It took him long enough, but it’s very, very welcome news that Ron DeSantis is now participating in meaningful campaign events and not, say, eating pizza and playing catch on Fox.
The Republican presidential candidate was by far the most consequential interview with Tucker Carlson during last week’s Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines. He offered a far better position on the pointless Ukraine war than the virtue signal-y one he had in the past. He made clear he understands just how threatening the Washington regime is to the ever-broadening underclass, to the point that the federal government may eventually be able to cut off your ability to buy things. And he aggressively defended his record’s most controversial (to the media) achievements.
All of that is good, and with Tucker unbound by the corporate (read: leftist) culture at Fox, no Republican could or should have counted on it being a breezy interview. And more importantly, news broke shortly thereafter that DeSantis agreed to an interview with CNN’s most dishonest and most lispy anchor, Jake Tapper.
To date, the DeSantis strategy has been to deny any access to the candidate by journalists and TV reporters who aren’t from Fox News or who haven’t already publicly stated how much they like him. That works fine as a sitting governor, but it doesn’t work in a national campaign wherein most voters, even Republican primary voters, don’t know him and want to know how he performs in an adversarial environment.
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