STEVE DEACE (HOST): That tweet that I just read, it does articulate the challenge of beating Trump in a primary. There -- there's about 20 to 25 percent of the primary electorate who does not care about this level of gaslighting from Trump. They don't care. I'm gonna explain why. They have no character. They're in a cult. I mean, some of them are cultists, sure, but it's really not that many people. Most of them aren't the Twitter grifters or cultists that you see omnipresent on Twitter. So, I would really caution the DeSantis stans -- I don't know if you guys like that nickname or not. I just couldn't come up with a better one -- I would caution you from being too influenced by that annoyance.
We -- learn from the mistakes we've made on the Cruz campaign. We assumed that what we were seeing in social media, that cult-like following, was the entirety of his support. And it's not. And we paid a steep price for that mistake. That's another one of the mistakes we made that we have to own. Okay? It's -- because if you don't understand this, you will -- you will message to your own detriment. And frankly, at times, I see this from DeSantis Twitter follower -- Twitter support.
Most of Trump's 20 to 25 percent hardcore base -- and when I say most, I mean, like 90 percent of that 20-25 percent -- It -- they are in that base because they gave up on the conventional system, because the conventional system gave up on them and then turned on them. And so they see Trump as a bulwark, pardon the pun, okay -- but they see Trump as a bulwark against the system finishing them off.