Following his Twitter Spaces interview with Elon Musk and his interviews with Trey Gowdy and Mark Levin, Ron DeSantis held a media call and fielded questions from a number of conservative journalists.
He had already answered, to Gowdy, the original question I’d intended to ask, which was about Trump floating the notion of skipping debates. He told Gowdy that this smacked of a sense of entitlement that is alien to DeSantis: “I grew up blue collar, working minimum-wage jobs, and learned nobody’s entitled to anything in this world, Trey.”
On the media call, DeSantis opened with a joke about how Musk offered him a choice between a SpaceX rocket ride and Twitter, and he thought Twitter would be safer. He was asked if he had a bottom-line dollar limit to how much aid he would offer to Ukraine, and declined to give one, observing that he hoped that the war would be over by next January (a predictable subtext of his prior remarks on the war) but also emphasizing that there is a need to bring the war “in for a landing” that avoids a lengthy war of attrition.
A number of the questions on the call focused on DeSantis’s political theories of how he and Republicans could win, and why the party hasn’t done so lately. That put him in the position of playing pundit — never a great spot, but sometimes unavoidable — and he took to it enthusiastically. Asked how he would unite Republicans after what promises to be a contentious primary, he explained that his theory of uniting the party in November is that he’s not a factional candidate but is taking positions acceptable to a broad swath of the party — yet another implicit shot at how hard Trump has leaned into dominating the party from a factional base while alienating more traditional Republicans. DeSantis cited the near-unanimous percentage of Florida Republicans who supported him in 2022.
He expects a close race against Joe Biden but sees a possibility with his candidacy for a breakout, given the tepid enthusiasm of Democrats for Biden. In a general election, “Trump would turn out Democrats,” while DeSantis hopes to demoralize them as he did in Florida. Regarding independent voters, he cited how he, Brian Kemp in Georgia, and Kim Reynolds in Iowa were able to win independents when others didn’t in 2022 because they were able to offer those voters someone they’re “comfortable” with — again, an obvious contrast to Trump, who by now has burned his bridges with many of those voters.
Also, this was noticeably the second time tonight that DeSantis name-checked Reynolds, the even-toned but conservative governor of Iowa (in the Gowdy interview, he cited her stance on abortion). Reynolds hasn’t endorsed yet, but she is popular in Iowa and widely viewed as a potential vice presidential pick for the right nominee.