DeSantis’s Impressive Interview With Jake Tapper Shows Why He Should Leave the Echo Chamber

Ron DeSantis’s impressive interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday could be a boon to his presidential campaign in more ways than one.

In his answers, DeSantis walked difficult political tightropes and presented himself as a knowledgeable conservative leader with a temperament suited for the Oval Office. Even Bakari Sellers, a progressive political commentator for CNN, admitted that DeSantis looked “decently presidential” over the course of the interview. It was an encouraging performance from a candidate who has largely avoided engagement with the mainstream press.

Besides the obvious benefit of leaving a positive impression with voters, though, it should help his campaign course correct by teaching it a valuable lesson: DeSantis is at his best when he’s being challenged.

To date, DeSantis’s campaign has been far too focused on catering to a subset of the Republican Party that is overrepresented online. This may be the result of its keen determination that it will need to outflank former President Donald Trump from the right, but its attempts to implement a strategy that acknowledges this truth has oftentimes been lacking. For examples of those failings, look no further than the meandering statement about Ukraine he gave to Tucker Carlson, his campaign’s attacks on Trump over the coronavirus vaccines, or the bizarre video it promoted to highlight his own hardline stances on LGBT issues.

These efforts do more to harm than help DeSantis, who became a national figure as a result of his ability to advance conservative policy in the name of common sense. During the pandemic, he bucked national trends to insist that children return to school and reject vaccine mandates. On education, he’s insisted on removing pornographic materials from school libraries while advocating a back-to-basics approach to curricula. And on the environment, he’s prioritized conservation while rejecting burdensome regulations.

This is the strategy that won him a nearly 20 point re-election victory in previously purple Florida.

His blueprint for winning over Republican primary voters on a national scale has been entirely unrecognizable from that approach, however, and the disparity is in no small part attributable to the media landscape that he’s been immersed in.

During a conversation with Carlson at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa last Friday, DeSantis found himself being asked if he would pardon Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been charged with 18 federal crimes for “unlawfully obtaining and disclosing classified documents” to “the injury of the United States or the advantage of a foreign nation.” Needless to say, Assange’s fate is unlikely to be a priority issue for most Americans come 2024.

Inflation, education, and crime on the other hand, will be at the forefront of voters’ minds, and DeSantis stressed his bona fides on these “bread and butter issues” during his conversation with Tapper, citing Florida’s economic boom and his work during the state’s most recent legislative session.

Similarly, Carlson’s own hostility toward continued U.S. support for the defense of Ukraine — and the illusion of that same hostility being widespread in the GOP electorate —  steered DeSantis into taking an unpopular tack on the issue. His aforementioned statement in which he characterized the ongoing war as a “territorial dispute,” and bashed “DC foreign policy interventionists” for supposedly supporting “regime change” in Russia came across as a vapid attempt at sloganeering.

Contrast his red meat-heavy statement to Carlson with his discussion about Ukraine with Tapper, during which he emphasized his resolve to turn U.S. attention toward the Pacific, but nevertheless argued that Russia must not be rewarded for its aggression; it’s hard to believe the two messages came from the same candidate.

There’s no doubt that DeSantis faces strident, pervasive bias against him from many in the fourth estate who have long sought to destroy him and even compared him unfavorably to Trump.

But there’s also no doubt that DeSantis’s reputation was largely built on the basis of his ability to refute the media’s critiques and build a broad electoral coalition in spite of them. As counterintuitive as it may seem, it’s DeSantis’s enemies, not his friends, that bring out the most serious version of himself — and the one with the greatest chance of winning the White House.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.