Mika Brzezinski read from a Florida Sun-Sentinel op-ed piece on Morning Joe this morning.
"Florida's Sun-Sentinel editorial board writing, 'Trump's grip weakens, but that's bad news for Florida.' It writes, in part:"
Anyone who admires DeSantis from afar should come to Florida with eyes wide open. After winning by just 32,463 votes, he has governed with contempt for the 4 million people who didn't vote for him. He is as authoritarian as Trump, just as disdainful of democracy, no less polarizing. DeSantis is a bully. No Florida governor has been as ruthless or effective in dominating his state, owning the legislature and trampling dissent. The present Republican party has no shortage of qualified governors or ex-governors to nominate, all who won election or reelection in blue states by governing from the center, not from the dark extremes. The party's post-Trump future rightfully belongs to people like them, not to the intentionally divisive, polarizing and humorless DeSantis. Voters in America's other 49 states, take note.
"This is great news for Ron DeSantis. He loves owning the libs. He loves when he's attacked in the media. But this authoritarian streak is fascinating," Joe Scarborough said.
"Two things about DeSantis, one is the fact that if you ask most people if he's a conservative, they say, well, of course he's a conservative. And yet he doesn't let small businesses decide how they keep their workplaces safe because it doesn't fit his political agenda. Even at the height of covid, he would not let cruise lines take what steps they thought as private employers they needed to take to keep their cruise lines safe.
"You could say the same thing about local school boards. You could talk so many things where the decisions are centralized. The centralized state tells everybody in all 67 counties what they're going to do, how they're going to do it. There's nothing conservative about that. You actually want to empower local school boards and principals, teachers, small business owners. He just doesn't view it that way," he said.
He pointed out that DeSantis started out trying to govern from the middle.
"That changed because his goals changed," Willie Geist said. "It's not just reelection this year, it's clearly 2024."
"He has been very good at generating headlines. He has become the new darling prance of Fox News and of people who might like Trump but feel he is too backward looking and feel like he's not the choice for 2024."
Geist pointed out that the Trump people believe they would easily beat DeSantis.
