Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Ron DeSantis: Florida Man
Aired: 2023-08-24
Duration: 01:24:58


=== Trust Your Girlfriends (05:49) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:00:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that.
[00:00:21]  Trust your girlfriends.
[00:00:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:00:25]  Trust me, babe.
[00:00:26]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:31]  I got you.
[00:00:32]  I got you.
[00:00:36]  10-10 shots fired.
[00:00:38]  City hall building.
[00:00:39]  How could this ever happen in City Hall?
[00:00:41]  Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood.
[00:00:43]  A shocking public murder.
[00:00:44]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[00:00:51]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[00:00:53]  Those are shots.
[00:00:54]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[00:00:57]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
[00:00:59]  That may have been about sex.
[00:01:01]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
[00:01:05]  Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:11]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[00:01:15]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:01:19]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[00:01:26]  An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
[00:01:29]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:01:32]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:01:43]  What's still meatball?
[00:01:45]  My continues to be Ron.
[00:01:49]  How we doing, everybody?
[00:01:51]  I'm Robert Evans.
[00:01:53]  This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about Ronathan DeSantis.
[00:01:58]  With me, again, Cody Johnston, Katie Stoll.
[00:02:02]  How do you guys think your lives would be different if your last names were reversed?
[00:02:08]  Stole Katie?
[00:02:10]  No, no, no.
[00:02:10]  If you were Katie Johnston and you were Cody Stoll.
[00:02:14]  Oh, in a way.
[00:02:16]  I feel like you'd be called Cody Stolly a lot.
[00:02:19]  Cody Stolly, probably.
[00:02:20]  Yeah, that would have been your college nickname, like because of because of the vodka.
[00:02:24]  Like, oh, I had S, Cody Stolly.
[00:02:27]  Well, why was that not?
[00:02:28]  Why was that not Katie Stoley's nickname?
[00:02:31]  Because that would not be appropriate.
[00:02:33]  Katie Stoley doesn't sound right to me.
[00:02:37]  People called me Stolley, just Stolly in college because that would be like a cool.
[00:02:44]  You know, I think Katie J would be a nice nickname.
[00:02:47]  Katie J. Katie J.
[00:02:49]  Yeah.
[00:02:49]  Katie J is solid.
[00:02:52]  I'd go by that.
[00:02:53]  I think I'd be a very different person if I'd grown up with that as my nickname, Katie J.
[00:02:58]  Yeah.
[00:02:59]  I think if I had a solid that Cody stole too, I think it'd be different too.
[00:03:03]  It's totally different now.
[00:03:05]  Yeah.
[00:03:06]  You would be working for the Daily Wire right now.
[00:03:09]  Before we get into Ron DeSantis, I've just found a list of Gen Z slang terms.
[00:03:15]  And in order to boost our appeal with the youth demographic, I'm going to key you in on some of these on some of these slang words.
[00:03:24]  Google's AI has collated them from a mix of mommy daddy.com, mental floss, and parade.
[00:03:31]  So you know this is the best information on Gen Z.
[00:03:34]  Well researched.
[00:03:35]  Wait, is this an article or is this like a Google search?
[00:03:38]  It appears to be, yeah, this is just like the Google search result for Gen Z slang list because I was trying to stay cool.
[00:03:44]  Yeah, it's just, it's become great.
[00:03:47]  Falling apart.
[00:03:48]  So number three on the list is SIC slash SICK.
[00:03:53]  Just these are the two spellings of sick that Gen Z kids do.
[00:03:57]  It means next level cool.
[00:03:58]  So not just normal cool.
[00:04:00]  That's good.
[00:04:01]  Obviously, salty means bitter or angry.
[00:04:04]  Liddy, again, exciting or wild once more.
[00:04:09]  Liddy is something I've heard that that is seeped its way into wider use.
[00:04:14]  I just use it.
[00:04:15]  I know.
[00:04:15]  That's what made me look this up.
[00:04:17]  I used it this morning to describe myself last night.
[00:04:21]  Does that mean I'm hashtag cool?
[00:04:23]  Oh, yeah, truly.
[00:04:24]  Yeah.
[00:04:24]  Or we're going to be able to do it.
[00:04:24]  No, because there is no cap, Sophie.
[00:04:27]  Or your coolness.
[00:04:28]  Those, these words are no longer cool.
[00:04:31]  Yeah, I've ruined it.
[00:04:32]  I mean, Google is collating it with.
[00:04:34]  I'm personally pissed at this because dope is number two.
[00:04:37]  And like, that's not a Gen Z term.
[00:04:40]  That's well, well before Gen Z has been saying it for a long time.
[00:04:44]  People or me had been saying it for a long time.
[00:04:46]  Yeah.
[00:04:47]  I feel like that's like an ex-millennial cut.
[00:04:50]  There's got to be something good.
[00:04:52]  They got Gucci.
[00:04:54]  I do feel like that's solidly Gen Z.
[00:04:57]  Yeah.
[00:04:57]  Yeah.
[00:04:59]  They've got the word Riz.
[00:05:01]  They do have the word Riz.
[00:05:03]  That is not on this list.
[00:05:04]  I was going to say, it's like, is there anything on the list that's like correct or like useful?
[00:05:09]  No, like everything that AI puts together, it's a piece of shit.
[00:05:13]  They don't even have Riz.
[00:05:14]  That's so weird.
[00:05:15]  But it's Rizz.
[00:05:16]  They don't have no cap.
[00:05:17]  They don't have any of that.
[00:05:18]  Charisma.
[00:05:18]  Riz, Riz.
[00:05:19]  Baste isn't on here.
[00:05:20]  Riz is Gen Z shortening charisma.
[00:05:23]  Like, you have swag.
[00:05:26]  You have Riz.
[00:05:26]  Yeah.
[00:05:27]  It's more like in the context of like flirting.
[00:05:29]  Yeah.
[00:05:30]  But it is short for charisma.
[00:05:32]  Anyway, this has been Gen Z Corner, where we can spark our credentials with the young'ins, with the wee ones.
[00:05:42]  Did it work?
[00:05:43]  We might listen back to this single.
[00:05:45]  Wow, we should cut this on account of how we sound so old.

