EXCLUSIVE: Ron DeSantis $50 million super PAC CLOSES after donors were spooked by ‘rookie s*** mistakes’

A super PAC set up to back Ron DeSantis with $50 million is shutting down as donors pulled out — while its founder said the Florida governor’s campaign was guilty of “rookie s**t” mistakes and that he now Donald will support Trump.

John Thomas, a Republican strategist known as the “Billy the Kid of political battles,” founded “Ron to the Rescue” in November and had secured funding from mega-wealthy donors.

But he said donors began to have doubts after the failed launch of the DeSantis campaign on Twitter Spaces in May.

It was the final blow to DeSantis after a tree fell on the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee on Wednesday during Hurricane Idalia. His wife Casey DeSantis and their three children were home at the time, but no one was hurt.

During the Twitter Spaces debacle, DeSantis was interviewed by Elon Musk on the social media platform, but the feed dropped repeatedly, allowing detractors to paint the DeSantis campaign as incompetent.

“We were hoping for a formal air support TV campaign when DeSantis officially launched,” Thomas told DailyMail.com in an interview. But the problem with that is the Twitter Spaces blunder. Almost from the beginning, all of our major donors said, ‘Let’s see how this works out.’

“There is one very important thing that every national presidential candidate has to do on their launch day, and that is to provide video to the television stations to optically project what your vision for the future is,” he added.

Thomas described other incidents, including posting internal documents on the Internet, and agreeing to debate California Governor Gavin Newsom, as “rookie s**t” mistakes.

Before the launch of Twitter Spaces, the strategist, who has worked on races in 49 states, had a slew of donors willing to give “seven- and eight-figure support” to DeSantis.

The PAC ended up spending only about $20,000 on grassroots efforts to gain support for the governor.

“There was never a moment where donors gave any kind of encouragement, like ‘well, now’s the time.'” So everything just dried up, Thomas said.

Never Back Down, the main super PAC backing DeSantis, raised $130 million in the second quarter of this year. At the end of June, the country still had $96.8 million to spend, according to submitted election fundraisers.

Earlier this month, one of DeSantis’ largest donors – hotel entrepreneur Robert Bigelow – announced he would not donate more than the $20 million he had already given to Florida’s governor unless he took a more moderate approach.

Bigelow was particularly critical of the six-week abortion ban that DeSantis signed in Florida.

Thomas said he and his donor network are now figuring out how to raise money for former President Trump in his campaign.

Campaigns must report their most recent fundraising numbers by the end of September.

“We’re going to look at Trump’s cash at hand after the Sept. 30 reporting period and then we’re going to try to determine where we can fill gaps, if we need to,” Thomas said.

Thomas was one of the first supporters of Trump in 2016 and 2020. But because he wanted the Republicans to “win” above all else, he stepped out and founded “Ron to the Rescue” after the Republicans’ lackluster performance during the midterm elections in November 2022.

“When Trump launched his campaign very early, it sort of ran out. There wasn’t really much enthusiasm around it. It was weird, in the sense of, wow, this former party leader just doesn’t get a lot of attention,” Thomas said.

“And DeSantis, we think, missed the announcement window where voters would be receptive to a change.”

He added that Trump has “displayed a level of campaign savvy and discipline that I didn’t see from him in 2020 and I didn’t see from them in 2016.”

He said the “most remarkable thing the Trump campaign had done” was to spend more than $20 million in advertising dollars attacking DeSantis before the governor could even launch his own race.

Alternatively, DeSantis made a fatal mistake by waiting to launch until May of this year.

“It ultimately defined DeSantis,” Thomas said.

When DeSantis launched, he chose to do so online, missing out on a valuable opportunity to distribute images to voters across the country, Thomas said.

The next mistake Thomas and his donors thought DeSantis made was that he had “no core message other than that he’s a Trump light.”

“The message of ‘Trump without drama’ is not resonating,” he said. “The Republican electorate calls that having a backbone.”

Thomas faced a number of other frustrations that eventually led to him throwing in the towel on raising money for DeSantis, such as posting internal super PAC memos on the Internet.

“It’s not uncommon for a super PAC that wants to or a campaign that wants to legally provide information to a campaign or vice versa to use the internet, but this is called a private link,” he said.

That incident allowed Ramaswamy to dismiss DeSantis as a “super PAC doll in the debate” and claim he had been bought out by major donors. DeSantis, in turn, could not use the strategies from his PAC’s memo since they had already been made public.

As for debating Newsom on Fox News, “it feels like a junior varsity game,” said Thomas.

“To accept a debate with a governor who is not a candidate is disparaging and beneath the dignity of Ron DeSantis, who is supposed to be a top-level candidate,” he said.

Trump saw his poll numbers plummet after skipping the Republican debate in Milwaukee last week. But while his lead on the field fell by a total of eight points, he maintains a whopping 38-point lead, according to the Emerson College Polling study, published Monday.

Trump has the support of 50 percent of the Republican primary, with DeSantis at 12 percent, slightly ahead of Vivek Ramaswamy at 9 percent, and Nikki Haley and Mike Pence both at 7 percent.

Thomas also said donors had expressed frustration that DeSantis has already put his trust in Jeff Roe — who led Senator Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign — and his consulting firm Axiom Strategies.

Team DeSantis donors hope the governor will see a boost if the Georgia election case against Trump goes to trial and former top aides like ex-chief of staff Mark Meadows could turn against the former president.

Trump and 18 co-defendants were charged this month — with the former president’s memorable mugshot making headlines around the world.

But Thomas doesn’t believe the upcoming lawsuits will have a significant impact on Trump’s support.

In the focus groups we’ve done, all these lawsuits are merging into each other,” he said. And if Meadows or whoever turns around, the message will be, ‘These people succumbed to political pressure to save their own country, and Trump is the only one with a backbone of steel.’