the media ignored Truth Social, Trump’s platform, if they didn’t cover Trump’s posts and DeSantis’s posts, the average voter wouldn’t even know these things exist,” he told The Epoch Times.

“What matters with Twitter is that the press picks it up. Not a lot of people are reading any tweets by anyone. The press picks it up, and that turns it into a much higher profile story.”

Social media also allow campaigns to get videos out for a fraction of the cost of television ads. Then, the press and media start talking about them. Ultimately, millions of people might watch them if they go viral.

As a political advertising consultant, Berkovitz used that tactic in the pre-social-media era by releasing television ads directly to the press to create a buzz.

Republican candidate George H.W. Bush, with legendary political consultant Lee Atwater behind him, and Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis used the same tactic effectively in the 1988 presidential campaign.

“The media spent all their time talking about the ads,” Berkovitz said.

DeSantis allies ran that play by releasing a video on April 14, just before Trump addressed the National Rifle Association (NRA).

The ad shows video clips of Trump as president talking down the gun rights group and parleying with Democratic Party leaders about how to make gun laws more restrictive.

DeSantis has dipped in polls over the past couple of months as Trump has risen. That could be attributed to Trump’s slashing social media attacks, according to political science professor Aubrey Jewett of the University of Central Florida.

But there’s no way to know for sure, she told The Epoch Times.

Other factors contributed to Trump’s rise, including his indictment, which seemed to give only a temporary boost. DeSantis’s remarks on the Russia–Ukraine war may have caused his polling numbers to dip, Jewett said.

Online Campaigning Generates Cash

Trump has used social media brilliantly, not only to speak to his followers but also to raise money from people making small contributions, Donahue said. He compared Trump with the late Jesse Helms, who used direct mail for the same purpose.

“Helms was one of the top fundraisers you ever saw,” Donahue said of Helms, a Republican senator for North Carolina from 1973 to 2003. “Direct mail was expensive, and now you have Facebook. And Trump’s back on Facebook.”

Trump raised more than $4 million, much of it from small or first-time donors, the day after his indictment.

“It wasn’t Trump going to black-tie dinners in Dallas or Houston or Miami” that brought in the cash, Donahue said. “He hasn’t had to do that.”

In some ways, the Twitter war is just a new twist on a timeless phenomenon.

Politics has always been a “brass-knuckles business,” Berkovitz said.

Online campaigning now is the ring where candidates must be ready to brawl.

“Every politician, going back to our founders, had to learn to use the communication tools available at the time,” Carl Calabrese, a retired Buffalo-area Republican political consultant, political science professor, and public official, told The Epoch Times.

“At the [country’s] founding, it was pulpits and pamphlets and town squares” where candidates brought their message.

“Then, it became newspapers by the Civil War. Then, modern technology. [Franklin D.] Roosevelt was the trailblazer using radio. And then television, where [John F.] Kennedy was the trailblazer.”

Politicians still have to use all those mediums, he said.

“But they have to add this to the arsenal,” Calabrese said. “Who do we reach, how do we reach them, and what’s the message? It’s the same question we ask with traditional media.”

Social media gives people such as Trump the biggest bang for the buck, he said. That’s not just financially but also in the number of people reached with the relatively small effort of typing a message.

And using social media is a must for reaching younger voters, some strategists say.

“It’s where a lot of them get their information,” Jewett said. “Most young folks aged 35 and under are not watching traditional news or TV on cable.”

Older Americans rely more on social media for news these days as well, according to Calabrese.

Among his former colleagues, “four out of five got their news exclusively, or read it first, on Twitter,” he said. “And three of those were over 60. It’s not just a young-person phenomenon. Campaigns realize that and want to tap into it.”

However, MacManus expressed concern for U.S. politics because of the rancor epitomized by the Trump–DeSantis Twitter war.

“You wonder what all this bashing and negativity and incivility is going to do to turnout, and that’s got to be of concern to both parties,” she said.

Susan A. MacManus, professor emerita at the University of South Florida, has written many books on politics and is one of the most-quoted political scientists in the South. (Courtesy of USF)

Florida voter turnout was lower for the 2022 midterm elections than in the 2018 midterms.

A Knight Foundation analysis of young people’s opinions about the news found that they think it “focuses on conflict and never on options or solutions,” according to MacManus.

“The younger generation sees nothing positive about politics on either side of the aisle,” she said. “And the national press is part of the problem. They just love conflict.”

The voter turnout gap between younger and older voters has widened.

Generation Z voters turned out at a rate of 23 to 28 percent, and about 28 percent of millennials showed up to vote, which is “low compared to older generations,” according to MacManus.

Another polling statistic troubles her.

“Polls ask if you'd like your child to grow up to be president,” MacManus said. The answer “used to be overwhelmingly yes. Now, it’s overwhelmingly no. They don’t wish that on their children.

“Distrust is rampant. People don’t know who to trust. They don’t trust anybody. The threads that hold this country together are extremely frayed.

“I pray every night we get together in this country. Love thy neighbor as yourself, the most basic of faith ideologies. Voters are really weary. They just want some peace and quiet.”