Posobiec said: "So what's going on here? Has DeSantis failed to stick the landing? Why are they sending out Hogan to talk like this?"
"How else to describe it than the same phrase I've used now for weeks and weeks, if not months on end, which is turmoil in Tallahassee," Kassam responded. "You know people who have worked campaigns, and I don't mean you know, people who have knocked [on] a few doors, as grateful as people are for that work. I mean, if you have not slept for three or four days running, because you've been working at a campaign headquarters, if you've been managing your principal, you look at a situation like that they've got in Tallahassee."
Kassam said the "situation that they've got at the very top of the DeSantis campaign" is "abundantly, painfully obvious to those with any campaign experience, that this is not going to be a team that gets Ron, not even over the line, but even in close contention."
"It's amateur hour. It's lightweight. And here's the thing that really gets me about this. We talked about underperformance. Right, underperformance is an understatement," said Kassam. "Quite frankly, this is him, Ron DeSantis, the popular, good governor, great governor, many people say, many of my Florida friends say, who is not just ruining himself in this election cycle, and he's not just ruining it for himself in four years time. But he's actually ruining himself in perpetuity. For what? For a couple of ego trips that are given to him by his back-slapping buddies who might be on the board at Fox News and so on and so forth. And of course, his aspirational family around him, the less we say about that, perhaps right now, probably the better."
"But there's another point about all of this that I want to make, and it's that people need to internalize now [that] Ron DeSantis is primary Hillary, you know, got the media at his back. You can have free airtime on Fox whenever he wants. Get scarcely any critique by the corporate press, by the New York Times, by Politico, by the Washington Post, all of these guys. Yeah, every so often, they'll throw out a story or two, something like a little slap around the wrist. But that's generic Republican slap around the wrist. That's not 'You're the front runner.' That's not 'We're afraid of you.' That's not 'We fear [what] you'll do in the White House.' If you get there, that's par for the course. And so in my mind [DeSantis] is primary Hillary. Everyone's helping him, he's got the road before him."
"[He] is supposed to be crowned as this kind of anti-Trump or not-Trump figure in this primary, and he can't get over 20 percent. He cannot get there. And I remember I was asked when I was standing outside the courthouse when the first indictment came down in New York. And somebody shoved a microphone in my face and said, 'Hey, what's your takeaway from today?' I said, 'My takeaway from today is Ron DeSantis [has] seen the peak of his polling numbers,' and it was absolutely correct. And the donors are abandoning, and now he's having to run to the lawyers and lobbyists of Dominion voting systems in DC, where he will host a fundraiser tomorrow at the lawyer of Dominion voting systems offices. I mean, this is critical, critical desperation."
