Ron DeSantis was supposed to be great hope to rid the GOP of Donald Trump — by replacing him with a younger, charmless clone. So far it hasn’t gone so hot. He’s in second place among Republican voters, but it’s a distant second. Meanwhile, the number of competitors is growing and he’s losing potential voters by dropping straight-up homophobic (and homoerotic) ads. Things have gotten so bad that even Fox News feels okay asking him to his face about why he sucks so bad at this.
Bartiromo: I’m wondering what’s going on with your campaign… What happened?
DeSantis: These are narratives. The media does not want me to be the nominee. pic.twitter.com/stX7j5ns0t
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 9, 2023
As per Mediaite, DeSantis went on Fox News — the only outlet he deals with — for what he probably assumed would be a puff interview. Instead, host Maria Bartiromo confronted him with what his own team has openly acknowledged: that his polls stink.
“What’s going on with your campaign?” Bartiromo asked him. “There was a lot of optimism about you running for president earlier in the year.” She then busted out a headline from Politico this weekend that read “Failure to Launch: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ Campaign to Topple Donald Trump Has Stalled.” She read another Politico headline from last week about one of his own spokespeople admitting they are “way behind.”
“What happened?” Bartiromo asked him, straight-up.
Luckily for his detractors, DeSantis wasn’t worried about addressing any issues with his campaign. He even laughed at one of the headlines.
“Maria, these are narratives,” DeSantis argued. “The media does not want me to be the nominee. I think that’s very, very clear. Why? Because they know I’ll beat Biden, but even more importantly, they know I will actually deliver on all these things.”
Besides, DeSantis said, it’s early days.
“We’ve got a long way to go,” DeSantis explained. “I’m looking forward to being able to participate in the debates, but this is not something that, you know, I ever expected to just snap fingers and all of a sudden, you know, you win seven months before anything happens. You’ve got to work, and it requires a lot of toil and tears and sweat, and we’re going to do that.”
It’s true that the Republican National Convention, when a presidential contender is finalized, is over a year away. That’s plenty of time for Trump to come up with a better mean nickname — or finally cave in and call him “Meatball Ron.”
(Via Mediaite)