Over the past two years, Governor Ron DeSantis has embarked on a public relations speed run aimed at boosting his national profile ahead of 2024, embracing red meat social policies and making inroads with conservative power brokers of every stripe. As part of this effort, the notoriously pugnacious governor has managed to walk a tightrope among right-wing media that few Republicans can. From traditional organs like the New York Post and the National Review to Alex Jones and other insurgent far-right darlings, just about every corner of the conservative media ecosystem has played a part in his meteoric rise.
On Fox News, DeSantis has become a favorite guest, appearing regularly on Fox & Friends, as well as on Sean Hannity’s and Dan Bongino’s shows, to attack COVID lockdowns, cancel culture, and abortion-rights protesters, whom he has likened to January 6 rioters. As reported in an extensive New York Times Magazine profile Tuesday, one Fox producer even told DeSantis’s aides that the far-right governor could host his own show. The Times story also reported that DeSantis began upping his Fox appearances in 2020 at the advice of his wife. “Casey [DeSantis] would say, ‘We have to get him on Mark Levin and Hannity once a week,’” an unnamed DeSantis aide told the paper. “‘Frequency is very important.’”
The governor’s affable relationships with the media aren’t just limited to cable news. In January, DeSantis hosted Dave Rubin, a conservative podcaster, and Benny Johnson, a once-disgraced BuzzFeed writer who now works for Newsmax, at a dinner at the governor’s mansion, per the Times. Ben Shapiro, the most popular conservative podcast host, has described himself as “a big Ron DeSantis fan” and has pushed for him to run in the next presidential cycle, even if that means squaring off with the former president. “If he chooses to run, I think he’d be an excellent candidate,” Shapiro told a listener who raised concerns that a Donald Trump-versus-DeSantis primary could hurt the GOP’s odds. “His best opportunity to run for president is likely in 2024.” Meanwhile, Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped popularize the anti-LGBTQ “groomer” slur, directly advised DeSantis’s policy team on its Stop WOKE Act, which this April officially banned public schools and private workplaces from discussing racial and gender issues. (Last month a Florida US District Court judge declared the law unconstitutional.) “For years, many conservatives understood culture war as lamentation: They believed that complaining about progressive ideology and hypocrisy was a victory in itself,” Rufo told the Times. “Governor DeSantis understands culture war as public policy.”
In conservative print media, multiple industry leaders are also rooting for a DeSantis presidency—and they are far less worried about creating a rift between the GOP’s two 2024 favorites. Rod Dreher, a columnist at The American Conservative, hailed DeSantis as “America’s conservative leader” last month, writing: “While Donald Trump talks the talk, it’s the Florida governor who walks the walk. Competence beats drama every time.” And as I wrote in July, this sentiment—that DeSantis embodies Trump-esque populism but with more political know-how—is shared by the National Review. “Will conservatives look back on the last two years and longer and recognize that DeSantis was their leader even while Trump was still in office?” wrote National Review columnist Michael Brendan Dougherty in an August piece that crowned DeSantis the “leader of the opposition” to Joe Biden’s America.
Over at News Corp, Rupert Murdoch–owned publications appear increasingly ready to ditch Trump in favor of the Florida governor, as my colleague Joe Pompeo reported. The New York Post advised its readers to “Look forward!” when the time comes to choose the next GOP presidential nominee, while the Wall Street Journal editorial board declared that the former president betrayed his supporters by conning them on January 6, adding that “he is still doing it.” (DeSantis, for his part, has flirted with a baseless conspiracy theory that the FBI helped orchestrate the Capitol riot, a claim popularized by Tucker Carlson.) Incidentally, this pattern of ship-jumping has also played out on the opposite end of the conservative media spectrum. Alex Jones, a professional conspiracy theorist and one of the most influential talk radio hosts of this century, announced last month that he was officially putting his weight behind the Florida governor. “I am supporting DeSantis,” Jones told his listeners. “DeSantis has just gone from being awesome to being unbelievably good.… This is what Trump should be like. And I’ve been hammering this point, and he’s doing it now. And we have someone that is better than Trump. Way better than Trump.”
Aside from the media, DeSantis has also ingratiated himself with major Republican power centers, including the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential right-wing think tanks; Hillsdale College, a leading conservative higher-ed institute; and Club for Growth, a fiscally libertarian group that rose to fame during the Tea Party wave. And while DeSantis’s shadow candidacy has not yet won over Never Trump conservatives like Jonah Goldberg, David French, and Charlie Sykes, they do not view him with the same singular contempt that they have for the former president.
While DeSantis continues to court all sections of the conservative media, the governor has not given an interview to a nonpartisan news outlet since the summer of 2020. The Times, which said it interviewed more than 100 sources for its DeSantis feature, including current and former aides, reported that it was shunned by the Florida governor and his office. In an appearance on The Ben Shapiro Show last year, DeSantis justified his habit of icing mainstream media outlets, saying: “Republicans have to understand—don’t try to get these people to like you.”
