The Republican debates, sans Donald Trump, have been a predictable bore. At best, the programming offers a preview of a 2028 primary or a competition for a new nominee if Trump, 77, drops dead. All of it is evidence, at the very minimum, no one in the Republican primary can do television like Trump. If they are bombastic and a tad unhinged, they cannot captivate—they are a smattering of second and third-order talents, and most suffer from overexposure. Just ask Ron DeSantis.
But the governor of Florida has at least promised to do something interesting: participate in Gavin Newsom’s Fox News debate scheme. Newsom, the governor of California, has convinced DeSantis that they should debate, one-on-one, on Nov. 30 with Sean Hannity moderating. Newsom, like DeSantis, wants to be president one day. Neither man will probably get to the White House, but Newsom’s odds, at the moment, look slightly better. If Trump crushes DeSantis in the primary, as polls indicate he will, the Florida governor’s political career is done. Newsom, an enthusiastic Joe Biden surrogate, might be a top tier Democratic candidate in 2028, in a war for donors with Kamala Harris, his fellow Californian.
While some in the pundit class have panned the idea of a Newsom-DeSantis clash, it’s plainly worthwhile as spectacles go. Newsom and DeSantis are in charge of two of the largest and most important states in America. They offer, rhetorically at least, deeply divergent views on social and economic questions. They will get to argue for the future of their very attractive and very flawed states. If anything, our polarized system needs more meetings between the tribes, more opportunities to exchange ideas over an extended period of time, even on Fox. Otherwise, the culture withers.
There’s a less important but intriguing political question that might be asked of the debate: who, of the two, actually benefits? My first instinct was DeSantis, desperate for buzz as his campaign flags. Now, with a few more days to think it over, the answer is much clearer to me.
And it took the editor-in-chief of the Blaze, a right-wing news organization, to clarify the stakes.
“Newsom revealed a bit of what’s coming last night, which the Right is not ready for. He’s comfortable in his own skin like Trump, and doesn’t just want to be there but is comfortable and assured and *loves* being there. Radiating ambitious, gleeful energy while on with Hannity,” Matthew J. Peterson posted on X, former known as Twitter, last last month. “He’s not ideological—pure and distilled lizard aristo-technocratic lizard brain with political people skill in relation to American elites that matter—and if he ran it would be to the right of his party. People are not prepared. Typical Fox News responses will not be enough.”
Typical Fox News responses will not be enough. Indeed. In the old Fox formulation, bullies v. nerds, alphas v. betas, it’s increasingly obvious that Newsom, the oily ex-baseball prospect, is the man best fit for this quasi-demented and deeply influential arena. He’s hungry for it. In some ways, he’s more like Trump than DeSantis will ever be.
Until last year, I had never heard Ron DeSantis speak for an extended period of time. From afar, I imagined something stentorian; he was a product of Fox, after all, his political ascent owed to bulldog hits on behalf of Trump in the late 2010s. I closed my eyes and conjured an amalgamation of Brian Kilmeade and Bret Baier, a tinge sinister, always commanding. He presented as a refined Trump, and this was what the GOP craved. He just had to convince the Republicans Trump was actually a loser.
The problem became obvious once DeSantis opened his mouth. The bitter irony, for the own-the-libs, terminally-online set, is that DeSantis sounds exactly like what they revile most. Close your eyes now and listen: he is the dweeb, the squish, too practiced, too shrill, a beleaguered Ivy League drone. He sounds like the overheated dad trying to corral a couple of teens who just won’t be quiet; he sounds like the manager who gets called and the manager who can’t, despite it all, get anyone to stand down. Trump’s nicknames never stuck, but they didn’t need to. Whatever it is—ineffable charisma, subtle magnetism—DeSantis plainly lacked it. As his campaign wore on, it began to seem almost remarkable he had ever been elected to anything. He made Marco Rubio look like John F. Kennedy in the autumn of 1960.
Peterson of the Blaze, with some hyperbole, cuts to the essence of Newsom. Today, he is the liberal governor of California, but he has been everywhere in his political career. He was a business-friendly San Francisco mayor. He ran a boutique winery. He was a child of a well-heeled lobbyist and a protégé of one of the wealthiest men in America. He was a left-handed pitcher who was good enough, in high school, to be scouted. He was married to Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s current fiancée. Unlike DeSantis, who was also an outstanding amateur baseball player—he participated in the Little League World Series and captained his Yale squad—he retains his ex-jock aura. He swaggers and slithers like Jerry Maguire.
Peterson is right: in a primary, Newsom can easily run to the right of his party. He has no fixed ideology. He has been a more liberal governor than Jerry Brown and boasts genuine accomplishments, like signing housing legislation to weaken California’s restrictive zoning. (At the same time, he’s shown, on issues like workers’ rights, he’ll only go so far.) He has guided the state through countless natural disasters. He has yet to fix the homelessness crises in the major cities and there is much, in California’s current struggles, DeSantis could hang on Newsom in PowerPoint fashion. But Newsom, a regular Fox watcher and participant, is no stranger to the rhetoric there. He relishes political combat, and likely sees a mark in DeSantis. Peterson calls it the “lizard” brain. It’s easier to think of him as the old linebacker back on the field, staring down a runt of a running back—or someone who’s never played much football at all.
Trump likes a good brawl, too. It’s why, despite his demagoguery, he still grants interviews to NBC and the New York Times. It’s why he accepted a CNN town hall. He has a native understanding, like Newsom, of the broader American culture. Age helps; both Newsom and Trump are old enough to have entered adulthood in an analog world. DeSantis thought it was smart to launch his presidential campaign on Twitter with Elon Musk. Compare those optics to the golden escalator.
Newsom knows conservatives expect little from him. They are no better than the Democrats, conditioned and coddled in their bubbles, and they are used to punching at what never punches back. The older Republicans can still remember Hannity’s nightly thrashing of Alan Colmes. In Newsom, they see only the latest woke lib, fodder for second-day virality—look at how insane the Democrats have become, har har. Rather, Republicans would be better off conceiving of Newsom as a West Coast Bill Clinton: debonair, chameleonic, and cutthroat when needed. Newsom may never get as far as Clinton, but in his desired match-up with DeSantis, the parallels are much closer to Clinton v. Bush or Clinton v. Dole than Republicans would like to admit. Newsom is going to enjoy himself next month.
“Spectacle” and “demented” were 2 excellent words to not only use in this good article, but to capture what’s going on in general.
You certain got both of them right. I was stunned at how bad DeSantis sounded at the first debate. And Newsom only wishes he had the ability of a Bill Clinton ...Bill had a rare gift that enabled him to make intimate contact with people and remember names, faces, ideas....I can't think of another politician on either side with that kind of talent for retail politics at the moment.