Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is less a functional politician these days than he is a walking, talking COVID vector, a human-shaped coronavirus enabler moonlighting as the freedom-loving chief executive of a major state. For many of the citizens of Florida — particularly those at risk of, or already dead from, the ongoing surge of the highly infectious Delta variant — this is not a good thing.
For the bookers at Fox News, however, it makes DeSantis an irresistible face to slap across TV screens around the country. So much so, in fact, that according to a tranche of emails obtained this week by the Tampa Bay Times, DeSantis was courted to appear on the country's top conservative propaganda outfit almost daily between election week 2020 and February 2021. At times, per the paper's reporting, he's even been given free rein to choose the topics of conversation for his appearances and collaborated with the network on everything from questions to formats to graphics.
