John Oliver examined the political career of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida who is widely expected to challenge Donald Trump for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination. “Trump initially struggled to coin a damaging nickname for DeSantis, with his first attempt being the embarrassingly weak ‘Ron DeSanctimonious”, the Last Week Tonight host noted on Sunday evening, though the former president “later unveiled something with a lot more punch”.
That would be the unfortunately catchy “Meatball Ron”. “I hate to say it, but Trump’s still got it,” Oliver admitted. “It’s perfectly stupid, childish and hurtful, in a way that’s genuinely difficult to articulate.”
Oliver also recalled a story from a former classmate of DeSantis, who said the governor would deliberately mispronounce Thai as “thigh” on first dates. If the date corrected him, he would make up an excuse and leave because he “didn’t want a girlfriend who corrected him”.
“If that is true, wow,” said Oliver. “Just imagine being on that date.” Oliver imagined how that scenario would play out, with the date ultimately leaving “with the check and the single greatest first date disaster story of all time”.
Oliver sought to avoid direct comparisons of DeSantis to Trump. “If I may quote Tom Brady’s publicist while reviewing his old golf photos: let’s take Trump out of the picture,” and examine DeSantis on his own merits. His track record as the governor of Florida is “sometimes less than he claims, sometimes less than his critics claim, and sometimes worse than you may know”.
“Since becoming Florida governor, he’s made shutting down dissenting voices something of a feature,” he began, citing a campaign ad which touted DeSantis’s pugnacious exchange with a local reporter and his hatred of “corporate media”. But he doesn’t hate all media – “even by Republican standards, the mutual affection between him and Fox is pretty extreme,” said Oliver. During one four-month stretch, the network asked him to appear on air 113 times, nearly once a day, which is “just pathetic”, Oliver said. “I’ll put it this way: if Fox News ever went on a date with DeSantis, they definitely wouldn’t correct him when he called it ‘thigh’ food.”
Oliver ticked through DeSantis’s alarming work as governor: at his urging, Florida’s state medical board banned gender-affirming care for minors, he signed a 15-week abortion ban into law and suggested that he’d sign a six-week one. But “lots of Republican governors have done things like that”, Oliver explained. “What makes DeSantis extra popular on the right is his willingness to wage big, symbolic culture wars.”
As in, his invocations of “wokeism” as a bogeyman, and claim that “Florida is where woke goes to die.”
“Florida is not where woke goes to die,” Oliver retorted. “It’s where wealthy Upper East Side New Yorkers go to die. Get your facts straight.
“DeSantis spends a lot of energy decrying wokeness and empty virtue signaling,” he continued, “although he also seems to spend a huge amount of time doing the rightwing version of exactly that.”
Namely, he has signed a bunch of “attention-grabbing bills that seem designed to delight conservatives and enrage liberals”, such as his anti-riot bill after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, or his “election integrity” crackdown, which led to the arrests of several Floridians at gunpoint.
“It really feels like DeSantis’s main aim there, as in so many cases, was just to instill fear – to make people afraid to protest or to moderate content or even to vote,” Oliver noted. “And that is the thing: even his sloppily written laws can end up doing real harm.”
That’s most clearly evident, he continued, in Florida schools, which DeSantis has targeted with the Parental Right in Education Act, also known as the “don’t say gay” bill, and a law banning books from school libraries unless they have been approved.
“What DeSantis has done is make it so anyone in any community can challenge these books,” Oliver said. He quoted one woman who submitted 21 book challenges in one county; she turned out to be a retiree with no children who admitted to only reading the books “in partial”.
“So basically, she just skimmed the books and said, ‘I’m pretty sure nobody should read this,’” Oliver said. “Which is coincidentally exactly how I feel about Ron DeSantis’s new book, but I’m not trying to get it taken out of libraries, am I?
“When you take all of this together – the books being removed, the inane proclamations to shame trans athletes, the sloppy attempts to criminalize protests – and you combine it with everything else, from the support of restrictive abortion bans to the efforts to stop gender-affirming care, it really begins to feel like the ‘freest state in America’ is only free to the extent that anyone wants to behave exactly the way that Ron DeSantis thinks they should,” Oliver summarized.
He anticipated many favorable comparisons of DeSantis to Trump in the coming months, “but that cannot be the bar here”.
“If you were forced to learn about Ron DeSantis from scratch, with no basis for comparison, what you would see would justifiably horrify you,” he concluded. “Because you’d be discovering a petty autocrat and a bully, a man with no interest in hearing dissent, questions, or indeed the correct pronunciation of Thai food. And all in all, a man who is, and I do not use this term lightly, just a fucking meatball.”
