John Oliver’s latest episode of “Last Week Tonight” focused on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and offered a half-hour’s worth of evidence that DeSantis isn’t the right-wing savior he’s often portrayed as.
To offer a brief, uber-scientific summary: Florida’s governor is a right-wing weirdo.
Oliver’s premise is simple: DeSantis is essentially a carbon copy of Donald Trump, and many of the things that make him a darling to conservatives haven’t been as much of a success as he claims.
Oliver’s premise is simple: DeSantis is essentially a carbon copy of Donald Trump, and many of the things that make him a darling to conservatives haven’t been as much of a success as he claims.
To start, Oliver teed off on DeSantis’ claims of Florida’s greatness under his leadership, including an ad in which DeSantis says, “Florida is proof positive that we the people are not destined for failure.”
“I don’t know about that, Ron,” Oliver said. “Last year alone in Florida, a man tried to steal a crossbow by stuffing it down his pants, a woman instigated a police chase so she could cross ‘getting arrested’ off her bucket list, and a man was charged with battery for throwing a hot dog at a police officer.
“We the people may not be destined for failure, but a lot of individuals down there sure do seem drawn to it,” Oliver said.
That was the perfect segue into DeSantis’ record as governor, which Oliver accurately summarized as “sometimes less than he claims, sometimes less than his critics claim, and sometimes worse than you may know.”
What made the list?
- DeSantis’ barbed exchanges with members of the press when he’s held accountable for his administration’s shortcomings (like its pandemic response).
- His refusal to recognize a trans athlete’s NCAA championship.
- His support for an anti-protest law that has been faulted by the United Nations and been found by a judge to be vague “to the point of unconstitutionality.”
- His support for a law that would hamper social media companies’ ability to ban extremists (several elements of this law were blocked by a judge).
Oliver also mentioned highly publicized actions from DeSantis, including his support for a controversial initiative focused on purported voter fraud in Florida. The initial 20 arrests last summer disproportionately affected Black people, and some of the charges soon started to fall apart.
Oliver, an actor in his own right, clearly knows a performer when he sees one. And what we have in DeSantis is someone putting on a show for his right-wing fans, who seem eager to eat up whatever he serves them, no matter how empty the calories.
Watching Sunday’s episode, I couldn’t help but think of this post I wrote in November after the midterms, about how DeSantis’ anti-government agenda is self-interested and largely performative — and destructive to Florida in the long term, given the state’s heavy dependence on the federal government in recent years.
“If Donald Trump never existed and you were forced to learn about Ron DeSantis from scratch with no basis for comparison, what you would see would justifiably horrify you,” Oliver said. “Because you’d be discovering a petty autocrat and a bully.”
Check out the segment below:
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.