On this week’s Inside the Hive, host Brian Stelter talks with Marc Caputo, national political reporter at The Messenger, about Ron DeSantis’s stumbles on the campaign trail as he trims staff and shifts strategy.
“He is a smart guy. He is able to argue a point lucidly, and he’s able to compress a lot of data very quickly and push his point forward and thrust and parry,” said Caputo. “But he is almost a victim of his own success, because as his power consolidated in the run-up to his reelection, after the reelection, he only kind of surrounded himself with people who were going to tell him what he wanted to hear, people who weren’t going to challenge him.”
Caputo, one of the most plugged-in political reporters based in Florida, also addressed why his state’s twice-elected governor (and Fox-friendly culture warrior) has so far failed to wrest the MAGA mantle from Donald Trump. “Voters, and especially Republican voters, they want alphas,” he said. “How are you going to knock the champ on his back by giving, like, veiled tweets?”
“I don’t think he’s quite dead,” Caputo said of DeSantis’s 2024 prospects. “He might have a foot in a grave.”