Revenge is a dish best served … on national TV?

Fox News announced late yesterday that Ron DeSantis would appear that evening in an interview with Kayleigh McEnany, Donald Trump’s former press secretary. Trump had recently trashed McEnany in personal terms (“milktoast,” remember?) for the mortal sin of reading slightly unfavorable poll results on the air.

That set up an interesting dilemma for McEnany, I wrote after the announcement went out. Would McEnany try to “take down” DeSantis to get back in Trump’s good favor? Would she toss softballs at DeSantis to get even with Trump? Or would she play it down the middle, as an unaffiliated journalist?

There are certainly flashes of Door #3 in this interview — but this looks like Door #2, no? Transcript via Fox News:

Ron DeSantis sets the record straight on Trump's false claims regarding his handling of COVID.

Former Trump Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany agrees: "that's true… there's no doubt about that… things were open." pic.twitter.com/AdeKXVU3xo

— Never Back Down (@NvrBackDown24) June 22, 2023

MCENANY: You mentioned COVID there. And I have this very distinct memory. I was in the Oval Office with Dr. Anthony Fauci, in the Situation Room with him. I mean, this man made you think, like, your days were numbered, all of our days were numbered, all 323 million of us. But then I go to Florida. I met you on a tarmac, and you were saying some pretty bullish things about opening the state. I was a bit taken aback, because it was such a contrast to kind of the groupthink I was hearing there in Washington. But you earned the ire of the left on your COVID response. Now you’re getting attacked from the right. There are a variety of responses to COVID. Why was yours the right one?

DESANTIS: Well, we made a decision to buck Fauci, buck the medical establishment, buck the media, the left, and some Republicans, and say, you know what, people in Florida have a right to work. The businesses have a right to be open. Kids have a right to be in school, and we’re not going to impose mask mandates or the like or vaccine mandates. And the minute we did that, we became the focal point for freedom in this country. If you had been in, like, the Florida Panhandle in May, June of 2020, it was like COVID didn’t even exist.

MCENANY: That’s true.

DESANTIS: People were making their decisions, the state was booming, and, really, we never looked back. And so we got it right in there. And it wasn’t just people moving here to live, people visiting, the way our economy responded. And I just had to look at the data. But you know what you had to do, Kayleigh? You had to be willing to stand out there all alone, because I didn’t have a lot of backup for that. Fauci was attacking everything Florida did.

MCENANY: Yes, he was.

DESANTIS: There were other bureaucrats attacking us. The media was attacking us. But you know what? My job was to stand up for the people that I represented. I didn’t know what that would mean for my political future, but, quite frankly, you got to be willing to sacrifice that to be able to protect the jobs and the liberties of the people that elected you. I stood my ground. We stood in the breach, and the state of Florida is better as a result of that.

MCENANY: Yes, I mean, look, there’s no doubt about that. I came to Florida a lot on the weekends. People don’t know that. I left the swamp, and it was pretty joyful to be in Florida. I went to restaurants. I drove on the highways. Things were open.

“Now you’re getting attacked from the right” is pretty much open code for “Donald Trump,” and everyone knows it. More importantly, McEnany’s personal testimony about Florida corroborates everything DeSantis goes on to claim. It also provides a first-person account as to the sharp contrast between Free Florida and “the swamp” run by Fauci from Trump’s Situation Room, and that is impossible to view as anything else than a Door #2 swipe at her old boss and his pandemic choices.

Let’s just say that this isn’t exactly a “milktoast” response to Trump’s earlier criticism.

McEnany did offer one challenging question as a follow-up to this COVID discussion, which is also in the clip above:

MCENANY: But what’s your response to someone who would say, Governor Kemp, he opened quicker, or they point to South Dakota? What’s your response to that attack from the right?

DESANTIS: Well, I think Brian Kemp did a good job. He’s a friend of mine. He’s a good governor. I applaud him. I think what I did more aggressively than anyone was overrule local governments who were imposing these restrictions. In Florida, the state government did not do very much. We’re talking about a few weeks. Some of the local governments, particularly in South Florida, were trying to impose mandates. And so what I did was, we overruled that. We said, you can’t close business. You can’t fine people for not wearing a mask, and we actually issued a blanket pardon for anyone who local government had tried to enforce COVID restrictions against. That is really what opened the floodgate, because you can say the state’s open, but if every other municipality is doing Fauci-ism, that’s not a free state. We pried the state open at the local level, and I think that was really the secret to Florida doing very well in those circumstances.

