Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will sit down for an extended exclusive with CNN’s Jake Tapper, the network announced.
Tapper, host of CNN’s weekday day The Lead, will interview DeSantis in Columbia, South Carolina immediately after a campaign event. The interview will air on Tuesday at 4 p.m.
CNN in a press release hinted the network will discuss policy positions with DeSantis, who has been running to the right of President Donald Trump on cultural issues.
“On the campaign trail, DeSantis has projected himself as a more conservative alternative to Trump on several issues, including abortion and guns. He has touted Florida’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and measures he’s signed that LGBTQ advocates have criticized,” the press release states.
“In the first major policy proposal of his presidential campaign, DeSantis last month proposed a sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration, including sending the US military to the border and mass detention and deportation of undocumented people.”
While DeSantis has been a fixture on Fox News dating back to his days as a U.S. Congressman, he has largely eschewed other cable networks. That includes CNN, an outlet viewed especially negatively by populist conservatives DeSantis has wooed in his quest for the Republican presidential nomination.
But DeSantis after nearly two months on the campaign trail continues to lag behind former President Donald Trump in polls of Republican primary voters. That has prompted the DeSantis campaign to reportedly scale down staffing and evaluate ways to reset the campaign’s direction.
A leaked internal campaign document, first published by NBC News, from the DeSantis campaign made clear increasing free media and attracting news coverage will be a priority moving forward.
“The earned media is the cake,” the memo reads. “The paid media (early states and national conservative cable) is the icing and keeps the messaging points from the eared media hits in the voter’s face.”
Notably, former President Donald Trump, the consistent frontrunner for the GOP nomination, has appeared on CNN even while heavily criticizing coverage. Most notably, he appeared in a live town hall event on the network in June moderated by CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins.
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