Ron DeSantis’ campaign is failing so terribly that we have enough material to do yet ANOTHER roundup of devastating coverage, even after their campaign “reboot.” But as we’ve been saying, this is what you can expect from a bad candidate and even worse campaign as they light money on fire, prove how out of their depth they are, and stake out a campaign on an extreme, right-wing agenda.

During the rollout of new, extreme curriculum standards in Florida, DeSantis shamelessly claimed that some African Americans benefited from slavery.

Washington Post: “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is intensifying his efforts to de-emphasize racism in his state’s public school curriculum by arguing that some Black people benefited from being enslaved and defending his state’s new African American history standards that civil rights leaders and scholars say misrepresents centuries of U.S. reality.”

“‘They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,’ DeSantis said on Friday in response to reporters’ questions while standing in front of a nearly all-White crowd of supporters.”

Adding to his long record of cozying up to insurrectionists, DeSantis once again downplayed the attack on the Capitol on January 6.

DeSantis: “I think it’s ridiculous how much money that they pumped in for the Capitol Police. It was not an insurrection. These are people that were there to attend a rally and then they were there to protest.”

New reporting reveals that a disturbingly homophobic pro-DeSantis video was created by DeSantis’ own campaign – and passed off to look like it was made independently. 

New York Times: “One recent move that drew intense blowback, including from Republicans, was the campaign’s sharing of a bizarre video on Twitter that attacked Mr. Trump as too friendly to L.G.B.T.Q. people and showed Mr. DeSantis with lasers coming out of his eyes. The video drew a range of denunciations, with some calling it homophobic and others homoerotic before it was deleted.”

“But it turns out to be more of a self-inflicted wound than was previously known: A DeSantis campaign aide had originally produced the video internally, passing it off to an outside supporter to post it first and making it appear as if it was generated independently, according to a person with knowledge of the incident.”

As his presidential aspirations crash down around him, DeSantis’ campaign and super PAC are publicly disagreeing.

New York Times: “Early strategic fissures have emerged between his own political team and the enormous super PAC that will spend tens of millions of dollars to help him. His Tallahassee-based campaign has begun shedding some of the more than 90 workers it had hired — roughly double the Trump campaign payroll — to cut swelling costs that have included $279,000 at the Four Seasons in Miami.”

“But the campaign has increasingly been tempted to punch down at lower-polling rivals, as in a memo to donors in early July that singled out Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina as someone who would soon receive ‘appropriate scrutiny.’”

“That campaign memo landed at the pro-DeSantis super PAC’s Atlanta headquarters with a thud. It seemed to rebuke the super PAC, calling into question the group’s decision to stay off the airwaves in New Hampshire and the pricey Boston market. Legally, super PACs and campaigns cannot coordinate strategy in private, so leaked memos are one way they communicate.”