In the aftermath of Ron DeSantis dropping out of the GOP presidential race over the weekend, MSNBC anchor Ayman Mohyeldin led a panel in trashing the Florida governor over his electoral misfortune, hitting him with personal attacks and accusing him of being a terrible governor.
Setting up one of several segments on the subject on Sunday night, Mohyeldin posed: "Can you think of a single Republican primary contender who has embarrassed themselves more or tarnished their reputation more than Governor Ron DeSantis?"
He then went to disaffected former Republican Tara Setmayer, who currently works for the disgraced Lincoln Project, giving her a chance to gloat that she and her former colleague Rick Wilson had predicted DeSantis as an "Epic Fail" when it began. Mohyeldin ended up declaring that he has never "seen someone as cringeworthy as DeSantis."
In a later segment, Mohyeldin played a montage of clips of DeSantis at different campaign or other public events and led his panel in laughing at the Florida Republican: "I mean, it's just so difficult to watch that. It is so difficult to watch that. I almost kind of feel bad for him -- I almost feel bad for him, but I don't really. I want to get your reactions to this. ... This was a guy who was horrible at the actual act of being a politician."
Setmayer then got to pile on again, this time also working in a shot at Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), as she commented:
I mean, it's cringe the whole time. You're just looking at this and thinking, "Is this a candidacy? Or is it like a Saturday Night Live ongoing sketch making fun of the worst possible awkward candidate ever. You know, this was doomed to fail from the beginning -- like, when I worked on Capitol Hill, Ron DeSantis was a Congressman, and, you know, he was like the Ted Cruz of the House. No one liked him -- he was awkward and weird with his colleagues. So this -- the whininess, the sanctimoniousness -- I mean, I have to give Trump credit -- at first, we thought it was a clunky name, but the "sanctimonious" was appropriate...
Introducing another segment toward the end of the hour, Mohyeldin accused the Florida governor of "targeting" people for abuse, even death:
When you look at the list of people Ron DeSantis targeted -- women with the abortion ban, Black Americans with the way he arrested voters, and also banning of books and denying them history -- LGBTQ plus Americans, the migrants, the parents of transgender children, COVID-19 and what that meant for the thousands of people in Florida who lost their lives because their governor did not take it seriously. I mean, the list just goes on and on and on. This was a consequential individual who has done a lot of damage to his state.
Setmayer agreed: "Yeah, that's why I said the idea of scaling up what he did in Florida nationally should have disqualified him from the very beginning, but it didn't because the Republican party is okay with the cruelty being the point as long as they win and stick it to the libs."
After earlier accusing Republicans of being "cruel" and "inhumane," former New Hampshire GOP chair Jennifer Horn took more shots at her former party: "This primary fully revealed for the American people just how vile so many Republican voters have become -- just how vile the party has become -- the inhumanity that the Republican leadership is willing to accept and embrace -- the ugliest parts of Trumpism that the GOP is building their platform on going forward."
Transcript follows:
MSNBC's Ayman
January 21, 2024
8:08 p.m. Eastern
AYMAN MOHYELDIN: Can you think of a single Republican primary contender who has embarrassed themselves more or tarnished their reputation more than Governor Ron DeSantis? I mean, recall all the fawning coverage that he received. We've got some of it up here -- the New York Post calling him "DeFuture" -- from conservative media outlets, including this front page from the New York Post. I genuinely can't think, you know, think of previous candidates. Jeb Bush came to mind, but he was never praised or expected to do as well as he -- as Ron DeSantis -- and yet here is Ron DeSantis sharing Jeb Bush's fate.
TARA SETMAYER, THE LINCOLN PROJECT: Yeah, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie -- I mean, the list is long, and people who have embarrassed themselves trying to kiss up to Donald Trump after he embarrassed them is long as well. It's like the, you know, political cowardice greatest hits volume two. But Ron DeSantis was a dead man walking -- his campaign was since he launched. And I will say that we at the Lincoln Project predicted that he would be an epic fail from day one. We predicted this a year and a half ago. Rick Wilson and I sat back and said, "Okay, just watch. Just watch."...
(...)
MOHYELDIN: No real surprises, and, on top of everything you've all described, just a horrible retail politician all around. I don't think I've seen someone as cringeworthy as Ron DeSantis trying to shake hands with kids or adults or anyone in a room. Trying to have a beer was just awkward for this guy
(...)
8:40 a.m.
(after showing montage of clips of Ron DeSantis campaigning)
MOHYELDIN: I mean, it's just so difficult to watch that. It is so difficult to watch that. I almost kind of feel bad for him -- I almost feel bad for him, but I don't really. I want to get your reactions to this. ... This was a guy who was horrible at the actual act of being a politician. Put aside policy for a moment, but when you watch that, what do you think? What do you make?
SETMAYER: I mean, it's cringe the whole time. You're just looking at this and thinking, "Is this a candidacy? Or is it like a Saturday Night Live ongoing sketch making fun of the worst possible awkward candidate ever. You know, this was doomed to fail from the beginning -- like, when I worked on Capitol Hill, Ron DeSantis was a Congressman, and, you know, he was like the Ted Cruz of the House. No one liked him -- he was awkward and weird with his colleagues. So this -- the whininess, the sanctimoniousness -- I mean, I have to give Trump credit -- at first, we thought it was a clunky name, but the "sanctimonious" was appropriate...
(...)
JENNIFER HORN, EX-CHAIR OF NEW HAMPSHIRE REPUBLICAN PARTY: The problem isn't just that his policies and his message were so cruel or so mean -- so much of it was inhumane. So much of it, you know, he would just -- like just saying it off his cuff, you know, talking about these people that he put on planes and shipped, you know, to places that they didn't know where they were going and separating them from their families and banning African American studies from the high school curriculum and, I mean, you go through the list, and his attitude and his policies about COVID and talking about blowing up Mexico. I mean, he was not just mean -- he was inhumane. And that was the part of Trumpism he really ran with.
(...)
8:51 p.m.
MOHYELDIN: We may have had over the last two hours some fun with our panel at the expense of Ron DeSantis, but Philadelphia Inquirer opinion columnist Will Bunch put it earlier today, he wrote: "It is so tempting to pile on the Ron DeSantis jokes, but I keep thinking about the Black voters he had arrested, the kids who had to leave (New) College, the migrants he tricked onto that plane -- all for the sake of the worst campaign in American history."
Well, let's get some final thoughts from our panelists on that. You know, we said, Tara, earlier in the show, that when you look at the list of people Ron DeSantis targeted -- women with the abortion ban, Black Americans with the way he arrested voters, and also banning of books and denying them history -- LGBTQ plus Americans, the migrants, the parents of transgender children, COVID-19 and what that meant for the thousands of people in Florida who lost their lives because their governor did not take it seriously. I mean, the list just goes on and on and on. This was a consequential individual who has done a lot of damage to his state.
SETMAYER: Yeah, that's why I said the idea of scaling up what he did in Florida nationally should have disqualified him from the very beginning, but it didn't because the Republican party is okay with the cruelty being the point as long as they win and stick it to the libs. And I think that speaks volumes about where the Republican party is today and why Donald Trump is still so far ahead -- why he will be the nominee as we predicted two years ago. It's inevitable. Anything Nikki Haley or anyone does is moot -- it's a fait accompli. Donald Trump is the Republican party's mantra. And that binary choice between Trump and Biden is going to become a reality much sooner, and the American people need to wake up and pay attention to the dictatorship that Donald Trump wants to inflict on this country, the threat that that poses to our democracy. And think about whether it's worth it losing our democracy for a tax cut or for lower gas prices. The American people will have to face that choice because this election could potentially be the last free and fair election we have in this country if they elect Donald Trump again. That's what we're facing here.
MOHYELDIN: Is that becoming clearer for voters, Fernand, or not yet when you see somebody like Ron DeSantis and the kind of campaign he'd run. Is it crystallized clearly for Americans what's at stake?
(...)
FERNAND AMANDI, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: It wasn't just Ron DeSantis all by his lonesome who caused so much damage here in the state of Florida. He did that as a pupil of Donald Trump as do all of the profiles in cowardice of today's Republican party. They are following the lead in trying to out-Trump Trump with this cruelty because it is ultimately what Republican voters are willing to stand by. That is why it is absolutely critical that team Biden and team democracy and the coalition that has to emerge to successfully defend that -- not just Democrats, but Democrats, independents, Republicans of conscience -- there are millions of them out there -- band together and understand and make the case that if we do not reelect Joe Biden, we are ending the 246-year experiment -- the American experiment in representative democracy -- and we will be handing it over to Donald Trump who has, he said not once, not twice., but more than one occasion that he will be a day one dictator.
MOHYELDIN: Jennifer, your final thoughts on this as Ron DeSantis exits the race and the legacy that he leaves behind both as a candidate and also the continued threat that Donald Trump poses to our democracy.
HORN: Well, Ferdinand (sic) had it exactly right. This primary was much -- was never about Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley or anybody else on that stage -- Chris Christie, Ramaswamy, any of them. It was always -- and, in fact, I would suggest it wasn't even exactly about Donald Trump. This primary fully revealed for the American people just how vile so many Republican voters have become -- just how vile the party has become -- the inhumanity that the Republican leadership is willing to accept and embrace -- the ugliest parts of Trumpism that the GOP is building their platform on going forward. I've said many times, Trump could be gone tomorrow, but Trumpism woven into the GOP is going to last for decades. And my biggest fear is that too many of us in this country have become lazy defenders of democracy. It's one thing for all of us to talk about it -- we need Americans to really understand what that means.
MOHYELDIN: Absolutely an important point. We have to get the message out clearly as to what is at stake in this election cycle. Nothing short of our democracy is on the line.
