The Humiliation of Ron DeSantis
The Florida governor isn’t Trump plus competence; he’s Trump minus jokes.
Before his stump speeches in his reelection campaign last year, Ron DeSantis liked to play a video montage that showed him being gratuitously rude to reporters at press conferences. It was petty and graceless—and warmly received by the Florida governor’s base. At a DeSantis rally in Melbourne, Florida, last fall, I watched the video from an elevated press pen alongside a gaggle of local reporters. The disconnect between the unflagging politeness that DeSantis’s young volunteers showed the press corps and the ostentatious douchebaggery of the candidate was stark.
Last night, though, Dunking Ron was replaced, briefly, by Conciliatory Ron. His decision to grant CNN’s Jake Tapper a sit-down interview in South Carolina was a reflection of how far behind Donald Trump he is trailing in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. But more than that, the interview was a rejection of one of the Florida governor’s most cherished principles: Mainstream journalists are the enemy and should be treated with undisguised contempt. DeSantis’s problem is that his basic theory of the campaign is turning out to be wrong. He promised to run as Trump plus an attention span, and instead he is running as Trump minus jokes. The result is ugly enough for the Republican base to recoil. Now, belatedly, the Florida governor appears to have decided that the only way to save his campaign is to execute a pivot from peevishness.
DeSantis played that montage in Melbourne, I think, because he had seen Trump railing against “fake news media” and leading his supporters in Two Minutes Hate sessions at his rallies, and he had drawn an entirely wrong conclusion. Despite being a smart guy, DeSantis apparently had not grasped that Trump’s routine was all for show. An act. All his life, Trump has phoned reporters to gossip. After leaving office, he welcomed multiple authors to Mar-a-Lago to spill his guts for their various books about his White House. Trump doesn’t hate the press; if anything, he likes it too much. This is a man who once pointed at the reporter Maggie Haberman and said, “I love being with her; she’s like my psychiatrist.”
DeSantis, by contrast, seems to genuinely hate the media, with their intrusion and attention and awkward questions. He has an unfortunate habit of waggling his head like a doll on a dashboard when receiving an inquiry he considers beneath him; he did it on a visit to Japan just before he formally announced his presidential campaign, when someone had the temerity to ask whether he was running, which he obviously was. The move creates an odd effect where his eyeballs seem to stay in the same place while the rest of his head oscillates around them. It’s a startling tell that he’s irritated or uncomfortable. Please let me play poker against this man.
Facing Tapper, though, DeSantis kept the wobble in check, offering instead a performance of earnest dullness. He stonewalled over whether the 2020 presidential election was stolen and whether the ex-president should face criminal charges, claiming that he preferred to “focus on looking forward.” He admitted that many people who attack “wokeness” can’t even define the term. And he dodged a question on whether he would extend Florida’s new six-week abortion restrictions countrywide by asserting broadly that he would be a “pro-life president” and claiming that, in any case, a Democratic Congress would try to “nationalize abortion up until the moment of birth” and even permit “post-birth abortions.” (Tapper did not challenge this at the time but later clarified the meaning with the campaign, which said it was referring to medical care being denied to any fetus that survived the abortion procedure.) The governor’s only gaffe was claiming that “the proof was in the pudding” when it came to suggestions that his campaign was failing, which brought to mind an unkind story, denied by the candidate, that he once ate a chocolate dessert straight from the tub with three fingers.
Let’s not go as far as the CNN pundit Bakari Sellers, who claimed that in the interview, DeSantis “started to give the vibe that he could be president of the United States.” But this was a far more emollient version of the Florida governor than any journalist an inch to the left of Fox News has ever encountered before. That’s because he now needs establishment media to treat him as a credible threat to Trump: The polls are bad, the vibes are shifting, and his campaign laid off several staff members last week. Added to that, although DeSantis raised an impressive $20 million from mid-May to June, his reliance on high rollers has become a problem. “More than two-thirds of DeSantis’ money—nearly $14 million—came from donors who gave the legal maximum and cannot donate again,” an analysis by NBC found. Those rich backers are also more likely to act strategically than grassroots true believers; they don’t have any interest in backing a loser because they admire his principles. In a similar vein, the formerly supportive Murdoch empire’s ardor for the Florida governor has noticeably cooled in recent weeks.
Hence DeSantis’s venture out of the warm shallows of Fox News and weirdo partisan sites and into the shark-filled ocean of journalists who might actually ask him difficult questions such as “Who won the 2020 election?” He needs to prove he is more than just the most popular of the also-rans, yet the whole race still revolves around the former president. “Team DeSantis refuses to see the race for what it is,” the Washington Monthly’s politics editor, Bill Scher, tweeted recently. “The race is not about who has the best tax plan. The race is: Trump, yes or no.” Even the airing of the CNN interview offered further evidence of the problem: It was pushed later in the hour by a potential third Trump indictment. It also competed with news of the Michigan attorney general charging 16 people accused of filing false claims that Trump won the 2020 election.
For DeSantis to recover, he must overcome four factors—three within his control and one outside it. The first is his squeamishness about criticizing Trump directly; you can’t defeat a bully if you look scared. The second is his decision to run to the right of Trump on several big cultural issues, including COVID policy, LBGTQ rights, and abortion. That strategy could be poison in the general election, but it’s not even paying off in the primary. The third is that DeSantis still looks lightweight on foreign and economic policy; he briefly minimized the importance of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, apparently to curry favor with Tucker Carlson, before revising his view. His book The Courage to Be Free and his campaign speeches are heavy on his pandemic policies and his fight against Disney, and notably light on pocketbook issues.
Granted, Trump has taken wildly inconsistent positions on any number of subjects and probably couldn’t identify Ukraine on a map. But that brings us to DeSantis’s fourth problem, the one he can’t seem to control: his personality. He is not naturally funny, entertaining, or charming. Just as he doesn’t understand the pro-wrestling-style kayfabe involved in Trump’s ostensible hatred of media outlets, he doesn’t understand that Trump’s regular flirtations with bigotry are softened with a knowing wink.
In recent days, the DeSantis team shared a video made by a Twitter user who goes by “Proud Elephant,” which attacked Trump for saying in a 2016 speech that he would “do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens.” The clip was nakedly homophobic, and I mean that literally—rippling male abs featured prominently, between approving citations of headlines about DeSantis passing “anti-trans” bills. In response, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg noted “the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders.” Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten, offered an even sharper verdict: “This is actually very gay.” Log Cabin Republicans, a group representing LGBTQ members of the party, tweeted: “Conservatives understand that we need to protect our kids, preserve women’s sports, safeguard women’s spaces and strengthen parental rights, but Ron DeSantis’ extreme rhetoric has just ventured into homophobic territory.” Take away the clownishness and cartoonishness of Trump, and what is left is overtly, obviously repellent—even to many within the GOP.
Last night, DeSantis told Tapper that he had been consistently written off, whether in his first race to be governor or in his battle against Disney. He pointed out his proven fundraising abilities. He did not need to say, because everybody knows, that Trump might be in deep legal jeopardy by the time the election comes around. The race is still open. But by granting the interview at all, DeSantis conceded that his biggest problem is not that the establishment media hate him—as he regularly claims—but that his reluctance to confront Trump directly makes him all too easy to ignore.
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