MCENANY: And new data out today, no learning loss for fourth graders between 2019 and 2022 in the state of Florida because you kept those schools open.

It’s a good, measured answer from DeSantis that wisely defuses any attempt to pit him against Kemp or Kristi Noem in terms of pandemic response. It offers collegiality instead, which in this case is easy since neither Kemp nor Noem are running for the Republican nomination. He doesn’t have to run against their records — he only has to run against Trump’s to offer that contrast to GOP primary voters. And thanks to McEnany’s personal recollections, that contrast is starker now than when the interview began.

That puts the ball back in Trump’s court, but thus far it looks like an ace for DeSantis. Trump had already prepared a pre-buttal to the interview, which went up about 15 minutes into the broadcast, that doesn’t address the pandemic issues at all. Instead, it just rehashed Trump’s personal grudges over DeSantis running against him and the usual playground name calling:

RON HAS ALWAYS BEEN A LOSER! pic.twitter.com/35c0Oy2K8W

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) June 22, 2023

This is almost a stroke-for-stroke regurgitation of Trump’s argument almost exactly one month ago when DeSantis officially entered the race. (Clearly, no one’s doing much work in the campaign strategy office.) Practically none of it comports to reality (which to be fair isn’t exactly unusual in politics generally), and the same deconstruction works today just as it did in May. However, the “Ron has always been a loser” accusation is especially absurd in a campaign context. DeSantis won two gubernatorial elections in Florida, a battleground state in presidential elections, and he won his second term last year by nineteen points over a former governor, Charlie Crist — whom Trump praised recently.

Maybe Republicans won’t get tired of “losing” like that, as opposed to the “winning” of 2020 and of Trump’s Senate recruits in 2022.

The rest of the interview treads closer to Door #3, but it’s clearly a friendly interview. Before the COVID discussion, McEnany sets up a chance for DeSantis to puncture Gavin Newsom’s hilarious claims that California is the place for business and freedom:

For decades in this country, people have beaten a path to California. It’s a beautiful state, great topography, all kinds of diversity in terms of the different communities you can live in. And yet they never lost population until their current governor took office. Now they’re hemorrhaging wealth. Now they’re hemorrhaging population, because you see things like what I saw the other day in San Francisco. I saw people defecating on the sidewalk. I saw people in an open-air drug market using fentanyl. I saw them using crack cocaine. … We can cite all the statistics. People vote with their feet.

McEnany then brings up China, in which DeSantis endorses a decoupling strategy as well as the use of tariffs to enforce relocation of supply chains. She also allows DeSantis to respond to the silly hit piece on his wife from the Washington Post, finishing by practically praising DeSantis’ manhood:

MCENANY: Yes, I got to say, my husband laughed when I read their attack on you. The best they could come up with in the liberal Washington Post, there are three things Ron DeSantis likes to talk about, the Constitution, baseball, and golf. I think that’s most men in the country.

DeSantis and his team have to be very, very happy with this interview. Trump and his team have to be very, very unhappy. But at least so far last night and this morning, Trump hasn’t said a word about McEnany on his Truth Social account. Maybe he learned a lesson, but it seems kinda — what’s the word? — milktoasty to me.

One last thought: While I think DeSantis has plenty of experience in handling hostile media, it might do him some good to look for a less-friendly venue for his next national one-on-one interview. Voters need to see his skills and see if they match up for a long presidential run through the primaries and especially for a general election. For now, though, DeSantis seems happy to provide McEnany with an opportunity for some payback.

Here’s the whole interview, which starts after a longish news story on transgender controversies. That’s worth watching too.

Update: I changed “responsible” to “unaffiliated” above. It’s possible to be both responsible and ‘affiliated’ with a side. ‘Unaffiliated’ is closer to the mark of what I meant.

Update: I added “in essence” to the headline after a complaint that it looked like a quote. We put actual quotes in quotations, of course, and readers here know our style, but I adjusted it anyway.