Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign launched a “Trump accident tracker” Tuesday intended to highlight slip-ups and controversial statements from the former president, escalating the battle between the two 2024 GOP rivals.
“To highlight the liability that Trump is for his own campaign and remind the American people of the liability he would be in the Oval Office, we will now be keeping a daily record of how long Trump can go without causing an accident on the job,” Andrew Romeo, a spokesperson for the DeSantis campaign, said in a statement.
The effort launched a day after Trump spoke to supporters in New Hampshire, where the DeSantis campaign noted that the former president appeared to confuse the leaders of Turkey and Hungary, referring to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as the “leader of Turkey.”
The accident tracker cited other Trump comments that have drawn confusion or criticism, including when he recently referred to the terrorist group Hezbollah as “very smart” and when he attacked Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) as she welcomed other 2024 primary candidates into the state.
Asked about the launch of the accident tracker, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called it a “weak, bitch move by a dying campaign. They never have an original idea of their own.”
DeSantis has increasingly argued Trump has lost a step from when he first ran for office.
“He is wedded to the teleprompter. He can’t get off that teleprompter. Anytime he does, he says things like ‘don’t vote.’ He’s telling people not to vote. Like we have all the votes we need? Really?” DeSantis said Tuesday in New Hampshire. “This is a different Donald Trump than 2015 and 2016.”
DeSantis, who entered the race as perhaps the most formidable Trump alternative, has struggled to gain ground on the former president in primary polls. The Florida governor is running in second in the majority of polls, trailing Trump by more than 20 points in many cases, and he has slipped into third place behind Nikki Haley in some recent surveys.
The new “Trump accident tracker” also coincides with the Trump campaign’s own so-called “Kiss of Death” countdown targeting the DeSantis operation. The countdown was in reference to Jeff Roe, the chief strategist for DeSantis’s super PAC, telling supporters they had 60 days to turn the race around.
The countdown concluded Tuesday, but the Trump campaign signaled it would continue to hammer DeSantis for the foreseeable future.
“The only way we’ll stop is when DeSanctus returns to the Epcot Center, where all his issues began, and starts singing ‘It’s a Small World After All’ while taking the Drinking Around the World Tour, because that’s the closest he’ll ever become to being a world leader,” the Trump campaign said.
Updated at 3:26 p.m. ET
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