Ron DeSantis says his 2018 ad touting Donald Trump was just a play for ‘free media’

Florida’s Governor is explaining away a controversial ad in which he touted his deep affinity for Donald Trump as a “tongue-in-cheek” play for “free media.”

“That’s obviously tongue in cheek. … Of course, it’s a funny video, but here’s the thing about it,” Ron DeSantis said, “when you’re doing these campaigns, you want to get as much free media as possible. So I knew that that would cause the corporate media to light their hair on fire and they did. And so they just kept playing it for me. So we didn’t even have to really pay for the ad.”

From there, DeSantis suggested that the ad’s touting of Trump wasn’t as appealing to Republican voters in the race against Adam Putnam as the depiction of his family was.

“Part of it is that ad gets out, what do the average voters see? They say, ‘Hey, this is a guy with a, you know, this beautiful wife, young kids, everything like that.’ And that, that, that kind of helped us there,” DeSantis said on the PBD Podcast.

DeSantis also said he would have won in 2018 without Trump’s endorsement, which he suggested actually held him back from winning by more than 34,000 votes against Andrew Gillum.

“The test of that is I won by 34,000 with his endorsement. Four years later, he attacked me three days before the election and I won by 1.5 million votes,” DeSantis said.

“Trump was a factor in 2018. It didn’t matter what I did, they were going to vote against me. That was, that was the reason they viewed me as that.”

While DeSantis may contend that his family was the takeaway from his ad and that he would’ve been better off without the then-President’s strong backing, Trump (who was rallying with the then-candidate days after the ad’s release) was the leitmotif of the spot narrated by Casey DeSantis.

“Everyone knows my husband Ron DeSantis is endorsed by President Trump. But he’s also an amazing dad. Ron loves playing with the kids,” Casey DeSantis says, kicking off an ad that attempts to meld humor and the presentation of her husband as a family man.

The spot features DeSantis exhorting a child to “build the wall” using giant construction blocks, reading to a child from “The Art of the Deal,” and teaching a child to read from a Trump sign.

“Make America great again,” DeSantis reads to one of his offspring.

“People say Ron is all-Trump, but he’s really so much more,” Mrs. DeSantis quips, as the camera pans to a child of tender age in a crib, wearing a Make America Great Again onesie.

“Big league,” the candidate says, “so good.”