Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has seen his popularity plummet in recent months even after he announced he was running for president and one of his former colleagues says he knows why.
Former Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.), who served in the House at the same time as DeSantis, said Thursday night on MSNBC that it’s because he’s a “uniquely unlikeable individual.”
“The more you get to know him, the more you realize he’s got a weird mix of vanity and paranoia, kind of a complex about the smartest person in the room,” Jolly said. “The problem is that the moment he proves his intelligence, he says things that are contrary to science, history, law and the Constitution, and people kind of scratch their heads.”
He said DeSantis has some political skills — including the ability to see where his party is going.
“He was at the forefront of the Tea Party wave, he was an early evangelist of Trumpism,” he said, adding that he “basically created the current Republican culture war movement.”
And he said that if any of the current GOP candidates could beat Trump, it would be DeSantis, and suggested how he might do it: