Gov. Ron DeSantis dodged a question on abortion, pledged to “rip the woke” from the military, and said former President Donald Trump shouldn’t be charged for Jan. 6 during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday, his first sit-down conversation with a non-conservative news outlet in years.
DeSantis also defended his struggling presidential campaign as a “state-by-state process,” despite continuing to trail Trump 21% to 50% in the latest FiveThirtyEight national polling averages.
DeSantis’ appearance on a network he has dismissed as part of the “corporate media” was a surprise, said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
“My first reaction when I saw this was, ‘Oh man, it’s getting desperate over there when they’re going on CNN,’” Coleman said. “… It’s sort of a break from his approach of only talking to friendly conservative media.”
In his 15-minute interview conducted in South Carolina, DeSantis did not answer the question when asked by Tapper if as president he would sign a six-week national abortion ban similar to the one he approved last year in Florida.
“I’m pro-life, I will be a pro-life president, and we will support pro-life policies,” he said. “At the same time, I look at what’s going on in the Congress, and I don’t see them making very much headway.
DeSantis claimed Democrats would “try to nationalize abortion up until the moment of birth,” which is not advocated by President Joe Biden or Democratic leaders.
Asked if special counsel Jack Smith should charge Trump for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol if there was enough evidence to prosecute, DeSantis condemned the potential prosecution as political “weaponization.”
“I want to focus on looking forward. I don’t want to look back,” DeSantis said. “… I hope he doesn’t get charged. I don’t think it’ll be good for the country. But at the same time, I’ve got to focus on looking forward, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Earlier in the day, DeSantis said that Trump “should have come out more forcefully” amid the pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, his strongest criticism yet of the former president for the insurrection that day.
“I think it was shown how he was in the White House and didn’t do anything while things were going on,” DeSantis said at a press conference. “… But to try to criminalize that, that’s a different issue entirely.”
DeSantis was responding to a question about Trump’s announcement Tuesday that prosecutors had sent him a letter stating he was a target of the investigation.
The governor had also unveiled his plan for the military, including banning transgender people from serving and eliminating diversity initiatives.
Told that research showed “wokeness” was far down on the list of reasons that potential recruits said they didn’t enlist, DeSantis said “not everyone really knows what wokeness is.”
“I mean, I’ve defined it, but a lot of people who rail against wokeness can’t even define it,” he said. But for the military, he defined it as “not something that’s holding true to the core martial values that make the military unique.”
As for his campaign, DeSantis said he was “definitely doing better than ever, state by state.”
“I’m not running a campaign to try to juice whatever we are in the national polls,” he said. “… We’re focused on building an organization. You’ve got to get people to come out in the middle of January in Iowa to caucus for you. … That is not going to make the same type of splash as if you were trying to run ads nationally.”
However, the latest polls in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the three earliest primary and caucus states, all showed him still far behind Trump. In a major campaign shakeup last week, DeSantis fired about a dozen staffers after burning through almost $8 million of his $20 million in initial funds.
Coleman said the interview was a chance for DeSantis to broaden his audience.
“His campaign has been criticized for only talking to the sources that they like on the right-wing side,” Coleman said. “And maybe that’s one of the reasons why DeSantis’ numbers are where they are.”
But DeSantis’ main problem, Coleman said, is that his overall favorability with Republicans has waned.
“It’s like the more voters see of DeSantis, the less they like him,” he said. “He’s worse off now than he was at the beginning of the year. … When he first launched, the prevailing narrative seemed to be, ‘Are we underestimating DeSantis and his campaign?’ Now it seems like, ‘Have we overestimated him?’”