=== Self-Published Tea Party Manifestos (15:59) ===

[00:05:50]  All right.
[00:05:50]  I mean, people have been complaining a lot about Gen Z on Twitter lately about them being, you know, prudes, not liking sex and things and stuff.
[00:05:58]  Watching movies weird.
[00:06:00]  Watching movies weird.
[00:06:01]  I just re-watched the original Bad News Bears with Walter Mathow.
[00:06:04]  And I think the solution is we got to get cigarettes back in kids' hands.
[00:06:08]  Like vapes aren't doing it.
[00:06:09]  We got to get them smoking.
[00:06:11]  We got to get them smoking.
[00:06:14]  Shortcut, we just put them back in the mines.
[00:06:16]  Put them back in the mines.
[00:06:17]  Just as good, just as good for the lungs.
[00:06:19]  Yeah.
[00:06:19]  Okay.
[00:06:20]  Same thing.
[00:06:20]  And we get some work done.
[00:06:22]  To fuck up their lungs.
[00:06:23]  It's not to make them look cool or make them generally cooler.
[00:06:28]  Okay.
[00:06:28]  Either way, just put them in the mines.
[00:06:31]  Yeah.
[00:06:32]  I was just hoping for more cheap labor, but if we want to make them cool, then I guess give them cigarettes.
[00:06:37]  Fine.
[00:06:38]  Excellent.
[00:06:40]  So we are back.
[00:06:42]  And let's see.
[00:06:44]  We are on top of spaghetti, all covered in cheese.
[00:06:48]  All covered in a meatball.
[00:06:51]  A meatball made of Ron.
[00:06:54]  So yum.
[00:06:57]  I have to find my place.
[00:06:58]  Handsome, handsome meatball.
[00:07:01]  That's right.
[00:07:02]  Often described as handsome meatball ron.
[00:07:05]  I have not stopped thinking about that, to be honest.
[00:07:07]  I mean, I have, but it's been several days since last we met.
[00:07:13]  Yeah.
[00:07:13]  Discussed Mr. Ronald.
[00:07:16]  Ronathan.
[00:07:17]  Yeah.
[00:07:17]  Ronathan, apologies.
[00:07:20]  I just can't believe it.
[00:07:22]  Anyway, I've spent too much time talking about his face.
[00:07:26]  So Ron was 33 years old when he went on his first political campaign.
[00:07:32]  Running for an open district that your party dominates is a pretty sweet spot for a politician trying to break into the national level.
[00:07:40]  This is kind of the easiest way you can possibly start in national politics.
[00:07:45]  And the only stumbling block between him and this first step on the ladder up towards the presidency was the Republican primary, right?
[00:07:52]  Because there's just not going to be a general election competition.
[00:07:55]  He wins the primary.
[00:07:56]  The seat is his.
[00:07:57]  And luckily for Ron, his competition were all utter non-entities.
[00:08:01]  So all he had to do to succeed was make himself into somebody.
[00:08:06]  He opted for the smart play here and decided that rather than focusing on his opponents, he would run against President Obama.
[00:08:13]  This was at the height.
[00:08:15]  We're talking 2012 here.
[00:08:16]  So this is kind of like a little past maybe the peak of influence for the Tea Party, but it's still like the big name in Republican politics at the moment.
[00:08:25]  And Ron leaned hard into that movement.
[00:08:28]  He patterned himself specifically off of Ted Cruz.
[00:08:32]  That was his hunter.
[00:08:34]  He's so makes so much sense.
[00:08:37]  Yeah, right?
[00:08:38]  Oh my God.
[00:08:39]  Uh-huh.
[00:08:39]  Yeah.
[00:08:40]  Oh, equally likable men.
[00:08:43]  That's perfecting.
[00:08:45]  Yeah.
[00:08:45]  That's so funny.
[00:08:46]  I see.
[00:08:47]  He's all I see when thinking about him is Ted Cruz.
[00:08:53]  That's so funny.
[00:08:54]  Yeah.
[00:08:54]  It's on purpose.
[00:08:56]  It is.
[00:08:56]  And I think he's just as doomed as old Teddy.
[00:09:00]  And you get the same thing, too, where like his co-workers, no one will say a nice word about Ron as a person, right?
[00:09:06]  Who works with him.
[00:09:08]  Oh, yeah.
[00:09:08]  Why would you?
[00:09:09]  He's just deeply unlikable.
[00:09:12]  So yeah, he starts attacking Obama's record.
[00:09:15]  He runs primarily on dismantling the Affordable Care Act, ending gun control, you know, border shit, all that good Republican jazz.
[00:09:23]  It was not.
[00:09:24]  Did he do any of that?
[00:09:26]  I mean, not really.
[00:09:28]  No.
[00:09:29]  It was not a creative line of attack, nor did it set him apart from the PAC, but it was enough.
[00:09:35]  He kind of is good enough at sort of leaning into these big conservative targets that he gets attention from the usual pack of right-wing funders, these different sort of think tanks and PACs and whatnot, like Freedom Works and the Club for Growth, who fund all of the really awful conservative candidates that have made life so colorful in our democracy of late.
[00:09:59]  Ron also makes a habit of showing up at tea party rallies, and he's able to build a reputation for himself as an economic wonk.
[00:10:06]  Another model that he really embraces is Paul Ryan, right?
[00:10:10]  So like he's trying to do that.
[00:10:12]  He really does.
[00:10:13]  It's like his so bad national.
[00:10:15]  Honestly, he's hit it.
[00:10:20]  It's so funny, especially like, obviously, you know, hindsight and all that, but to model yourself after Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan and now try to beat Donald Trump in an election, this is very funny.
[00:10:38]  That's not going to happen, my man.
[00:10:39]  You picked the two wrong guys.
[00:10:41]  Yep.
[00:10:43]  Yeah.
[00:10:44]  Yeah.
[00:10:44]  He really did like pick the exactly wrong dudes.
[00:10:48]  Now, kind of the one intelligent thing he did is he also leans into Glenn Beckstick of portraying himself as a historian.
[00:10:55]  This is like a big part of early Ron DeSantis.
[00:10:58]  And he's, he's really kind of patterning himself specifically on this style of like conservative media dude who rewrites history in order to make political points.
[00:11:10]  Key to this strategy is self-publishing his first book, Dreams from Our Founding Fathers.
[00:11:16]  The title, as in everything else about Ron, was a direct snipe at President Obama, particularly Obama's pre-election memoir.
[00:11:23]  But the content was more in line with the work of pop history big name right-wing media stars like Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh, all of whom had started publishing history books.
[00:11:33]  Now, Ron's self-published book does not hit the bestseller list.
[00:11:36]  He seems to have made less than $6,000 in sales, which is not bad for an independent book.
[00:11:42]  Well, he wasn't as if that was published.
[00:11:45]  Yeah.
[00:11:46]  And he's, I guess he's not as known as he is now.
[00:11:50]  Yeah, it wasn't like a, it wasn't starter.
[00:11:52]  I am thinking, I am thinking of it in terms of right now, but.
[00:11:56]  Yeah.
[00:11:57]  Yeah, it's not like, it's certainly not a big deal, but the book is a success in a different way, which is that he's able to take copies of it with him when he goes to speak at tea party rallies.
[00:12:07]  And even if they don't sell, the fact that he's sort of setting himself up as one of these guys who shows up with their like self-published manifestos at a tea party rallies, that makes him feel like he's one of them, right?
[00:12:18]  Like that's a, he's this very highly educated Yale guy who is like, has been previously tied to the kind of most austere chunks of the Republican Party.
[00:12:27]  And showing up with your self-published like manifesto at a tea party rally is a great way to make like make them feel like you're one of them, you know?
[00:12:35]  Absolutely.
[00:12:36]  So we should probably talk about this book a little bit because it shows off Ron's very consistent obsession with a narrow chunk of the historic discipline, the history of American federalism.
[00:12:46]  Two of his kids are named after he has a child named after James Madison and a child named after George Mason, both of whom like are federalists who helped write the Constitution.
[00:12:55]  And in Ron's eyes, they're the guys who saved the early republic from the demagogues who threatened the property of wealthy Americans.
[00:13:02]  Now, we could talk about what that property is.
[00:13:05]  And in fact, we will in a second.
[00:13:07]  Okay.
[00:13:08]  Dreams of our founding fathers quotes liberally from the arguments that DeSantis agrees with that were made by quote-unquote founding fathers.
[00:13:16]  This largely means equating freedom with the right to own property, which is, you know, land and people at this time.
[00:13:23]  Ron, of course, does not defend slavery in his self-published book.
[00:13:27]  He simply denies that our nation's history with it should have any impact on the way people think about founders or our constitution or property rights.
[00:13:36]  From an analysis in The Atlantic, quote, it's rather how his entire reading of American history is enveloped in both unquestioning fealty to the founders and an insistence that the role of slavery and race more broadly in that history does not seriously change anything about how we should understand the birth and development of our country.
[00:13:52]  For Obama and his teachers, the problem of slavery exemplified the need to adapt and improve the Constitution.
[00:13:58]  For DeSantis, would-be reformers who misunderstand the role of slavery in our history are themselves the root of the problem in our politics.
[00:14:05]  And the most infuriating portion of this book is when Ron makes very limited quotes, takes very limited quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. and makes them into an argument that he was a famous endorser of the founding documents of this country, right?
[00:14:19]  Because he would quote from the Constitution a lot to make, you know, and the Declaration of Independence to make certain arguments.
[00:14:25]  Point out how it was flawed and maybe we weren't doing it.
[00:14:29]  Yeah.
[00:14:29]  Yeah.
[00:14:30]  I love, love when white men do that.
[00:14:33]  Take him out of context and use that to fit a narrative.
[00:14:39]  Yeah, it's galling that what King was doing is pointing out how the country has never lived up to even the promises that it made.
[00:14:45]  And Ron is like, see, he was a constitutionalist.
[00:14:48]  He's just like Antonin Scalia.
[00:14:50]  God.
[00:14:51]  This is absolutely not what he was saying at all.
[00:14:54]  He's a fucking originalist.
[00:14:56]  By far the most galling moment in the book, though, is when Ron cites the Dred Scott decision as an example of an activist judge ignoring the letter of the law, something his beloved originalists would never do.
[00:15:08]  Quote, there is a consensus among historians and legal scholars that Dred Scott v. Sanford, which turned on the question of whether a fugitive slave could sue for his freedom after he crossed into a free state, was wrongly decided because Taney declared that African Americans could not be considered citizens.
[00:15:22]  They had, in fact, been voting citizens in numerous states.
[00:15:25]  DeSantis wants to distance himself and the Constitution from Taney's obvious and decisive hatefulness.
[00:15:30]  So he doesn't mention that the entire logic of Taney's willful forgetting of statutory laws rested on his insistence that the founding fathers could never have meant for there to be any kind of racial equality.
[00:15:41]  In other words, Taney made a politically conservative, notably partisan decision precisely on his interpretation of the founders' intent.
[00:15:48]  It was originalist to the core, the original originalism, where gut feelings about what the founders thought and wanted trumped actual state laws.
[00:15:55]  DeSantis can't see or won't admit that it is often originalism that is selective with evidence.
[00:16:01]  So he's basically saying, like, the Dred Scott decision is like what liberals do, right?
[00:16:05]  They're just going off of their political opinions and not being originalists, where the reality is that, like, no, it was a fundamentally originalist decision.
[00:16:14]  Yeah.
[00:16:16]  Do you think he knows?
[00:16:17]  Do you think he do you think he read the criticism of the book and was like, I've changed my ways now that people know what they're talking about?
[00:16:25]  No, of course.
[00:16:26]  No, like I don't know.
[00:16:30]  I don't know the degree to which one of the things that's frustrated me about my research into DeSantis is I don't know the degree to which he believes the shit he's selling as opposed to just kind of laying it out because it's an effective argument to make to get the things that he wants.
[00:16:47]  I lean towards he's full of shit, and this is just what he saw as the best way to get into power.
[00:16:54]  And like he is, especially these days, like the like knowing this stuff from this book and then seeing where he is now with education and history and just the Florida of it all, it does seem like he knows and is to and is smarter than he is letting on by just sort of, yeah, I can say this stuff and people eat it up.
[00:17:17]  Oh, yeah, absolutely.
[00:17:19]  He's definitely doing that now, but I do think it's pretty calculated and I do think he's a smart person that he's definitely a smart person playing, but it's all a part of a game, not a game, but yeah, a plan.
[00:17:33]  It feels strategic.
[00:17:34]  Yeah.
[00:17:35]  It also feels pathetic because it's pathetic now.
[00:17:38]  You know, we're looking at it now because his shit's starting to fall apart.
[00:17:42]  But you do have to note that like from the point at which he starts running, it works startlingly well for quite a while.
[00:17:51]  Well, that's why he genuinely scared at the beginning of this.
[00:17:54]  I've had this conversation with you guys of like, he actually, if it was to take, he was to take a root in some way, like he actually does scare me because he's smarter than a lot of them.
[00:18:03]  What he's done is very scary.
[00:18:05]  Like he's done a lot.
[00:18:06]  I mean, we'll continue talking about that.
[00:18:07]  So Ron's selective reading of our founding documents and history is not new, but it did solidify a place for him on the wonky side of the post-Bush GOP.
[00:18:16]  This caused him difficulty, namely due to the fact that his new funders liked what he had to say, but didn't like the fact that he was an extremely obvious void of charisma.
[00:18:26]  The kind of person who saves him here from the fact that he's just terrible at actually like hand-to-hand campaigning is his wife, Casey.
[00:18:35]  She is his charisma.
[00:18:37]  One colleague of Ron's later told a reporter, he doesn't make small talk easily, but Casey was always with him and she filled that gap.
[00:18:43]  He put so much emphasis on her.
[00:18:45]  Every single speech he ever made, he almost always let off with her, or within two minutes, he had mentioned her.
[00:18:50]  And she is like going door to door for him.
[00:18:52]  She's like shaking hands, knocking on doors and shit.
[00:18:56]  Like she is his ground game to a really significant extent.
[00:19:00]  And a big part of like making him feel like a normal person when he's doing these events with donors and stuff.
[00:19:08]  Ron and Casey had been married for just three years when they start campaigning together.
[00:19:13]  So three years after their fun little Disney wedding.
[00:19:16]  As the election continued, Ron started to collect celebrity endorsements.
[00:19:20]  Savvier Eyes and the Republican fold had marked him out for greatness.
[00:19:23]  He earned Joe Arpaio's endorsement along with that.
[00:19:28]  How about that?
[00:19:28]  Celebrity endorsements.
[00:19:30]  Celebrity endorsements.
[00:19:31]  Hey, Arpaio's a big name, especially in 2012.
[00:19:34]  Yeah.
[00:19:35]  Yeah, that's true.
[00:19:36]  And he also gets the coveted John Bolton endorsement.
[00:19:40]  Yeah, that's a big one.
[00:19:42]  Wow.
[00:19:45]  But perhaps his most important endorsement was that of Donald Trump.
[00:19:49]  Trump gave DeSantis.
[00:19:51]  Yeah, this, and again, this is 2012 birtherism Trump gives him an early boost when he tweets out on March 20th, 2012, Iraq Vid, Navy hero, Bronze Star, Yale, Harvard Law.
[00:20:03]  Very impressive.
[00:20:07]  I'd like to hear what Donald Trump has to say about all of this.
[00:20:11]  Is he still a Navy hero?
[00:20:12]  Is he still a Navy hero?
[00:20:14]  You still like Harvard and Yale?
[00:20:16]  You think those are like not where the snobby elites go to do communism?
[00:20:22]  Yeah, the communist, communist Harvard law.
[00:20:25]  In his first term, Ron was a reliable.
[00:20:27]  So he does get elected, by the way, obviously.
[00:20:30]  In his first term in Congress, Ron is a reliable vote on the piece of shit caucus.
[00:20:36]  He tried to stop Hurricane Sandy aid.
[00:20:38]  He voted to support the government.
[00:20:40]  Yeah, he does.
[00:20:41]  None of that.
[00:20:42]  None of that.
[00:20:42]  Don't help people with government money.
[00:20:45]  We need that money to not spend, I guess.
[00:20:48]  Cloudy with a chance of meatballs, right?
[00:20:50]  Yeah.
[00:20:51]  Yeah.
[00:20:52]  He votes to support the government shutdown.
[00:20:54]  He voted against an update for the Violence Against Women Act.
[00:20:58]  If you want a short idea about what a photography is.
[00:21:00]  I'm sorry.
[00:21:01]  How dare everyone not laugh at that joke from Cody?
[00:21:05]  I laughed at it.
[00:21:06]  I didn't catch it.
[00:21:07]  I didn't catch it.
[00:21:08]  Sophie just silently.
[00:21:09]  I was just silently dying.
[00:21:11]  Cody, can you, can you?
[00:21:12]  I guess I didn't really laugh, but I checked.
[00:21:14]  That's okay.
[00:21:15]  It was just a reference to weather and meatballs.
[00:21:17]  Cloudy with a chance of meatballs.
[00:21:18]  Roberts was finally.
[00:21:20]  That was really good.
[00:21:21]  Better than my Monet joke last week.
[00:21:24]  Moan it.
[00:21:26]  So, good stuff.
[00:21:29]  The Heritage Foundation gives him 100%.
[00:21:31]  So if you want to know the kind of dude he is as a congressman, there you go.
[00:21:36]  Oh, yeah.
[00:21:37]  Ron gets a junior seat on the Freedom Caucus.
[00:21:40]  He is one of the nine original members, although he's kind of the least of them.
[00:21:44]  He's not very prominent at this point, but he is.
[00:21:47]  This is kind of shows some political foresight, right?

