A conservative commentator isn’t happy with Ron DeSantis and his continued positional changes on Ukraine, and blames the Governor’s inconsistency on trying to please a donor who backed him in the past.
On Monday, Tucker Carlson criticized DeSantis for Ken Griffin having allegedly “told him to change his view on Ukraine from ‘It’s a regional conflict we shouldn’t get involved in’ to ‘It’s a super important thing. We should send more money.’”
It’s worth noting here that Griffin has broken with DeSantis, after having backed him in his re-election bid and having urged him to run for President, before cooling on DeSantis in recent months.
“One donor got him to change his view and all these so-called conservatives are supporting that,” Carlson claimed. “Like, it’s the most important thing ever, like who are these people and what is their problem? Like, what is going on with them?”
It’s unclear to whom Carlson was referring specifically, though he led off his Ukraine upset with a denunciation of “the people who represent him online” as “the nastiest, the stupidest and the most zero sum people I’ve ever seen in my life.” Again, he didn’t name which DeSantis advocates and surrogates matched that description.
We’ve reached out to the DeSantis campaign for response to Carlson’s Ukraine claim, but comment was not immediately available Monday night.
DeSantis originally deemed the war a “territorial dispute” and not one of America’s “vital national interests” in a statement provided to Tucker Carlson, in a seeming effort to curry favor with the now-former Fox News host.
He soon enough walked that position back, telling Piers Morgan “it wasn’t that I thought Russia had a right to that, and so if I should have made that more clear, I could have done it.”
He would go on from there to call for a “settlement” in the war, before a spirited exchange in July with Carlson in Iowa at the Family Leadership Summit.
DeSantis took issue with Carlson saying he changed his position from telling Carlson that the Russian invasion was a simple “territorial dispute,” rejecting Carlson’s restatement of DeSantis’ position as changing his view “to describe Putin as a war criminal and say that it was central to America’s foreign policy.”
“So the last part I did not say,” DeSantis said, leaving it unclear whether Carlson meant the “war criminal” statement (which he made in March while walking back his statement to Carlson) or the idea that defending Ukraine was “central to America’s foreign policy.”
“You dissent from the DC foreign policy elite, they then try to smear you and say, ‘Oh, you must be for Putin.’ I’ve always thought Putin is a bad guy. I still think he’s a bad guy. But that’s a separate question for a leader who’s got to look at the world in very clear-eyed glasses. You know that it’s not all peaches and cream out there and you have to make a judgment about what’s in America’s national interest,” DeSantis said.
DeSantis reaffirmed the “territorial dispute” framing soon thereafter.
“And the dispute at this point or the war at this point is not whether Ukraine’s government is going to fall. They’re fighting over territory on the far eastern part of the country between Russia and Ukraine. And that’s kind of where this is at. So the question is OK, how do you get that to where we can stop this and also from our national interest,” DeSantis said.
Carlson did not mention Ken Griffin during that interview.
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