Did DeSantis staff tank his 2024 campaign with MEMES? Florida gov’s team filled online ‘war room’ with clueless young staffers who created offensive posts – but couldn’t refute damaging ‘pudding fingers’ claim

Ron DeSantis may have lost the White House by handing over his social media operation to ignorant young people who insulted donors and voters alike while being outsmarted by Donald Trump.

The Florida governor has seen his rival’s lead in the race for the Republican nomination grow from 15 to 50 percent since February.

And analysts warned that his faltering campaign may have been strangled at birth by inexperienced staffers who were given free rein to use Nazi images and doctored photos of Trump kissing his chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci.

“The strategy was to be a newer, better version of the culture warrior,” Republican strategist Rob Stutzman told the New York Times.

“But they did it to the exclusion of much of the traditional campaign messaging.”

Florida’s governor threw resources into a “hyper-online strategy” and refused interviews with anyone but Republican media.

But he was mocked for the “biggest failure in campaign launch history” in May when the Twitter live chat crashed in spectacular fashion.

Aides told the newspaper that campaign manager Generra Peck wasn’t concerned the next morning, telling them the launch was so popular it “broke the internet.”

But it marked the start of a social media campaign dominated by gaffes and unforced errors, as Trump supporters turned the tables with memes highlighting his perceived awkwardness and eccentricity.

A meme based on rumors that DeSantis once ate chocolate pudding with his fingers during a flight was dismissed as “liberal gossip,” but it was Trump supporters who chanted “pudding fingers” at him during campaign stops.

A pro-Trump super PAC capitalized on a TV ad that used images of a hand scooping chocolate pudding, tying it to its plans to cut Social Security.

“Ron DeSantis likes to stick his fingers where they don’t belong, and we’re not just talking about pudding,” the ad claimed.

The governor’s rival followed it up with memes mocking him for allegedly “wiping snot on voters,” having a funny laugh and wearing lifts in his cowboy boots.

Joan Donovan, a researcher at Boston University who studies disinformation and wrote a book about the role of memes in politics, said humorous and unsubstantiated attacks are often the most effective.

“This is called meme magic,” she added.

“The irony is that the more you try to eliminate it, the more it becomes a problem.”

But it may have been the social media efforts, devised under the leadership of rapid response director Christina Pushaw, that did him the most damage.

In the “war room,” young staffers had to come up with memes and videos that they hoped would go viral.

Many were posted online by third parties, but they were created in the war room, according to two former aides and from text messages reviewed by The New York Times.

One featured fake footage of Trump hugging and kissing Fauci, and another attacked the ex-president as a supporter of LGBT rights with images of transgender people, clips from the film American Psycho and an image of DeSantis with pink lightning bolts shooting from his eyes .

“I was 55/45 for Trump/DeSantis,” podcaster Tim Pool told his three million subscribers.

“Now I’m 0% for DeSantis.”

But the most infamous video was one that showed the governor’s face superimposed over the Florida seal, transforming into the Nazi-era Sonnenrad emblem, complete with what appeared to be two columns of stormtroopers charging into battle.

DeSantis employee Nate Hochman was fired when he retweeted it from an account called DeSantis Fancams, along with the warning “We’ll be right back.”

But ideas for the videos were routinely shared in a large group chat by DeSantis staffers, who decided how best to post them online.

The group’s work cost DeSantis his biggest donor to the super PAC Never Back Down in the form of space magnate Robert Bigelow, who warned that “extremism will not get you elected.”

Other major donors have scaled back or stopped their support, including billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin.

“Most of the high-dollar donors are business people,” said Republican political consultant Terry Sullivan, Marco Rubio’s former presidential campaign manager.

“No one wants to buy a burning house.”

DeSantis ordered a restart of his campaign in June, firing a third of his staff and ending his boycott based on interviews with mainstream media.

A campaign spokesperson denied that the online strategy had failed, but emphasized that the campaign would not “relitigate old stories.”

“Our campaign is firing on all cylinders and focused solely on what’s ahead – we’re taking it to Donald Trump and Joe Biden,” a spokesperson told the newspaper.

James Uthmeier was named campaign manager in August, but critics say he is still losing the social media war with Donald Trump.

And an InteractivePolls poll on Saturday showed the former president would now win by 71 points to 29 in a head-to-head matchup between the two.

“It feels like the campaign has been reduced to little more than bickering with the Trump camp,” said conservative lawyer Mike Davies.

“The tactics are either counterproductive, annoying, or both.”