The narrative of the 2024 presidential campaign has officially gone full circle, with a candidate who enjoyed laudatory coverage for years now complaining about the right-wing press walking in lockstep against him.
In Urbandale, Iowa, Ron DeSantis offered yet another round of critiques of the conservative press, which he said is unwilling to question Donald Trump. While he didn’t call them “fake news” or a “racket” like he did Thursday on the trail, he did describe the conservative press as a “Praetorian Guard” protecting the former President.
“He’s got basically a Praetorian Guard of the conservative media, Fox News, the websites,” DeSantis claimed. “They don’t hold them accountable because they’re worried about losing viewers and they don’t want to have the ratings go down. And that’s just the reality, that’s just the truth, and I’m not complaining about it. I’d rather that not be the case, but that’s just, I think, an objective reality.”
DeSantis fretted about “conservative media” avoiding “big debates” about Anthony Fauci and his actions in 2020, or Trump’s proposal to “build a big, beautiful $1 billion-plus new headquarters for the FBI in the center of the swamp.”
“The sources that Republicans are now looking to more than any, are just not even engaging in any of this,” DeSantis lamented. “I think that a lot of it is, is rooted in audience and thinking that … you’ll lose audience. I don’t know. But the reality is, that’s just the case.”
The Governor said that while he’s made the case against Trump, “it’s different for me to just be doing that to a camera versus him being right there” in a debate, because mainstream media outlets “have to cover it and it becomes something that people start to talk about.”
“It’s different to just, to just lob it directly into the camera, it doesn’t get the same amount of legs,” said the man who spent years on conservative outlets conducting interviews heavy on hagiography and feather light on pushback.
DeSantis thinks it may hurt Trump “on the margins as this process goes on” to not engage Republican opponents. But in Iowa, the process is over Monday, and DeSantis is a distant second or third in polls.
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