=== DeSantis's Political Foresight (09:42) ===

[00:21:49]  He sees, because the Freedom Caucus is really a precursor to a lot of Trumpist shit hitting.
[00:21:55]  Yeah.
[00:21:55]  And he's on that, right?
[00:21:57]  From an early stage.
[00:21:59]  If DeSantis has a reputation in this period, it is as a very far-right vote who you cannot talk to or reason with, right?
[00:22:08]  He is going to vote against anything Obama wants to do reflexively.
[00:22:13]  Ron openly agreed with Mitch McConnell that there was nothing more important in this period than interrupting the president's second term.
[00:22:19]  This was a job that played to Ron's strength.
[00:22:21]  He is the kind of dude who does not care much about people or their suffering and so can just kind of vote to hurt things, right?
[00:22:29]  Like that's what he's doing.
[00:22:30]  He's just kind of like voting to make the country worse consistently.
[00:22:33]  And like brush off criticism.
[00:22:35]  Like he doesn't care about being asked a question about it or being confronted about it.
[00:22:39]  He's just whatever.
[00:22:40]  Yeah.
[00:22:41]  Purely, purely obstructionist point of view, purely want.
[00:22:45]  And like, gosh, we love a public servant that doesn't give a fuck about the citizens.
[00:22:50]  That has absolutely no care to like improving people's lives.
[00:22:54]  Just wants to play that game.
[00:22:56]  Yeah.
[00:22:57]  Here's a quote from Politico that really makes that point.
[00:23:00]  I wasn't really there to necessarily to make friends, he once told Politico.
[00:23:04]  He did not.
[00:23:05]  Fellow Republicans noted him as a loner who only got in close with other Freedom Caucus weirdos.
[00:23:10]  Former Florida Republican Congressman David Jolly said that besides those guys, quote, I don't think he had many relationships at all.
[00:23:17]  One peer, former Florida Democratic Congresswoman Gwen Graham, told Politico he wore earbuds on the floor of the House so he didn't have to talk to people.
[00:23:26]  To say he was antisocial is a disservice to this term.
[00:23:28]  He does not enjoy being around people.
[00:23:31]  Now, Gwen has an obvious bias.
[00:23:33]  She's a dim, but former Michigan Republican congressman David Trott was even more savage in a recent interview with Playbook.
[00:23:39]  I think he's an asshole.
[00:23:41]  I don't think he cares about people.
[00:23:44]  That's accurate.
[00:23:47]  Cold, accurate, but like for like a Republican to point out like, it's like part of their, you know, at least these days, especially, it's like, well, we're a little callous towards people.
[00:23:56]  And like the idea of empathy is like disgusting to us.
[00:23:59]  But even to call out like, yeah, he doesn't care about people.
[00:24:02]  Well, it is.
[00:24:03]  I think also what you're seeing with that, especially the whole, I'm going to wear headphones on the floor.
[00:24:07]  I'm not going to talk to anyone.
[00:24:09]  He's not, he has no interest in being a congressman as the job.
[00:24:13]  He has interest in being a congressman in order to set himself up for the presidency.
[00:24:18]  It's a means to an end.
[00:24:19]  Yeah.
[00:24:20]  And so what matters, you can't think about helping people or doing the job of governance.
[00:24:25]  All that matters is getting that 100% from the Heritage Foundation, locking in donations, locking in support, locking in things you can brag about in a campaign to the worst, most active chunks of the Republican base.
[00:24:37]  So he's going to put those headphones on because he knows he's going to be hurting people and he doesn't want to be confronted with their existence.
[00:24:44]  Like he wants to be able to ignore everyone around him because he is just here to push some buttons.
[00:24:49]  Yeah, it's like having a private office in your ears.
[00:24:52]  Yes.
[00:24:52]  Which he will eventually get.
[00:24:54]  Yeah.
[00:24:54]  It's like for his part, DeSantis leans into his growing reputation as like the fucking kind of a psycho from a write-up in Politico, quote, look, DeSantis said, I was not in Congress to necessarily socialize.
[00:25:08]  He slept in his office.
[00:25:09]  He liked being at home more than he wanted to be in DC.
[00:25:13]  So that's that's uncomfortable.
[00:25:15]  Yeah.
[00:25:16]  Like wait, he slept in his office.
[00:25:18]  He sleeps in his office.
[00:25:19]  He doesn't talk to people.
[00:25:20]  He sleeps in his office.
[00:25:22]  He's he's just there to like cast the votes that get him marked down as like good by the NRA, good by the Heritage Foundation.
[00:25:29]  And then it's away.
[00:25:30]  He has no interest in doing this job.
[00:25:33]  Right.
[00:25:33]  Cool.
[00:25:34]  In 2015, right as the first stirrings of Trumpism started to ooze into what had been a deceptively placid political media environment, Ron dealt with the first tragedy of his life.
[00:25:44]  His sister, who was just 30 years old, died of a pulmonary embolism.
[00:25:48]  When interviewed by Piers Morgan, Ron later claimed, you start to question things that are unjust and you just have to take faith that there's a plan in place.
[00:25:55]  Trust in God.
[00:25:55]  There's no guarantee that you're going to have a life without challenges and without heartbreak.
[00:25:59]  And that's just a function of being human.
[00:26:02]  So there you go.
[00:26:04]  Is that him being human?
[00:26:08]  That's a weird thing to say about yourself.
[00:26:11]  It's a weird way to talk about it and lesson to.
[00:26:17]  Yeah, I think a normal person would say something like, yeah, it's devastating.
[00:26:19]  Like I'll miss her forever.
[00:26:21]  Something like that, like you say about a dead person, not be like, not like this Republican argument.
[00:26:26]  Well, everybody deals with shit.
[00:26:28]  Right.
[00:26:28]  It seems to try to sort of like take that tragedy and turn it into like, well, you got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and work hard.
[00:26:35]  Life is unfair.
[00:26:36]  Well, he's also taking it into some sort of as an opportunity to paint himself as a masculine tough type, as someone who can handle anything that, you know, I'm sure he's hoping to come across as a strong stuff happens.
[00:26:54]  That's life, you know?
[00:26:56]  Yeah.
[00:26:57]  Why are you complaining about your problems?
[00:26:58]  Look at me.
[00:26:59]  It's like just, yeah.
[00:27:00]  But we all, it also just reinforces, yeah, the bootstraps mentality, which is the idea that we all can just buck up and everything's fine.
[00:27:09]  I think what this best quote best embodies is that he is always relentlessly on point in this period of his life, right?
[00:27:16]  This is the answer that you give because it furthers your political reputation as the kind of conservative who can who can get elected, right?
[00:27:23]  Like every single thing that you say in public, every word, every action is based on building your future presidential campaign.
[00:27:32]  Like that's, that's who he is.
[00:27:34]  If that's how you're thinking, that's exactly what you know.
[00:27:36]  That's the move and that's what you do.
[00:27:37]  Yeah.
[00:27:38]  Yeah.
[00:27:38]  When the 2016 election got well underway, Ron was as blindsided by Donald Trump's rise to prominence as anyone else.
[00:27:44]  This is evident in the fact that he kept his fucking mouth shut for much of the primaries.
[00:27:48]  And when he did speak out about the controversial GOP frontrunner, it was mainly to dissociate himself from Trump.
[00:27:55]  He said in one interview that Trump's 2012 tweet had not been an endorsement and he made it clear that he'd never met the man.
[00:28:01]  So he actually, this big deal endorsement he gets as a first term congressman, he's like, oh, that wasn't an endorsement.
[00:28:07]  That was just a nice tweet about me.
[00:28:08]  I've never met the guy.
[00:28:09]  Don't know him.
[00:28:11]  No opinions.
[00:28:12]  And this is probably fair to see as a limitation in his political instincts, right?
[00:28:18]  He was not someone who right away saw Trump coming.
[00:28:22]  Yeah.
[00:28:24]  And I think this makes sense.
[00:28:25]  Like he's a structure guy, right?
[00:28:27]  He plays well with the Republican Party and he plays well with the kind of engine of donors and think tanks and whatnot that support that party and particularly its far right flank.
[00:28:38]  But as soon as he encounters someone who is running outside of that structure, threatening to upset it and remake it, he freezes, right?
[00:28:45]  He's just not ready to deal with this.
[00:28:47]  Yeah, it's just that weird, like you're courting, you're courting this aspect of the party in politics, but you don't really necessarily realize the end game or like where it's headed.
[00:28:56]  And then it happens.
[00:28:57]  And like, well, but I was, but the machine is good.
[00:28:59]  What's this guy trying to wreck this machine?
[00:29:01]  Yeah.
[00:29:02]  I think it speaks also to like the fact that he modeled himself sort of after Ted Cruz, who also had a similar thing where it's like, I don't know what to do here.
[00:29:10]  And, you know, his wife's to hate him or to kiss him or to copy him or to.
[00:29:17]  And then you get that sweaty phone call picture of Ted Cruz just like begging for votes.
[00:29:21]  So funny.
[00:29:22]  And it is like, it is kind of worth noting that from all the evidence we have, it seems that Ron hated Trump on site or at least saw kind of making fun of him as a profitable enterprise.
[00:29:33]  One of his former staffers told Vanity Fair, Ron made more fun of Donald Trump than anyone I know.
[00:29:39]  And another added, he thought Trump was fucking nuts.
[00:29:42]  So again, very much not on the Trump train initially.
[00:29:45]  But when Trump starts making this inexorable progress in remaking the Republican Party in his own image, Ron is kind of focused continuing his pace towards the White House.
[00:29:55]  He's in his second term by early 2015, and he's already made a lot of connections among the Heritage Foundation think tank set who determine where campaign funds are going to go.
[00:30:04]  So when Marco Rubio announces that he's going to run for president and steps down from a, yeah, I'm not going to run for re-election for this Senate seat, a representative for the Club for Growth calls Ron and is like, hey, Marco Rubio's definitely headed to the White House.
[00:30:20]  Do you want to run for his Senate seat?
[00:30:22]  I'm going to quote from Politico here.
[00:30:24]  In May 2015, less than a month after Rubio announced his presidential candidacy, DeSantis announced his Senate bid.
[00:30:30]  He had the post-haste backing of the same array of conservative groups, Senate Conservatives Fund, Freedom Works, the Club for Growth.
[00:30:37]  And a year after he got called back to the breakers at a luncheon of the Republican Party headquarters in Highlands County, Florida, DeSantis spelled it out.
[00:30:44]  I was the only U.S. Senate candidate that spoke at the Koch Brothers Donors Summit where they have all their organizations that get involved in these races.
[00:30:50]  You have everyone from the Club for Growth on.
[00:30:52]  So we built a huge, huge network of supporters that will be able to turn on.
[00:30:56]  The most important decision Ron DeSantis made that led to his eventual election as governor, a high-profile National Republican consultant said, was running for Marco's seat in 2016.
[00:31:05]  DeSantis, he said, was able to go network a group of billionaires that he otherwise couldn't have done as a congressman.
[00:31:11]  And this is, he doesn't get this seat, right?
[00:31:14]  Because Rubio flames out and returns to his seat.
[00:31:18]  But because he had been willing to play ball and run for this to keep it, you know, in-house and whatnot and made all these connections, that's what political insiders will argue is what lets him become the governor of Florida, or at least what gives him a fighting chance, right?

