DeSantis ad pays tribute to Donald Trump

In a new ad released Monday, Republican candidate for governor Ron DeSantis drives home his love for President Donald Trump — again and again, with humor.

Trump supporters are a critical constituency DeSantis is counting on in his primary contest with Adam Putnam.

The new ad is narrated by DeSantis’ wife, Casey, who starts by reminding viewers that Trump has endorsed her husband in the Aug. 28 Republican primary.

“But he’s also an amazing dad. Ron loves playing with the kids,” she says, adding — with tongue firmly-in-cheek: “People say Ron’s all Trump, but he is so much more.”

The 30-second spot continues sprinkled with funny lines and images — all reinforcing that DeSantis is 100 percent Trump.

The candidate teaches one of his two children to “build the wall” — a reference to Trump’s proposed wall on the U.S. border with Mexico — and shows them building a wall out of cardboard blocks.

Then he reads a story to one of the kids, who sits in his lap as he holds a copy of then-businessman Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal” and utters this line: “Then Mr. Trump said, ‘You’re fired.’ I love that part.”

Finally, Casey DeSantis explains, her husband is teaching infant daughter Madison how to talk. It shows her sitting in her dad’s lap. He’s holding a Donald Trump campaign sign and reciting and pointing to each word in the president’s slogan: Make America Great Again.

The ad is a break from the increasingly negative back and forth between the two candidates.

Polls in the last week show DeSantis leading Putnam — as many voters have already received absentee ballots, early voting begins in mid-August, and the primary is just four weeks away.

The president will headline a DeSantis rally in Tampa today.

The DeSantis campaign didn’t provide specifics about where the ad would run and how much it would spend, but said it would begin airing “statewide across Florida” today.

The style of the spot is a marked contrast to an ad last week from Putnam’s political committee, which attacks “D.C. DeSantis” for what it says is his support for a national, 23 percent sales tax. Politifact rated the ad “mostly false.”