How Did Ron DeSantis Manage to Screw That Up?

When the Newsom-DeSantis debate was first announced—on Fox News, moderated by Sean Hannity—many people wondered why Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, would put himself up to this. Newsom is not running for higher office, for one thing, while the staging of the event on Fox News, presided over by the comically immoderate Hannity, meant that the playing field would be slanted cartoonishly against him.

On the other hand, it was easy to understand why DeSantis’ handlers, and perhaps some Fox News executives, thought the DeSantis-Newsom debate should have been winnable for the Florida governor. Sure, he has proved horribly overmatched sharing the debate stage with the middling field of Republican presidential aspirants, being pressed ever so slightly on his record and asked to differentiate himself politically. Peel away the multipronged opposition, tuck in some softball questioning, relieve him of the live audience: Surely DeSantis would be better able to flex some muscle. But after 90 minutes of sort of answering Hannity’s prompts, the debate managed to raise only two great queries: Why would Ron DeSantis agree to this? And shouldn’t he have looked taller than that sitting on Sean Hannity’s shoulders?

We all knew it would be unbalanced. Hannity all but pledged as much in the intro, swearing that all his questions would be coming from “well-sourced fact-centered perspectives,” smiling wryly, and then averring, “Again: fact-based questions.”

DeSantis needed a little boost like he needs a little lift in his boots, because of his personal disadvantages in debate. One such problem is that every time he speaks he somehow manages to come off as even more grating. Another problem is that every time he doesn’t speak, he attempts that signature near-smile grimace, in which he shows off those veneers and that high-end orthodonture so common in a state known for its retirees.

And yet, the bias of the questioning was so over the top that it was hard for anyone to keep a straight face. DeSantis was given seemingly unlimited permission to talk over Newsom; when Newsom tried a similar tactic, Hannity swiftly intervened. One might have expected that Hannity would hazard at least one single challenging question to DeSantis, just to pay lip service to the notion of reciprocity, but he didn’t even bother with that. Every single question was some derivative of Ron, why is Florida so great? Why is California so terrible? Please refer to the fact sheet we’ve worked up for you.

DeSantis debuted a brand new debate strategy: interjecting “That’s a lie” or “False narrative” or “That’s false … false … false” off-camera while Newsom was speaking. That, combined with DeSantis’ familiar mode of dubious, folksy anecdote, mostly sums up his performance. “ ‘It’s almost like an out-of-body experience,’ ” he claimed that Floridians leaving California had told him about buying toothpaste in the Sunshine State. 

Oh, and he brought his own props. As part of a particularly dreadful segment trying to justify his state’s book bans, DeSantis produced some pocket porn: a cartoon rendering slightly censored that he claimed to have taken from a California sex-ed indoctrination title. (Unfortunately, it was too small to really appreciate.) Later on, when hammering Newsom on California’s homelessness problem, he produced a pocket-sized poop map that documented sites of human feces in San Francisco, each denoted by different shades of brown pixels. He held it defiantly, waiting for the camera to zoom in on his folded brown splotch. Really. Yes, really.

When he faltered, which he did often, Hannity came swinging in to help. “Let me ask that question!” he directed DeSantis, after Ron tried to land one zinger. “Is Joe Biden paying you tonight?” Hannity at one point asked Newsom. The Fox host prefaced another question, which Newsom answered readily, by saying, “You have been unwilling to answer this question.” Hannity afforded himself repeated interruptions of Newsom for dubious fact-checking claims and at one point tried to play Newsom off the stage with exit music like an acceptance speech at the Oscars.

It wasn’t really two-on-one, though. It was more like three-on-one, with the most formidable opponent coming in the form of the Fox News graphics team. The charts the network produced to factually foreground the lopsided questioning were perhaps the most egregious aspect of the entire event.

One chart compared the raw number of mass shootings in California with that of Florida since the governors took over their respective states, without even attempting to standardize for population size. California’s population is nearly double Florida’s. Crime is rampant, Fox News breathlessly insists, and the network did its part by contributing some of the most flagrant chart crime you’ll find anywhere.

My personal favorite, though, was a list of “foreign nationals found at Southern border” in 2022 and 2023. The list, which included 538 Syrians and 3,153 Egyptians, was sourced to “CBP data leaked to Fox News” and teed up a representative question for DeSantis: What are the odds that Biden’s open borders have admitted terror cells into the U.S.?

Why, “100 percent!” said DeSantis. He didn’t even need time to think about that one. “There will be a terrorist attack that we can trace to our southern border.” At one point, feeling the heat on an abortion segment, Hannity asked DeSantis to describe his feelings as he signed Florida’s restrictive abortion ban.

Newsom didn’t exactly cover himself in glory. He gave unnecessary credence to Republican talking points on the asylum system and homelessness, but given the absurdity of the exercise, he remained pretty unflappable in countering the barrage around him.

Was it substantive? Not really. Was it entertaining? I laughed a few times, when I wasn’t grinding my teeth, but mostly at Hannity’s questioning. You’ll be happy to know that after the showcase, Kayleigh McEnany said that she thought it was top-notch work from her colleague.

As Newsom repeatedly reminded him, DeSantis is in the death throes of his 2024 presidential campaign. He put nothing on the record Thursday night that looks likely to forestall that outcome; he definitely did nothing that might suggest that four more years in the national spotlight is all he needs before he’s ready to really make a run at the White House. Losing a debate to a noncandidate with a crooked ref doesn’t inspire much confidence.

Maybe it was good for Democrats. There will probably be some strained explanation for why it was good this happened. Newsom has raised a tiny amount of money for the Biden campaign off it; both sides will get short clips and try to make them go viral. But if that’s the future of American politics—and it probably isn’t—we now know, if we didn’t already, that it will be annoying.