=== Networking Billionaires in Congress (04:08) ===

[00:31:32]  Or I would say that makes sense anyway.
[00:31:34]  Yeah.
[00:31:35]  Cause he shows himself as a team player to these money guys.
[00:31:38]  Yeah.
[00:31:39]  Yeah.
[00:31:39]  Team player tool for them, whatever you want to call it.
[00:31:44]  He is bragging about being a tool of the Koch brothers in this period.
[00:31:46]  Exactly.
[00:31:47]  Yeah.
[00:31:47]  Like, I'll do whatever.
[00:31:49]  I give me the money.
[00:31:50]  I'll do a thing.
[00:31:52]  Yeah, I'll do it.
[00:31:52]  I'll do the thing.
[00:31:53]  I'll do the thing.
[00:31:58]  That's it.
[00:31:58]  That's perfect.
[00:31:59]  So let's replace our audio sting into and out of every episode with that.
[00:32:05]  No.
[00:32:07]  She's like noting it.
[00:32:09]  Here's a spicy ad debo.
[00:32:12]  God almighty, that's embarrassing.
[00:32:15]  Shameful.
[00:32:17]  Are you supposed to do ads?
[00:32:19]  Yeah, we were doing ads.
[00:32:20]  That was just it.
[00:32:27]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:32:31]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:32:35]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:32:38]  And rule two: never mess with her friends either.
[00:32:41]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:32:45]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:32:49]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:32:51]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:32:56]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:32:57]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:32:59]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:33:01]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:33:04]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:33:06]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:33:08]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:33:13]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:33:14]  Trust me, babe.
[00:33:15]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:33:25]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:33:31]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:33:36]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:33:41]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:33:51]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:33:56]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:33:59]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:34:02]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:34:04]  That's so funny.
[00:34:05]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:34:14]  Say you love me.
[00:34:16]  You know I.
[00:34:18]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:34:26]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:34:31]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:34:38]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:34:45]  From power to parenthood.
[00:34:47]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:34:50]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:34:52]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:34:55]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:34:59]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:35:06]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:35:08]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:35:14]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:35:16]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:35:19]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:35:30]  Ah, we're back.
[00:35:33]  What you guys is back.
[00:35:34]  Favorite, favorite way to do an offensive Italian accent.

=== Shallow Toadying to Trump (09:27) ===

[00:35:40]  I don't because I'm partially Italian.
[00:35:43]  So yeah, I'm very Italian.
[00:35:45]  Yeah.
[00:35:46]  I think it's the one we've just been doing.
[00:35:49]  It's a Mia Mario.
[00:35:51]  I love what to do with the baths in a pesto sauce.
[00:35:57]  I do take baths in pesto sauce.
[00:35:59]  You do.
[00:36:00]  And I commit a lot of insurance fraud.
[00:36:02]  There you go.
[00:36:03]  The perfect Italians.
[00:36:05]  The perfect Italians.
[00:36:06]  That's how my family came to this country.
[00:36:10]  Good times.
[00:36:11]  So if you're going to be influential in politics in this country, you have basically two broad families of choice.
[00:36:18]  One is to work yourself up from within the system.
[00:36:21]  You do take bit roles in campaigns, you know, until you're able to get enough support to run for office somewhere, probably a local office.
[00:36:28]  You win election.
[00:36:29]  You start schmoozing with big donors, building connections to financiers through the think tanks that ask as they're grasping little hands.
[00:36:35]  The other way to get into politics in this country in a big way is just pure populism.
[00:36:40]  You force yourself into relevance by building enough of a following that these same people have to pretend they're not angry that you skipped in line, right?
[00:36:48]  Trump is a line skipper.
[00:36:50]  He's great at line skipping.
[00:36:51]  Ronnie D is not a line skipper.
[00:36:54]  As one of his friends, a former Florida Republican congressman told Politico, he's somebody who has his view of his strategy and politics.
[00:37:01]  Do the right little conservative things, but behind that curtain, build a network of mega-conservative donors, the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson.
[00:37:08]  Ron, more than just about anybody I know in politics, has built that network very successfully.
[00:37:13]  And this is the thing he's actually good at, right?
[00:37:15]  Like this is his actual skill.
[00:37:17]  David Bossy, the president of Citizens United and former deputy campaign manager for Trump, has given DeSantis credit for building an operation with, quote, very Trumpian tones during Trump's first campaign.
[00:37:29]  I actually don't think this is accurate.
[00:37:31]  Bossy now works on DeSantis' campaign, which is why he's saying this.
[00:37:35]  But my take is that it would be more accurate to say Ron and Trump focused on the same issues because those issues have been issues for Republicans as long as most of us listening have been alive.
[00:37:45]  Cutting entitlements, border security, culture war shit against elites.
[00:37:48]  But those are just surface similarities.
[00:37:50]  Ron has always gone after those things in a pretty normal conservative way, whereas Trump went after them in a populist wildcard way.
[00:37:59]  Given his legitimate...
[00:38:01]  So yeah, I don't know.
[00:38:02]  I think Bossy's full of shit there.
[00:38:04]  Anyway.
[00:38:04]  Yeah.
[00:38:05]  And I think, well, also, especially now, like, Ron is doing a clear, terrible Trump impression and not doing like he's, he's, he's sort of like off the grid in terms of like what he's used to, it seems.
[00:38:21]  And that's part of why he's sort of floundering.
[00:38:23]  He's like, well, this is not what I thought politics was supposed to be.
[00:38:26]  I did the things I'm supposed to do, and now I got to be this freak.
[00:38:30]  He's very much out of his depth in what he's trying in the tact that he's taking here.
[00:38:36]  You're out of your depth, Donnie, Ronnie.
[00:38:38]  Exactly.
[00:38:39]  Ronnie.
[00:38:40]  Perfect.
[00:38:41]  Yeah.
[00:38:42]  Excellent.
[00:38:44]  Okey-dokey karaoke.
[00:38:46]  So given his legitimately impressive history as a ball player, you might expect Ron to have played on the congressional team.
[00:38:55]  And he did.
[00:38:56]  But by all accounts, he did not make an impressive impact, nor did he devote much time towards it.
[00:39:04]  The only impact baseball was to have on the rest of his career so far is that he left congressional baseball practice in the summer of 2017, just before a gunman opened fire.
[00:39:13]  By the time 2018 rolled around, Ron was ready to take another shot at the brass ring.
[00:39:19]  In this case, it was the governor's seat in his home state of Florida.
[00:39:23]  And again, he is running to be the governor of Florida, not Flo Ryda, the beloved musician who represented San Marino in 2021.
[00:39:34]  Just want to really be clear about that because we keep getting confusion.
[00:39:38]  Yeah, the last episode, people were damn-you're telling me my face.
[00:39:41]  I'm still confused and continued.
[00:39:43]  I still think it's Flowrida.
[00:39:45]  Well, I think the only way to solve this is induct Flow Rider into the United States.
[00:39:49]  Sure.
[00:39:50]  Yeah.
[00:39:51]  Sure.
[00:39:51]  Yeah.
[00:39:52]  And I think for the flag, we just get rid of the other 50 stars and just have one big star on the flag that represents Flow Rider.
[00:39:59]  United.
[00:40:00]  Because that would be our biggest star.
[00:40:02]  Uh-huh.
[00:40:02]  Yeah.
[00:40:03]  Yeah.
[00:40:03]  That's right.
[00:40:03]  That's right.
[00:40:05]  So, still no idea what song that guy wrote.
[00:40:09]  He's got to have at least one, right?
[00:40:10]  That was popular.
[00:40:11]  Population does.
[00:40:12]  Yeah.
[00:40:13]  Otherwise, Sad Marino wouldn't have sniped him.
[00:40:16]  So his opponent for the Republican nomination, Ron DeSantis is not Flowrida, was a guy named Adam Putnam, a career politician who had been in office, some kind of office since he was 22.
[00:40:29]  At one point, and this is, I think, funny, Putnam is clearly a guy who like is at one point in his career a conservative wunderkind, right?
[00:40:37]  Like he's he's starting office in his like early 20s.
[00:40:39]  He's one of these like go-getter youth Republican that the party sees as its future.
[00:40:45]  But shit starts to change on a dime with Trump.
[00:40:48]  And Ron is like, well, I can make hay by portraying Putnam as this like out-of-touch rhino careerist, you know?
[00:40:55]  So he uses his connections to get a meeting on Air Force One where he makes his case to President Trump.
[00:41:00]  This was an important meeting.
[00:41:02]  No one else's endorsement mattered if Trump was on his side, and no one else could save him without Donald.
[00:41:08]  Now, DeSantis has been putting in groundwork here.
[00:41:11]  He like started for months prior to this, about a year or so prior to this, really hitting against Trump attacks on social media and stuff.
[00:41:20]  And this is kind of a shallow thing, just the fact.
[00:41:22]  And whenever he goes on TV, he'll defend the president, right?
[00:41:25]  It's very obvious.
[00:41:27]  It's very like shallow toadying, but that shit works like a dot, like perfectly on Donald Trump.
[00:41:32]  Oh, yeah.
[00:41:33]  Very much like Trump's solid response to Flattery.
[00:41:36]  Yeah.
[00:41:37]  Love that kind of meatball.
[00:41:38]  Yeah.
[00:41:39]  So they have this meeting, and DeSantis' chief of staff later recalled what President Trump saw in DeSantis was somebody that was fighting for him and his agenda on Fox News, whether it was Fox News or on Fox business.
[00:41:50]  And DeSantis had a pretty smart strategy to use his committee responsibilities and find ways to insert himself into the national debate and get booked on TV.
[00:41:57]  And we obviously had a lot of media requests beyond Fox, but you know, members of Congress know what shows the president watches and what he doesn't.
[00:42:04]  Yeah.
[00:42:07]  And it works.
[00:42:08]  Trump tweets an endorsement soon after this meeting.
[00:42:11]  Ron wins his primary handily and he makes frequent use of Trump's support, name-dropping him 21 times in a single debate.
[00:42:20]  He cuts what one Democratic ad man called the dumbest, most effective ad in Florida history.
[00:42:25]  And it's, it is remarkable.
[00:42:27]  It starts with him like reading his son a copy of the art of the deal and telling his daughter to build the wall with toys.
[00:42:33]  Oh, yeah.
[00:42:34]  Oh, yeah, that's a real hit.
[00:42:35]  That's a real banger of it.
[00:42:37]  So funny.
[00:42:38]  Just the dick writingist ad.
[00:42:43]  I, yeah, he's so deeply embarrassing.
[00:42:45]  It's so transparent and funny.
[00:42:47]  I, uh, yeah.
[00:42:48]  And that time passed and it's all gone now.
[00:42:51]  Yeah.
[00:42:52]  It's all gone now.
[00:42:53]  So despite all this, Florida was still one of America's most infamous swing states.
[00:42:58]  It is very purple at this point.
[00:43:00]  And the general election is a nail biter.
[00:43:03]  DeSantis barely manages to squeak past Democrat Andrew Gillum with some 32,000 votes, less than half a percentage point.
[00:43:10]  Gillum later gets hit with a 21-count federal indictment for wire fraud, conspiracy, making false statements, all related to fraudulent fundraising from various entities tied to his campaigns.
[00:43:20]  Gillum denies all charges, but that doesn't matter for here.
[00:43:23]  What matters is that DeSantis does manage to squeak out a victory and that it is going to be very narrow, but his second victory is not going to be narrow.
[00:43:31]  And that's pretty worth noting.
[00:43:33]  So today, Ron DeSantis is deservedly reviled for turning Florida into a laboratory for outwardly fascistic and eliminationist public policy, targeted particularly towards queer people.
[00:43:45]  His early years in office, though, are surprisingly mild.
[00:43:48]  He is not the guy he is now, his first couple of years as governor.
[00:43:52]  Another Politico article notes, he surprised many in the state by tackling towards the center.
[00:43:57]  He signed a bill that nixed a ban on smokable medical marijuana, announcing it with Matt Gates, one of the most Trumpy members of Congress, and Orlando attorney John Morgan, long a major fundraiser for Democratic candidates.
[00:44:08]  He vetoed a bill that would have prevented local bans on plastic straws.
[00:44:12]  He angled for additional funding for Everglades restoration.
[00:44:15]  He instituted two new state jobs, chief resilience officer and chief science officer.
[00:44:19]  DeSantis actually spoke the words climate change after Rick Scott had downplayed it.
[00:44:24]  His approval ratings soared into the 60s and even into the 70s, including sort of shockingly high faves from Democrats and Independents, too.
[00:44:32]  So that's interesting.
[00:44:34]  That is interesting.
[00:44:35]  I think it does make sense.
[00:44:36]  It is actually consistent because when he's in Congress, it doesn't matter.
[00:44:41]  Like you're not directly accountable to anyone really in Congress, like because there's all these other guys voting on everything that happens, right?
[00:44:49]  So you can be just an obstructionist if that's the thing that makes you palatable to the base, that gets you the endorsements.
[00:44:55]  When you're governor, you do have to do, like, especially when you're governor of a state that is a purple state, right?
[00:45:02]  That's why he's doing this because he doesn't want to lose office because that's fucking death to a presidential campaign.

