Oh-So-Mature Trump Aides Want Him to Focus on DeSantis’ Penis
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.
“He’s also short but … yes of course it’s about his penis, that’s why we’re doing it,” says a source involved in the effort to get the former president to use the line of attack against DeSantis.
Team Trump’s attempts to focus the public on DeSantis’ anatomy underscores just how dark and puerile the GOP primary promises to be — even as the former president asks voters to return him to a seat of awesome power and responsibility.
His venom towards DeSantis is enhanced by a campaign staff whose personal loathing of DeSantis eclipses even Trump’s. Several of the former president’s lieutenants have worked for DeSantis and come away from it with such bitter experiences that they wish not just to defeat the governor and his team, but to abjectly humiliate them.
A DeSantis campaign spokesperson declined to comment but flagged recent comments from the Florida governor that cast attacks on him as recognition that his campaign represents a “threat.”
“The way I’m being attacked, Trump has run almost $20 million in ads negative attacking me, you know, with frivolous and false smears,” DeSantis said during an appearance on Fox News Radio on Monday. “I’m the one that’s taken most of the fire. And I think that’s an indication that people know that, yeah, we have what it takes and that we’re a force to be reckoned 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.)
Trump’s penchant for personal attacks is hardly new, but the insults have become a more important battleground because of the shrinking differences between the two candidates on policy. In 2016, Trump represented the lone nativist populist candidate in a presidential primary crowded with more mainstream Republicans. This cycle, he faces an opponent in DeSantis who has spent years trying to mimic Trump — so much so that the former president has accused him of copying his hand gestures. With DeSantis either matching or getting to the right of Trump on issues, personal attacks are one of the ways Trump appears to believe he can distinguish himself more fully from the governor.
Trump’s allies are open about his plans to wage a personal war on the Florida governor, saying that it may be more critical to winning than any policy differences. “As the primary progresses, emasculating Ron is going to be a big part of the Trump campaign’s efforts,” says a Trump ally close to the ex-president’s campaign. “It is important to make the policy argument. But one of Donald Trump’s biggest talents is defining his opponent’s character traits and highlighting their biggest personality flaws. Doing that — defining who Ron DeSantis, the person, is to the American voter, before he has the chance to do it himself — is arguably more important than any policy contrast.”
In the past several weeks, a handful of key political advisers and confidants have told Trump he should start using “Tiny D” as his principal DeSantis nickname, instead of only ones like “DeSanctimonious” or “DeSaster,” according to two sources with direct knowledge of the situation. One of these sources refers to it as the “small-dick PsyOp.”
So far, however, it’s Trump — famous for both a lack of restraint and vicious campaign attacks — who has resisted this particular line of attack. The ex-president has barely used the “Tiny D” epithet publicly, and has only occasionally done so offhandedly.
Still, the former president and his top advisers have made no secret of the fact that a key component of their strategy against DeSantis involves a constant stream of “mindfucking” the Florida governor and going after his personal insecurities as much as they can.
Some of Trump’s aides and longtime allies have repeatedly told Trump that, in their personal experiences, DeSantis is a uniquely “sensitive,” “thin-skinned,” and “insecure” man, making him a perfect target for Trump’s needling. (Trump himself, of course, is also famously sensitive to personal slights, and known for going to extreme lengths to respond to them — even to his personal detriment.)
While Trump has held off on the “Tiny D” messaging, members of his team are going all-in on the nickname — and the ugly strategy. After top Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung mixed it up with the pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down on Twitter last week, Cheung responded with the “pinching hand” emoji, which is used to suggest diminutive size. Chris LaCivita, one of the operatives leading Trump 2024 and the engineer of the 2004 “Swift Boat” campaign against John Kerry, also joined in on the campaign messaging earlier this month, when he tweeted: “what happened to Tiny d?”
According to two people familiar with the matter, some Trump campaign aides have encouraged outside allies and informal media surrogates to routinely use “Tiny D” in recent weeks, telling them it is by far the most effective moniker to mess with DeSantis and get in his head. “There is absolutely an effort underway to make the ‘Tiny Dick’ the nickname most linked to Ron,” one of the sources says.
During Trump’s last contested GOP primary in 2016, it took until February of election year for genitalia measuring to become part of the contest.
With his campaign struggling, Sen. Marco Rubio threw out a laugh line at a campaign rally about Trump having small hands, strongly implying that Trump had a small penis. At a Republican debate in Detroit the following month, Trump defended himself: “I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.”
Later that year, Rubio would admit to CNN host Jake Tapper that he “apologized to” the then-future president, adding: “I said, ‘You know, I’m sorry that I said that. It’s not who I am and I shouldn’t have done it.’”
Taking its cues from Trump, MAGAworld has trained the same schoolyard insults at newly launched primary rival and erstwhile ally Chris Christie with an ugly campaign of fat-shaming. Trump himself took to his Truth Social account to post a video of Christie’s campaign launch edited to depict the former New Jersey governor at a buffet. MAGA Inc, the Trump-aligned super PAC, matched the rhetoric with a hackneyed pun — “Chris Christie will waste no time eating DeSantis’ lunch”— in a statement distributed Tuesday.
At his campaign launch, Christie threw his own jabs at the former president. Trump, he told voters in New Hampshire, is “a lonely, self consumed, self-serving, mirror hog” who “never admits a mistake” and “always finds someone else and something else to blame for whatever goes wrong.”
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