Establishment Media Attacks Ron DeSantis for Staff Complaints

Politico Playbook made the latest sortie at Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) regarding staff turnover from his previous days as a U.S. Representative and candidate for Florida’s governorship.

Playbook asserted a “support group” of prior “DeSantis staffers meets regularly to trade war stories about their hardship working for the governor,” alleging that “the turnover in his office and among his campaign advisers is well known among Republicans.”

The attack continued:

In three of his five full years in Congress, he [DeSantis] ranked in at least the 70th percentile in terms of highest turnover in a House office, according to data compiled by Legistorm. In the governor’s office, he has only two staffers who started with him when he was a junior member of Congress.

Within six months of taking office as governor in 2019, DeSantis fired five staffers. One was a 23-year-old scheduler who’d been with him since the beginning of his gubernatorial race. Shortly after she was sent packing, an unnamed member of DeSantis’ administration was quoted in a Florida blog trashing her performance. A month later, his deputy chief of staff left, prompting Florida reporters to press him about the rapid churn in his operation.

Another story relayed to us by five former staffers: At the beginning of his administration, DeSantis directed the Florida Republican Party leader to fire a party official who had cancer — on that person’s first week back from surgery.

“Aides would lure DeSantis to staff meetings with cupcakes, saying that it was a colleague’s birthday to get him to attend,” the Playbook article continued.

The Playbook said many staffers they interviewed “did not want to be quoted by name because of potential professional repercussions.” But one reportedly told Playbook, “Loyalty and trust, that is not a currency he deals in. It’s him and Casey. But everyone else is like a disposable piece of garbage.”

The latest hit piece on DeSantis comes as CBS’ 60 Minutes aired a report on April 4 that claimed DeSantis had a pay-for-play scheme designed with Publix grocery stores. The story alleged Publix distributed coronavirus vaccines through its pharmacies after Publix donated $100,000 to DeSantis’s PAC.

But the story fell apart. By the same day in the afternoon, “This shamelessly dishonest hoax and conspiracy theory had collapsed into a steaming pile of fake news,” Breitbart News’s John Nolte wrote.