=== Obstructionist Congressional Tactics (07:52) ===

[00:45:07]  You have to do something.
[00:45:08]  Yeah.
[00:45:09]  You are the face of it.
[00:45:10]  Exactly.
[00:45:12]  Yeah.
[00:45:13]  So he's, he is a fairly, you would say pragmatic guy.
[00:45:17]  And that is generally like there's Politico quotes one Republican lobbyist as saying, as someone who has aspirations beyond his current office, which I think everyone will concede, this probably is not his last office.
[00:45:27]  I think that is how you have to do it.
[00:45:29]  I do think, hopefully, it will be his last office.
[00:45:32]  We also think maybe.
[00:45:34]  I mean, like, all it takes is just like a Trump to walk on stage and interact with him.
[00:45:40]  Yeah.
[00:45:40]  Putin Ron.
[00:45:41]  Bam.
[00:45:42]  Speaking of Putin Ron.
[00:45:44]  Yeah.
[00:45:44]  Let's talk a little bit about Putin Ron because it is during this surprisingly mild interlude in his career in 2019 that one of Ron's peculiarities would pass into legend.
[00:45:55]  Everyone who worked with the governor was aware that he was a man who did not socialize easily or well.
[00:46:00]  He's very intelligent.
[00:46:02]  He's able to digest large reams of data in hours and come back with pointed questions, but social dynamics baffle him.
[00:46:08]  In March of 2019, during a private flight from Tallahassee to D.C., DeSantis decided to take on some energy by eating a pudding snack.
[00:46:16]  According to two sources who were there, he did this with three of his fingers, using them like a spoon and licking them clean in full view of multiple people.
[00:46:24]  Now, that's off-putting a bit.
[00:46:29]  I do agree.
[00:46:30]  And I'm a big...
[00:46:31]  Oh, that was accidentally good.
[00:46:34]  I spent a lot of time in like, you know, the Middle East.
[00:46:37]  I do a lot.
[00:46:37]  I've done a lot of eating with my hands as utensils.
[00:46:40]  But eating pudding that way is just so in public is so off-putting too.
[00:46:45]  It is like putting your tongue in like a work business sort of setting.
[00:46:51]  Yeah.
[00:46:51]  Also, well.
[00:46:55]  Just all I say is you could just squeeze it in.
[00:46:58]  You don't have to do that at all.
[00:46:59]  You could just squeeze the pudding in here.
[00:47:01]  You could use the lid like a spoon.
[00:47:02]  Well, okay, thank you.
[00:47:03]  I was going to say, there's the lid is foil, usually.
[00:47:07]  I assume he's eating standard pudding cup.
[00:47:09]  Probably, probably a standard pudding.
[00:47:11]  You shape the lid into a little spoon, and then you have a little spoon.
[00:47:14]  You don't have to use your three fingers.
[00:47:16]  This is what we've all done.
[00:47:19]  He does.
[00:47:19]  He gives his pudding the shocker.
[00:47:22]  Like, God.
[00:47:23]  Not those three fingers.
[00:47:25]  Honestly, though, like, that's what I choose to do.
[00:47:28]  I know it's like such a silly thing, but there's something wrong with you if you think it's okay to do that around people.
[00:47:35]  I'm sorry.
[00:47:36]  It's weird.
[00:47:36]  Now, look, have I eaten pudding with my fingers when nearly blackout drunk alone in my apartment?
[00:47:43]  Of course.
[00:47:44]  But I think we can all agree I should not be a governor.
[00:47:48]  Yeah, and then there's that.
[00:47:49]  But I just imagine you wouldn't do it sober around colleagues in any kind of environment.
[00:47:56]  But if you did, it'd be like, yeah, I'm this type of governor.
[00:47:59]  Yeah, I'm going to put it in the meeting and I'm going to take a shit during the meeting to like that I can, right?
[00:48:07]  You could, if Ron, if Ron had the kind of natural charisma LBJ had, just like, I don't give a fuck.
[00:48:12]  You're not even people to believe.
[00:48:14]  This is who I am and you're dealing with me.
[00:48:16]  Yeah.
[00:48:17]  Like, go for it.
[00:48:18]  But no, he's just a weirdo who wanted his little pudding snack and had to stick fingers in there to get it down his gullet.
[00:48:25]  Because this is an unbiased political analysis show.
[00:48:29]  I do want to note here that at the same time Puddin Ron was being born, another famously unpleasant politician on the other side of the aisle had a similar experience.
[00:48:38]  The New York Times reported that in 2019, during a flight to a campaign event, Senator Amy Klobuchar was told there was no fork for her salad, and she pulled a comb from her bag and used it to eat.
[00:48:50]  Now, this is maybe the most controversial thing I say on this show.
[00:48:55]  Both of these are weird things to do.
[00:48:57]  I think Ron's choice was more normal than Amy's.
[00:49:01]  Do you?
[00:49:01]  Because like, people, it's weird to eat pudding with your fingers, but fingers are acceptable for eating some things.
[00:49:08]  A comb.
[00:49:09]  A comb is good.
[00:49:10]  This comb is weird, man.
[00:49:12]  Also, I've seen, we've all seen Amy's hair.
[00:49:15]  There's product in there.
[00:49:17]  She's cleaning.
[00:49:17]  Yeah.
[00:49:18]  So she's eating her salad and also eating hairspray.
[00:49:21]  It is unhinged.
[00:49:23]  Yeah.
[00:49:24]  It is.
[00:49:24]  I know.
[00:49:25]  It's not good.
[00:49:26]  It's not good.
[00:49:27]  Respectfully out.
[00:49:29]  Yeah.
[00:49:30]  I'm trying to worry about it.
[00:49:33]  Like, it's not this, but like, something like, it's like getting your, like, like your toothbrush out and using your toothbrush to eat the pudding.
[00:49:41]  Sure.
[00:49:41]  But even that is like not the same as the comb.
[00:49:43]  Like, there's no equivalent there.
[00:49:48]  Love it.
[00:49:49]  So prior to 2020, if you were looking at Ron DeSantis, you'd probably have expected him to hew to that wonky Paul Ryan image, which is kind of what he's doing largely with a little bit of Ted Cruz thrown in there to hold on to.
[00:50:01]  None of the weightlifting photos.
[00:50:02]  Yeah, none of that stuff.
[00:50:04]  But to try and hold on to his state through whatever happens with Trump's second campaign and hopefully plot a less extreme path to picking up his crown after, right?
[00:50:11]  Sort of let the Trump storm pass and trust that you're young enough to have time to get in there afterwards.
[00:50:19]  Given his relatively mild performance at this point, this would not have been a bad strategy.
[00:50:24]  But the coronavirus pandemic changed everything.
[00:50:27]  Initially, Ron responded more or less the same as everyone else.
[00:50:31]  And Florida does have a brief lockdown.
[00:50:33]  I think it's like a month or so.
[00:50:35]  Lockdown, run.
[00:50:36]  Lockdown, run.
[00:50:37]  Lockdown, Ron.
[00:50:38]  Once it becomes clear that the pandemic is not like, it's not a civilization ender.
[00:50:42]  It's, you know, just a massive threat to the most vulnerable people in the country.
[00:50:46]  He's like, well, fuck those people.
[00:50:47]  And he reverses course and decides to ride the waves of paranoid discontent by flouting every expert recommendation and reopening his state.
[00:50:55]  Here's the Atlantic.
[00:50:57]  Initially, Florida fared better than many states, although its numbers eventually came to look pretty bad.
[00:51:02]  He has since adopted a sort of soft anti-vaccine stance, never explicitly rejecting the shots, but declining to promote them and often appearing with skeptics.
[00:51:09]  DeSantis' COVID politics hurt his approval with Democrats, driving down his overall numbers, but they endeared him to conservatives in both Florida and nationwide.
[00:51:17]  His standing remained and remained strong among Republicans in the sunshine state.
[00:51:22]  And he became a darling of the national right-wing media, which saw him in him a rare conservative COVID success story and also a politician who could combine elements of Trumpism with more traditional movement conservatism.
[00:51:33]  The glow seems to have emboldened DeSantis.
[00:51:35]  Taking Trump's example, DeSantis begun keeping legislators in check with the threat of criticism or backing primary challenges.
[00:51:42]  And this is the start of Ron as the fearsome force of authoritarian governments that we see today, right?
[00:51:48]  He is initially pretty popular governor.
[00:51:50]  At one point, he has nearly 70%, but he realizes by becoming this culture warrior, he's going to lose 10, 15 points, you know, something like that, but not enough to take him out of winning the governor's seat.
[00:52:03]  And in fact, it'll strengthen his overall appeal to his base.
[00:52:07]  So that means more money.
[00:52:09]  And crucially, not just does it mean more money, it means he doesn't actually need to have any sort of buy-in from the left in order to govern because he can get all of the legislators in Florida lockstep behind him.
[00:52:22]  Because since he is so popular with the base, he can be like, look, if you don't do exactly what I fucking want, you're out of here.
[00:52:29]  Like I will endorse your opponent in a primary and you're fucked.
[00:52:33]  And that's what's allowed him to do, to push through a lot of the stuff that he's done that's really unpopular.
[00:52:38]  It's interesting to see when you're laying it out like this, how quickly this it's not that he ultimately wants.
[00:52:47]  We've talked about it this whole time, just how he's adopted this persona over the period of time, but it's been a relatively short period of time with this latest iteration of Ronald.
[00:52:58]  Yeah, Ronathan.

