A Twitter debate between a journalist and supporters of Ron DeSantis is airing the Florida governor’s dirty laundry -- specifically, the way he allegedly used to conduct himself on first dates while in college.
In a tweet shared by ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis, he highlights a sentence from a Financial Times profile on the Republican lawmaker where he quotes college friends and acquaintances who knew him from his years at Yale University and after.
The overall portrait painted in the feature, which quotes sources close to the firebrand conservative who is poised to run for president in 2024, relies on small and large details from his years leading up to launching a political career and thereafter.
In one such instance, the reporter quotes an account from the pandemic memoir of Charles Finch, who attended Yale at the same time as Gov DeSantis – then, referred to as only “D” – and was a classmate of his.
“According to a friend, [DeSantis] would tell dates he liked Thai food, but pronounced it ‘thigh’,” the article writes, citing Mr Finch’s book. “If they corrected him, Finch wrote, he would find an excuse to leave.”
The piece adds, quoting a section from the memoir where Mr Finch summarises this first-date tactic as being because: “He didn’t want a girlfriend who corrected him.”
After reading the article, Mr MacGillis shared a link for the story and captioned it with a quote from the story and a “yikes.”
In a thread to the first message, he added: “Also: Behind the scenes, Trump is said to bristle at mentions of DeSantis’s formidable intellect,” and “It’s a v good, comprehensive piece. One of the best I’ve read on DeSantis.”
Critics panned Mr MacGillis on social media platform for being guilty of spreading a detail that amounted to just “gossip.”
“I mean. Biden hung out with segregationists and Harris kept innocent men in prison to advance her career, but this is bad too. I guess,” conservative commentator Chad Felix Greene tweeted.
Canadian conservative media personality and founder of the far-right outlet Rebel News jokingly decried that this unearthed detail from decades back was evidence that the walls were “closing in” on Gov DeSantis.
“They’ve finally got him cornered. I don’t believe he’ll survive the scandal of a British newspaper’s investigation revealing that, 25 years ago, when he was a student, he once pronounced Thai as thigh. It’s over,” he quote tweeted in response to the ProPublica reporter’s original message.
For his part, Mr MacGillis contextualised his message in many of the comments that criticised his original tweet, highlighting how elected officials are complex and small details can sometimes be as telling – or at least deemed newsworthy – as larger ones.
“Elected officials have many aspects to them. One can believe [DeSantis] made the right call on schools and that (just to cite one obvious counterexample that the FT piece cites ) the Martha’s Vineyard flight was an excessive stunt. People are complex,” he tweeted back to a commenter who had argued in defence of the Florida governor’s position on school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In a separate follow-up tweet, he also doubled down on the tweet, writing: “I trust both the quoted author and the FT reporter enough to cite it. It’s a small but striking detail.”
“I read a lot, I cite lots of things I read, big and small. This small thing caught my eye,” he added, seeming to close the conversation, on his end, on the matter.
Gov DeSantis is facing re-election this November against Democratic challenger Charlie Crist, a former Republican governor of Florida who joined the Democratic party in 2012.
