Joy derision Democrats swap good manners for ridicule

In her book Trump in Exile, the reporter Meridith McGraw describes how aides to Donald Trump set about destroying Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who threatened to lure Republican voters away from the former president.

- Martin Pengelly

"One Trump adviser referred to Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.

Rule number five: ridicule is man's most potent weapon," she writes.

Alinsky, a community organiser in Chicago who died in 1972, is still influential on the left and demonised on the right, but that did not stop his fifth rule, which also says "it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage", being put into concerted action by the Trump campaign during the primaries.

DeSantis was ridiculed for his lack of height, his heightened sanctimoniousness, and most effectively of all simple weirdness: a discomfiting public manner the Trump camp indelibly linked to an alleged incident on a donor's jet in which, lacking a spoon, the governor chose to use his fingers to eat a cup of chocolate pudding.

DeSantis disintegrated. Trump swept to the nomination.