=== Dangerous Games with the Base (03:08) ===

[00:53:00]  Ronathan.
[00:53:01]  Yeah.
[00:53:02]  Yeah.
[00:53:03]  You know what else articulates well, Katie?
[00:53:10]  Is it something advertisements?
[00:53:14]  Yeah.
[00:53:15]  We are actually sponsored entirely by Ron DeSantis.
[00:53:19]  So yeah.
[00:53:21]  Here's Ron.
[00:53:23]  Hi.
[00:53:24]  I'm here to be your president.
[00:53:28]  And you know what I don't like is not, well, not pudding.
[00:53:33]  I love pudding.
[00:53:34]  That's a really good idea as a good idea for society.
[00:53:38]  So sorry, Katie.
[00:53:39]  Really perfect.
[00:53:40]  I have a question as we come back from break here.
[00:53:43]  Sure.
[00:53:44]  Do we think that there should be some kind of test for elected officials where we give them some kind of food and no solar and see what they do?
[00:53:53]  And if it's a great idea, Sophie, that's one of the best ideas I've heard.
[00:53:58]  Yeah.
[00:53:58]  I feel like in a long time.
[00:53:59]  And I feel like there's like a scale and it's like, you know, were you on the comb and the salad or were you, you know, just, you know, as Katie?
[00:54:11]  As Katie suggested, you, you, you eat the pudding without putting your fingers in it because I mean, what I, what I would really like to see, you would have to do everyone at once, but all of our elected leaders, you get it once, you put them in a room and you have them eat like a sandwich or some hummus or something that you have squirted dish soap into.
[00:54:33]  And you film them while you do it just to see.
[00:54:35]  You don't tell them.
[00:54:36]  See, you see who powers through it, right?
[00:54:42]  How good are they?
[00:54:42]  It's like, right, are you going to, are you going to say something and be like, this tastes weird?
[00:54:47]  Or like, are, and are you going to sort of, have you had hummus before?
[00:54:51]  Do you know what it's supposed to taste like?
[00:54:52]  Do you know that it's not supposed to taste like soap?
[00:54:55]  Or are you like, oh, yeah, I love my soapy hummus.
[00:54:59]  It's got that soapy taste that we all know and love about hummus.
[00:55:03]  This may be one of those, one of them will take the initiative to say, hey, don't eat this.
[00:55:10]  It's got soap in it, but probably not.
[00:55:13]  It is also a good, it's an opportunity for them to prove themselves to be a good leadership leaders taking position.
[00:55:20]  You find out if some of them go, did you put cilantro in this hummus?
[00:55:24]  Yeah.
[00:55:25]  And you find out who has bad taste buds.
[00:55:28]  Yeah.
[00:55:30]  Yeah.
[00:55:30]  Because we should not, I think we can all agree, you should not be able to hold office if you've got the gene that makes cilantro taste bad to you.
[00:55:37]  Yeah.
[00:55:37]  I mean, yeah, for sure.
[00:55:38]  I mean, I just.
[00:55:39]  I don't think those are even really people.
[00:55:40]  I just feel like we're making really good rules right here.
[00:55:44]  And I feel like the food without supporting should be live streamed.
[00:55:49]  Yeah, for sure.
[00:55:50]  For sure.
[00:55:51]  We can do it.
[00:55:51]  We can film it.
[00:55:52]  Well, I can be a part of the debate.
[00:55:53]  We have a video audience of those Philly sports fans from part one.
[00:55:57]  I mean, you know what we're doing, though?
[00:55:58]  We're just sort of like paving the way for another Trump presidency.
[00:56:02]  Because, you know, if he eats the soapy hummus, he's just going to be like, this isn't, this is bad.
[00:56:06]  Like, what are you doing?
[00:56:07]  Give me a Diet Coke.

=== Paving Way for Another Presidency (03:21) ===

[00:56:08]  Like, he'll just like, he'll bulldoze the entire room.
[00:56:12]  Yeah.
[00:56:12]  You're right.
[00:56:13]  Dangerous games.
[00:56:15]  Anyway, here's a dangerous ad.
[00:56:23]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:56:27]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:56:30]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:56:33]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:56:37]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:56:40]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:56:44]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:56:46]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:56:51]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:56:53]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:56:55]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:56:57]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:57:00]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:57:02]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:57:04]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:57:08]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:57:10]  Trust me, babe.
[00:57:11]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:57:21]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:57:27]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:57:34]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:57:40]  From power to parenthood.
[00:57:42]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:57:46]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:57:48]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:57:50]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:57:54]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:58:01]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:58:04]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:58:10]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:58:12]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:58:15]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:58:23]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:58:29]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:58:33]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:58:39]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:58:48]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:58:54]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:58:57]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:59:00]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:59:02]  That's so funny.
[00:59:03]  Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:59:12]  Say you love me.
[00:59:14]  You know.
[00:59:16]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:59:26]  Hi!
[00:59:27]  I'm Ron.
[00:59:29]  We're back.

=== Preventing Future Authoritarians (14:27) ===

[00:59:30]  That was horrible, Cody.
[00:59:33]  Okay, so, yeah, there we go.
[00:59:37]  So, Ron DeSantis, after COVID, is now starts to remake himself in the image of Huey Long, basically.
[00:59:44]  Like, he goes kind of dictator from this point forward.
[00:59:49]  He bases his power and authority on this vice grip that he's got on the Republican voters of Florida, and he's able to use this to push through very unpopular policies by threatening his legislators with primary challenges.
[01:00:01]  Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist from the University of Central Florida, says that DeSantis' control over the Florida legislature is historically unique.
[01:00:09]  Historically, particularly in the Florida Senate, you'd see more independents.
[01:00:13]  They'd buck the governor.
[01:00:14]  Jeb Bush experienced this.
[01:00:15]  Charlie Christ, even Rick Scott.
[01:00:18]  Now, DeSantis' approval is below its pre-pandemic levels, but this does not change his behavior.
[01:00:23]  And he uses it like his power now to ram through Florida's infamous don't say gay bill, which bans any classroom discussion of gender identity or sexual orientation in Florida public schools through the third grade.
[01:00:35]  It was and remains an unpopular law, but Ron handily won re-election after the pandemic.
[01:00:42]  And in fact, he didn't just win, he absolutely blew out his Democratic challenger.
[01:00:47]  You can say one thing for DeSantis, and that's it's that he knows how to push when he sees an opening.
[01:00:52]  He has responded to the new tenor of Florida politics by remaking himself as the arch culture warrior, making unpopular policies geared at hurting the left and enemies of conservatism above anything that might be called traditional governing.
[01:01:06]  He's helped to push through what many consider the most partisan redistricting map in the country, geared towards reducing the influence of black voters.
[01:01:13]  This has been met with a full-on legal assault against what Ron calls voter fraud, one which has primarily targeted black Floridians.
[01:01:21]  A good example comes from October of 2022, when body camera footage revealed a raid on voters around Tampa, 19 of whom were arrested for so-called fraud.
[01:01:30]  The ACLU reports, quote, The footage is disturbing.
[01:01:33]  It is clear that the individuals arrested in and around Tampa have absolutely no idea that they have done anything wrong and why they are being detained.
[01:01:40]  At moments, their confusion and distress are so pronounced that the police arresting them try to console them.
[01:01:45]  As the Tampa Bay Times put it, the police are almost apologetic for their actions.
[01:01:50]  19 people are arrested in this sting, which focused around Amendment 4.
[01:01:54]  This is an amendment to the Florida state constitution that was approved by 65% of Florida voters in 2018 and restored voting rights to Floridians with past felony convictions.
[01:02:05]  But the year after this happens, DeSantis has his legislature pass SB 7066, which requires that felons pay legal fines before being eligible to vote.
[01:02:14]  As the ACLU notes, the state has no central database for information on convictions and the resulting financial obligations.
[01:02:21]  This leaves hundreds of thousands of Floridians unable to assess if they owe money and how much.
[01:02:26]  Essentially, the state created a pay-to-vote system while giving people no way to determine how much they must pay.
[01:02:32]  And then he's able to like charge them criminally for voting when they haven't paid properly and that they can't know.
[01:02:38]  Like, yeah, it's really fucked up.
[01:02:40]  It is very clearly targeting specifically black voters.
[01:02:44]  13 of the 19 people arrested in this first sweep are black.
[01:02:49]  And yeah, it's generally seen as an attempt to chill the vote in low-income black and brown communities ahead of the 2024 election.
[01:02:55]  That's absolutely what he's doing here.
[01:02:57]  DeSantis also oversees a ban on critical race theory, one so severe it's led to even math textbooks being censored.
[01:03:04]  One law makes it a third-degree felony to distribute what the state under DeSantis calls pornography in classrooms.
[01:03:11]  The actual text of the statute is incredibly broad, defining pornography not just as erotic material with the intent to cause sexual excitement, but including instruction on gender identity or discrimination by teaching that, quote, an individual by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin is inherently racist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.
[01:03:32]  So it's basically just like a felony to teach anything that someone conservative might get offended by.
[01:03:38]  And if you know conservatives, you know, there's nothing that doesn't offend them.
[01:03:41]  Oh, it's all it honestly.
[01:03:46]  I don't even know what to say.
[01:03:48]  I mean, we talk about this all the time.
[01:03:52]  But it does blow my mind.
[01:03:53]  It's hard for me to wrap my mind around all that he's all the terrible things that he's done in a very short period of time.
[01:03:59]  Yeah.
[01:03:59]  And the hypocrisy of people talking about, you know, public schools, the schooling is an indoctrination, and then literally what is happening, literally what the things that are being removed from basic elements of our education and how classrooms and school libraries just absolutely shorn of books because, yeah, it's ghastly.
[01:04:27]  I'm not going to go into as much.
[01:04:28]  I'm not going to like spend the whole episode just listing every bad thing he's done as governor.
[01:04:33]  I thought it was more useful because you get this every day, right?
[01:04:36]  People are reading this, they're watching this.
[01:04:38]  I thought it was more useful to explain why he's able to do this because this is not how he governs at the start of his time as governor.
[01:04:44]  This is a change that comes midway through as a result of the COVID pandemic.
[01:04:48]  And it's important to know that he is able to do, get away with pushing so many unpopular policies because of how he gains control over the state legislature.
[01:04:57]  That's what I wanted to kind of get into because that's actually a really useful thing to understand, in part to prevent future authoritarians like DeSantis from doing similar things in other states.
[01:05:07]  You need to at least understand how he got to be able to do all this shit, right?
[01:05:14]  Now, this is all awful.
[01:05:15]  None of it, though, has stopped DeSantis from winning re-election.
[01:05:18]  There's a lot of articles from right before his reelection campaign that are like, you know, is COVID, is his hard right tilt?
[01:05:27]  You know, is this all going to like hurt his chances of winning?
[01:05:30]  Because he barely squeaks it by the first time.
[01:05:33]  His second election, Ron wins by an astonishing margin.
[01:05:36]  He even captures traditionally liberal enclaves in the state, which has led many to posit that however you want to characterize his reign ethically, he has ended, at least for now, Florida's status as a purple state.
[01:05:48]  A little early to say that, you know, we'll see how 2024 goes, but I think that's probably fair.
[01:05:55]  It is impossible to say at the moment whether or not this will hold true beyond 2024, but it does point to an undeniable conclusion.
[01:06:02]  Ron DeSantis is probably the most effective elected anti-democratic leader in the country.
[01:06:08]  The good news is that, at least for now, he seems to have overreached his capabilities.
[01:06:12]  And what is probably fair to say is the most major misstep of his career so far.
[01:06:17]  People have been discussing DeSantis as a probable Republican presidential candidate since at least 2020.
[01:06:23]  And after January 6th, 2021, and the brief relative absence of Trump when he was being shunned for that like couple of months, he seemed to shine as a likely future standard-bearer of the authoritarian movement that Donald had helped conjure into being.
[01:06:37]  There were articles in mainstream publications touting the Florida miracle.
[01:06:41]  Ron had decided to campaign on this.
[01:06:43]  Interviews highlighted his intelligence as a counterpoint to Trump's crudity.
[01:06:47]  But this brief period as a frontrunner came to an end as soon as the former president made it clear that he intended to run once more.
[01:06:54]  In deference to the fact that DeSantis had defended him a few years earlier, Trump gave a couple of quiet warnings.
[01:07:00]  I think the first warnings are probably sent through intermediaries, kind of politely.
[01:07:03]  You've got some guys who are, because they're both Florida dudes, you know, who are visiting both camps, be like, now's not the time, Ron.
[01:07:10]  Now's not the time, Ron.
[01:07:11]  But Ron doesn't listen to this.
[01:07:12]  And when that isn't enough, in November of 2022, Trump makes a public warning.
[01:07:17]  In an interview on Fox News, he threatens DeSantis with a release of private information if he runs for president from the Huffington Post.
[01:07:25]  I can tell you things about him that won't be very flattering.
[01:07:27]  I know more about him than anybody, other than perhaps his wife.
[01:07:31]  So funny.
[01:07:34]  I can't believe he did that.
[01:07:35]  What an unbelievable.
[01:07:39]  There's something like that that he does every week and it's just gone.
[01:07:43]  Yeah.
[01:07:44]  It is remarkable, right?
[01:07:45]  Warn him not to run for president.
[01:07:49]  You threaten him with that you'll pull out dirt on him if he does.
[01:07:53]  You just do it openly on TV.
[01:07:55]  That's so wild.
[01:07:56]  Like during the interview, right?
[01:07:57]  It's not even like off the cuff at like a rally.
[01:07:59]  It's like, no, I mean, I accept it from Trump because it is really funny.
[01:08:03]  Like it is, it's very funny.
[01:08:05]  And I'm sorry, I am that shallow with stuff like this.
[01:08:09]  It's really funny.
[01:08:10]  Yeah.
[01:08:10]  Yeah.
[01:08:11]  Quote, I think he would be making a mistake.
[01:08:13]  I think the base would not like it.
[01:08:14]  I don't think it would be good for the party.
[01:08:16]  Any of that stuff is not good.
[01:08:17]  You have other people that possibly will run, I guess.
[01:08:19]  I don't know if he runs.
[01:08:20]  If he runs, he runs.
[01:08:23]  Yeah.
[01:08:23]  Well, he runs one morning and he shouldn't.
[01:08:26]  It's going to hurt him badly if he does.
[01:08:28]  And again, he does.
[01:08:30]  Up to this point, Ron's career has been meticulous, right?
[01:08:35]  The first time he throws the dice is kind of when he takes this hard right turn on COVID.
[01:08:40]  And that works for him.
[01:08:41]  And I think if I'm going to psychoanalyze him, I think after decades of making all of the careful choices, he sees how kind of gambling works for Trump, how it gets him into, at least gets him into the presidency once.
[01:08:57]  And he's like, he sees how well it works for him and his reelection campaign.
[01:09:01]  And he's like, well, fuck it.
[01:09:02]  Guess I'm going to keep gambling.
[01:09:04]  And he throws the dice on Donald Trump.
[01:09:06]  And Trump is just a better gambler than Ron DeSantis could ever hope to be.
[01:09:10]  Like, this is a calamitous mistake.
[01:09:14]  But it is in line with this new image that DeSantis has tried to paint for himself since the pandemic.
[01:09:19]  This kind of getting away from the Ted Cruz, from the careful Paul Ryan sort of thing.
[01:09:24]  And this attitude is embodied in the Trumpy accessories that he starts selling to finance his reelection campaign.
[01:09:29]  My favorite of which are golf balls with the text, Florida's governor has a pair on them.
[01:09:35]  Oh, boy.
[01:09:36]  Just sad, Ron.
[01:09:38]  Boy, that feels so forced, Ron.
[01:09:42]  Yeah, it does.
[01:09:42]  It does.
[01:09:43]  Also, you know, you're already dealing with the meatball, Ron thing.
[01:09:46]  Maybe don't, don't add balls here.
[01:09:48]  Or lean into it.
[01:09:51]  Sell meatball making kits with your face on it.
[01:09:54]  Ron's meatball, Sella.
[01:09:55]  Yeah.
[01:09:56]  In fact, he should.
[01:09:58]  That's what I would do.
[01:09:59]  Yeah.
[01:10:00]  His only strategy seems to be running against Trump as a better Trump, which is a risky move against a man with so much personal popularity among the same base.
[01:10:10]  And sure enough, as soon as Ron sets himself against Trump, all of this dirt on him starts to spill.
[01:10:15]  Outcome articles noting that he's had three chiefs of staff in three years at Congress and then three more in five years as governor, right?
[01:10:22]  Like he's got all this turnover.
[01:10:23]  Nobody likes him.
[01:10:24]  He can't keep a team together.
[01:10:25]  One of his former strategists let slip to Vanity Fair that Ron and Casey, quote, use people like toilet paper and that there's an unofficial support group of former aides.
[01:10:36]  This might just be dismissed as politics, if not for the fact that the DeSantis campaign has seen even more rapid turnover since then, bleeding nearly all of its hires over the course of a year that seen him go from the best funded candidate on the Republican Party to broke and so reliant on his super PAC that Trump's campaign recently made a public warning against Republican candidates coordinating illegally with their super PACs just to like stick at Ron a little bit.
[01:11:03]  So funny.
[01:11:04]  Yeah.
[01:11:06]  Just.
[01:11:06]  Yeah, it's very funny.
[01:11:07]  It's a foolish thing to do.
[01:11:09]  Like, aside from like all the things that you're pointing out, like, why would you try to out Trump Trump when you're so severely unlikable?
[01:11:19]  It is like, even like, I that's probably a hard thing to do.
[01:11:22]  I don't like Trump, but like, he's got, he definitely has some charm and charisma because he's on TV for decades as like a famous guy.
[01:11:31]  Um, but yeah, it is, it is hard to sort of like necessarily assess yourself like that, um, and admit it, even if you are a little putting fingers, man.
[01:11:39]  Yeah, yeah, he's really far deep at this point, you know, and he's really like gone down the path.
[01:11:46]  Yeah, yeah, he's locked in.
[01:11:47]  Yeah, he is locked in.
[01:11:49]  It's uh, it's interesting to me because it's, it's very much like a like you've got like this boxer who's like just a famously good right hook, just knocking dudes out left and right.
[01:12:00]  And he's a heavyweight, and you're like, you know, sometimes you like box at the local gym with your friends for fun and you see him, you see this guy, maybe he's doing some sort of like circus thing.
[01:12:10]  He's just pounded dudes, right?
[01:12:12]  Challenging guys from the crowd.
[01:12:13]  He knocks like four or five dudes out, and you're like, you know what?
[01:12:16]  I bet I can take this man who's twice my far away.
[01:12:19]  Like, it's just what?
[01:12:20]  So reckless.
[01:12:22]  The hubris of it, too.
[01:12:23]  The like, oh, I can just.
[01:12:25]  It's like Musk saying he wants to fight Zuckerberg.
[01:12:27]  Yeah.
[01:12:28]  Yeah.
[01:12:29]  No, man.
[01:12:30]  Like, yeah.
[01:12:32]  I think that, both what Ron has done and Elon Musk wanting to fight Mark Zuckerberg are just the best evidence you could get of how power and wealth derange you.
[01:12:43]  Like he has lost.
[01:12:44]  He's a guy earlier in his career who very smartly assesses risk and reward.
[01:12:49]  And he's, he's, it's just kind of fallen apart.
[01:12:52]  He won for too long.
[01:12:53]  That kind of thing.
[01:12:54]  Oh, yeah.
[01:12:54]  No, it breaks your brain.
[01:12:55]  It breaks you.
[01:12:56]  It turns you into a meatball.
[01:12:59]  Yeah.
[01:13:00]  Into a meatball.
[01:13:01]  A ground up little meatball.
[01:13:02]  Yeah.
[01:13:03]  And so, you know, alongside Trump, DeSantis has chosen to pick a fight with Disney over the extremely mild resistance the company put up to his anti-Gluck Ron.
[01:13:11]  You're a vowel renewal, DeSantis.
[01:13:13]  It's very like, he tries to revoke their special tax status, and then Disney uses their much more expensive lawyers to cancel a lot of this out.
[01:13:20]  He should have revoked his marriage.
[01:13:22]  Yeah.
[01:13:23]  Disney has the ability to do that.
[01:13:25]  They are like the Pope.
[01:13:28]  And it's very funny.
[01:13:28]  Like former RNC chair Michael Steele was after all this happened is like, once you lose a battle against Mickey Mouse, it's kind of hard to take you seriously.
[01:13:37]  I mean, Max Stepanovich.
[01:13:39]  Like you lose a fight that you started.
[01:13:41]  Yeah.
[01:13:42]  That you started with Mickey Mouse.
[01:13:44]  Max Stepanovich, an influential figure in Tallahassee politics, told Politico last year that DeSantis had to resist becoming the protagonist in his own Greek tragedy, claiming the governor's key rival is not Trump, but hubris.
[01:13:56]  I might also add.

=== Losing Battles Against Mickey Mouse (11:00) ===

[01:13:58]  What I said.
[01:13:59]  Yeah.
[01:13:59]  Yep.
[01:14:00]  His own awkwardness, too, you know, putting Ron.
[01:14:04]  Yeah.
[01:14:05]  His laughing and then scowling.
[01:14:08]  Yeah.
[01:14:08]  In that span of half a second.
[01:14:10]  That one of his Nazi ad didn't help.
[01:14:13]  No, that sure doesn't help.
[01:14:15]  Yeah, it's all very funny.
[01:14:18]  I think the best way to close this out is for me to play a little clip of an interview with old meatball Ron at a DeSantis 2024 event.
[01:14:28]  This was taken by Paul Steinhauser.
[01:14:31]  So I'm going to do this.
[01:14:33]  Yeah, Katie, you've been waiting for this.
[01:14:35]  So let's see.
[01:14:36]  Small episode.
[01:14:37]  Maybe he finally has the juice in this clip.
[01:14:39]  Can you guys see it?
[01:14:40]  Does he got it?
[01:14:40]  Does he got a juicy?
[01:14:41]  Did he finally get the juice?
[01:14:42]  Yeah.
[01:14:43]  And said the other day that the knives are out for you at that debate.
[01:14:49]  I got to ask you about that.
[01:14:50]  Plus, I got to ask you on the table.
[01:14:52]  I just put out a memo that people are talking about.
[01:14:55]  So I'd like to get your reaction to both.
[01:14:57]  Well, on the memo, it's not mine.
[01:14:59]  I haven't read it.
[01:15:00]  And it's just, I think it's something that we haven't put off to the side.
[01:15:05]  In terms of debate, look, when you're, I know from the military, when you're over the target, that's when you're taking flack.
[01:15:10]  And if you look, really, in the last six to nine months, I've been more attacked than anybody else.
[01:15:15]  Biden, Harris, the media, the left, all the Republican candidates.
[01:15:19]  Four times indicted president is probably more attacked.
[01:15:23]  So we view it as positive feedback.
[01:15:25]  We'll be ready to do what we need to do to deliver our message, but we absolutely expect that and we'll be ready for it.
[01:15:32]  And that means punching back.
[01:15:34]  It means yes.
[01:15:34]  It means defending ourselves, but more importantly, showing why we are the leader to get this country turned around.
[01:15:42]  Yeah.
[01:15:43]  There's so much.
[01:15:44]  First off, Ron, how many times did you take flack in the Navy as a lawyer?
[01:15:50]  That's my phrase.
[01:15:51]  I was like, ah, over the combat line, eh?
[01:15:54]  Yeah.
[01:15:55]  Uh-huh.
[01:15:55]  Okay, Ron.
[01:15:56]  Wild time to bring that in.
[01:15:58]  But yeah, he is grinding his fucking teeth.
[01:16:02]  So the reason that the thing he's asking about is I mentioned that his campaign is broke.
[01:16:07]  His super PAC has a lot of money, but you cannot coordinate directly between a campaign and a super PAC.
[01:16:13]  So he had his super PAC put together his debate prep list, like his debate prep instructions.
[01:16:20]  But the super PAC can't send those to the campaign.
[01:16:22]  What it can do is put them up in a website in a way that's technically publicly available, right?
[01:16:28]  And then they can say, and that's how we got it, right?
[01:16:30]  They published this publicly.
[01:16:32]  Now, there's ways to do that where it's not obvious, but like people found it and published his debate prep instructions, which are mostly really like, it's do not attack Trump ever.
[01:16:42]  You know, never say anything bad about Trump when you're up there.
[01:16:48]  Sounds like he's going to fight back real hard.
[01:16:50]  Viciously attack, ignore Trump and viciously attack Vivek Ramaswamy by calling him.
[01:16:56]  And it like, this is the saddest part.
[01:16:58]  It's like, you got to give him a Trump-style nickname to attack Vivek Ramaswamy.
[01:17:03]  Vivek the liar.
[01:17:06]  Oh my God.
[01:17:07]  Terrible.
[01:17:08]  Don't even try.
[01:17:10]  Yeah.
[01:17:11]  You know what Trump would call Vivek?
[01:17:13]  I don't think anything.
[01:17:14]  I think he would basically ignore him because he's not a serious threat.
[01:17:17]  He would go after Ron.
[01:17:18]  He would be calling Ron DeSantis putting Ron on the street.
[01:17:21]  And if he did, it might be a little racist.
[01:17:23]  Might be a little racist.
[01:17:24]  There's a chance, but it is Vivek.
[01:17:28]  He has made clear.
[01:17:30]  It rhymes with Snake.
[01:17:31]  He's rapped about it.
[01:17:32]  Okay.
[01:17:33]  Don't worry.
[01:17:33]  He's rapped about it.
[01:17:34]  You'll see.
[01:17:36]  Is he well known as a liar on the right?
[01:17:38]  Like, what's the problem?
[01:17:39]  That's so weird, right?
[01:17:40]  Like, because he's like, the things Vivek says are like weird, like, misunderstandings of how the government works.
[01:17:46]  And like, wait, you want to do this with the, like, what are you talking about, man?
[01:17:50]  But he's not a liar.
[01:17:51]  I think there's this fundamental misunderstanding about why Trump's nicknames are effective.
[01:17:58]  And they are effective because they get at what most people have as like a primary complaint about a dude in a very like succinct way, right?
[01:18:07]  Jeb Bush is like the son of a president who was like the kind of evil genius political manipulator and the brother of a president who was like the super charismatic political candidate, right?
[01:18:18]  Yeah.
[01:18:18]  And he just was absolutely bland by comparison.
[01:18:22]  Low energy Jeb, right?
[01:18:24]  He's desperately, it's the thing that hurts him the most, right?
[01:18:27]  Like he knows that about himself.
[01:18:29]  Ted Cruz, Lion Ted.
[01:18:30]  You call Ted Cruz a liar because Ted Cruz is a fucking liar.
[01:18:34]  Everyone knows it.
[01:18:35]  He exude lies out of his pores.
[01:18:37]  He sweats lies.
[01:18:39]  You can tell, yeah.
[01:18:41]  For the Trump, if Trump was going to do a nickname of Vivek is nobody, nobody Vivek, right?
[01:18:45]  Like he's not a, right?
[01:18:47]  He's, he's a zero, you know?
[01:18:50]  Because he is a zero.
[01:18:51]  Yeah.
[01:18:52]  Vapid Vivek, you know, something like that that gets it his like, that he's, he's not a serious candidate.
[01:18:57]  He's just there for his books and stuff.
[01:18:59]  And that's, you know.
[01:19:00]  Yeah, vapid Vivek.
[01:19:01]  That's a good one, Katie.
[01:19:02]  You don't call him Vivek the liar?
[01:19:04]  Because like that's not it, like there's that doesn't get you anywhere.
[01:19:08]  Also, blank the blank is not some is not the that's not the um the structure of the nicknames.
[01:19:16]  Also, like yeah, I think Vapid's a good one, Katie.
[01:19:20]  That might be the Vapid Vivek, uh, rapid vivaque.
[01:19:23]  Rapid, yeah, anyway, anyway, guy who wants to raise the voting age to 25, Vivek, Vivek, Vivek, I think we need to lower the age to rent cars to 18.
[01:19:39]  18.
[01:19:39]  Uh, yeah, and I also think we need to lower the drinking age to 18.
[01:19:45]  Um, as long as you're buying your alcohol in a rented car, that's my argument.
[01:19:51]  Okay, uh-huh.
[01:19:52]  Get to drink it in the rented car and drink it while driving in the rented car.
[01:19:55]  No, no, that would be irresponsible.
[01:19:57]  I just want to, it's kind of like how in Texas, you can buy liquor at a drive-thru, but only if they put a piece of tape on it.
[01:20:03]  That's that's that's the kind of situation for you.
[01:20:06]  Apparently, yes, it's glorious.
[01:20:08]  64-ounce margarita in your truck the size of a Sherman battle tick.
[01:20:13]  Literally a drive-thru looking store.
[01:20:15]  Yeah, it's called States Rights.
[01:20:16]  It's so funny.
[01:20:18]  It's the best thing Texas does.
[01:20:21]  And like, now that I know it exists, I don't want to get out of my car and get booze.
[01:20:26]  I should have like a peasant of someplace.
[01:20:28]  Like a poor?
[01:20:29]  No, absolutely not.
[01:20:30]  Poor.
[01:20:31]  Yeah.
[01:20:32]  Anyway, that's a lot to run on Wednesday evening when he is not allowed to talk about Donald Trump in any way.
[01:20:41]  Good luck to Ron the day before this episode will drop.
[01:20:46]  Hoping exactly.
[01:20:48]  Yeah.
[01:20:50]  Well, thanks for having us.
[01:20:51]  Thanks for having us.
[01:20:53]  Perhuge.
[01:20:54]  Do you want to end over?
[01:20:55]  Do you want to do your plugs?
[01:20:58]  Katie?
[01:20:58]  We've got shows.
[01:20:59]  We sure do.
[01:21:00]  We'd love for you to listen and watch those shows.
[01:21:04]  Well, we have a YouTube channel called Some More News.
[01:21:08]  And you can watch videos, but we also have a podcast called Even More News.
[01:21:12]  And we also have the audio from the YouTube channel in that podcast feed.
[01:21:15]  So it's like, there's two different shows in the podcast feed.
[01:21:18]  Check it out.
[01:21:18]  You'll get it.
[01:21:19]  Check them out.
[01:21:19]  And Patreon.
[01:21:21]  And Cody, you have a band.
[01:21:23]  Oh, that's so true, Sophie.
[01:21:25]  Oh, my God.
[01:21:25]  What a great point from Sophie.
[01:21:26]  Once again, man.
[01:21:28]  My band is called The Hot Shapes.
[01:21:30]  You can find them on Bandcamp and SoundCloud.
[01:21:33]  And maybe streaming where you stream songs, I think.
[01:21:36]  I tried to do that.
[01:21:37]  I don't know.
[01:21:37]  Check it out.
[01:21:38]  And Robert, you have a book.
[01:21:42]  I do have a book.
[01:21:44]  It's called After the Revolution.
[01:21:46]  You can buy it anywhere books come from.
[01:21:49]  And, you know, what else I have is a lot of love in my hearts for my co-hosts and my producer who listened to two hours or so of Ron DeSantis.
[01:21:59]  And if you at home are feeling kind of bummed out about this, go on Twitter and find the clip of him in that interview we just played next to Homelander.
[01:22:09]  Oh my God.
[01:22:10]  The same like roiling face shows.
[01:22:15]  Oh, just it's not even bubbling under the surface.
[01:22:18]  It is the surface.
[01:22:19]  The bubbling is the surface.
[01:22:20]  One to one.
[01:22:21]  I've also never seen like, I don't think I've ever seen somebody grind their teeth like so visibly.
[01:22:27]  Like, no, you're, you're also bearing your teeth.
[01:22:29]  Yeah.
[01:22:29]  You're bearing your teeth and you're grinding them.
[01:22:31]  Usually like, no, tight lips, you keep it down.
[01:22:33]  You clench it.
[01:22:34]  He didn't seem to be handling things well.
[01:22:38]  No, no.
[01:22:40]  Or for the past years.
[01:22:41]  But yeah, no.
[01:22:44]  He is grinding and bearing and gnashing and rending and tearing.
[01:22:50]  Yeah.
[01:22:50]  Is that something from where the is that a quote?
[01:22:53]  I made it up.
[01:22:55]  Stop talking, Katie.
[01:22:56]  The gnashing of the teeth.
[01:22:59]  Yep.
[01:22:59]  I'm just going to stop talking.
[01:23:01]  Bye.
[01:23:04]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:23:07]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:23:17]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:23:26]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:23:28]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:23:30]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:23:32]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[01:23:37]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:23:38]  Trust me, babe.
[01:23:39]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:23:49]  10-10 shots fire in the City Hall building.
[01:23:52]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[01:23:54]  Somebody tell me that.
[01:23:56]  A shocking public murder.
[01:23:57]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[01:24:04]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[01:24:06]  Those are shots.
[01:24:07]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[01:24:10]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
[01:24:14]  Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:24:24]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[01:24:28]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:24:32]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[01:24:39]  An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
[01:24:42]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[01:24:45]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[01:24:54]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:24:57]  Guaranteed human.