All the Things That Went Wrong for Ron DeSantis in His Latest Debate Failure

Thursday night’s biggest loser was Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who spent the better part of Fox’s “Great Red vs. Blue State” publicity stunt being thoroughly humiliated by California Governor Gavin Newsom in an all-out shitshow that did, at one point, reference poop.

The cage match between these two governors, which will perhaps be remembered as the apotheosis of “Debate Me, Bro!” culture, was a lopsided affair, pitting one man who is running for president (badly) against another who is not running for president and thus has far less at stake. The back-and-forth between the two men mainly consisted of Newsom taking big shots at DeSantis and his lackluster presidential platform, leaving DeSantis with scant material to lob back in the direction of his Golden State rival.

“We have one thing in common: Neither of us will be the nominee for our party in 2024,” Newsom quipped early on in the debate.

Over the span of 90 minutes, the California Democrat slammed the presidential hopeful for flip-flopping on policy stances, curtailing LGBTQ+ rights, and loosening gun laws in Florida following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre, the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in U.S. history.

In one particularly embarrassing exchange, Newsom dogged DeSantis over his decision to employ a radical book ban in the Sunshine State, during which the conservative’s anxious head-shaking and drooping expression made it abundantly clear that he was just as unprepared to debate a liberal politician as he has thus far proven to be when debating his fellow conservatives.

“What you’re doing is using education as a sword for your cultural purge,” Newsom said. “I don’t like the way you demean people, I don’t like the way you demean the LGBTQ community,” Newsom added.

Even at moments when DeSantis seemed to believe he had the upper hand, he did not. During one heated exchange over Florida’s response to the pandemic, Newsom reminded DeSantis that the state had employed quarantines and checkpoints to curtail the spread of the virus.

“You followed science, you followed Fauci,” Newsom said, referring to the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci.

“That’s not true,” DeSantis insisted.

It probably wasn’t supposed to go like this. The GOP hopeful had been handed all the ingredients to make Thursday night a home run for his campaign. Yet despite boosts from host Sean Hannity on the largest conservative network in the country, who at one point tried and failed to peg Newsom for including what DeSantis claimed was “pornography” in the California school curriculum, DeSantis only managed to make himself a hair feistier than his background appearances during GOP debates illustrated.

In a debate that was supposed to pose comparisons between the policy choices made by red states and blue states, DeSantis spent a considerable amount of energy on the intramural politics of the Democratic Party, accusing Newsom of running a “shadow campaign” behind President Joe Biden’s back. When he took the opportunity to pivot back to policy, DeSantis’s big swing involved a bit of prop comedy in the form of an illustrated map of San Francisco that purported to detail precisely where human feces had been spotted around the city—a charge that made even Newsom laugh.

If the Florida governor thought the prime-time special, which served as a meager sideshow to the presidential race that he’s actually a part of, could help his tanking popularity among American voters, then these calculations may have been off. Newsom used the stage to take repeated shots at DeSantis’s diminished presidential prospects.

“You are trolling folks and trying to play political games so you can out-Trump Trump,” Newsom said. “How is that going for you, Ron? You are down 41 points in your own home state.”

DeSantis has lagged far behind in the GOP primaries he was anticipated to be a heavy contender in, trailing more than 47 percentage points in national averages behind Donald Trump, whose strategy of outright avoiding public debates has proved exceedingly effective among Republican voters.

Hours after the debate, Trump took to Truth Social to blast his hamstrung rival, sharing a parody of the event that he dubbed the “battle of loserville.” The former president’s campaign also took note of the embarrassing spectacle, issuing a statement that compared the governor to a crackhead on a “12 inch step stool.”

“Ron DeSanctimonious is acting more like a thirsty, third-rate OnlyFans wannabe model than an actual presidential candidate,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said. “Instead of actually campaigning and trying to turn around his dismal poll numbers, DeSanctus is now so desperate for attention that he’s debating a Grade A loser like Gavin Newsom.”

Representative George Santos was officially expelled from Congress on Friday, making him only the sixth member ever given the boot.

The House voted 311–114 to remove Santos, a rare bipartisan vote. The state of New York must now hold a special election to replace him.

Santos left the chamber before the vote was finished. When asked for a reaction after his expulsion was made official, he told reporters, “It’s over. What reaction?”

The New York Republican had survived a previous expulsion vote at the beginning of November. Representatives voted 179–213 against the resolution to remove Santos (with 19 members voting “present”). Multiple Democrats said they wanted to see the result of an Ethics Committee investigation into Santos before taking a move as extreme as expulsion.

The report was released just two weeks later, and it was a bombshell. “The evidence uncovered by the Investigative Subcommittee (ISC) revealed that Representative George Santos cannot be trusted,” the report stated. “At nearly every opportunity, he placed his desire for private gain above his duty to uphold the Constitution, federal law, and ethical principles.”

Santos repeatedly used his campaign to solicit donations, only to use that money for personal expenses, including buying designer goods and makeup, getting cosmetic procedures, and “smaller purchases at OnlyFans.”

Although he was only in Congress for 11 months, Santos managed to become one of the most controversial figures on Capitol Hill. A year ago, it was revealed that Santos had fabricated the bulk of his professional and educational résumé.

In addition to misusing campaign funds and lying about his employment history, Santos has falsely claimed that his grandparents were Holocaust survivors, his mother died in the 9/11 attacks, and four of his employees were killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting. He also lied about founding an animal rescue charity and producing the disastrous Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

Santos has been federally charged with 23 counts of various types of financial fraud. He pleaded not guilty to the initial 13 in May, and he has denied the additional 10 that were filed in October in a superseding indictment. Earlier this year, he also agreed to a deal with Brazilian authorities investigating him for financial fraud so he could avoid prosecution.

Honestly, he really fit in well with his fellow Republicans. And now his bright light has been extinguished.

At this point, the shocking thing about House Speaker Mike Johnson is not his extremist views but how brazenly he’s flaunted them.

Here’s the latest: Johnson wrote the foreword for the book The Revivalist Manifesto, which was written by far-right Louisiana politics blogger Scott McKay, CNN reported Friday. Johnson and McKay have collaborated before: The lawmaker has written numerous pieces for McKay’s blog. The book in question was published in 2021, and the following year, Johnson promoted it heavily on social media and on his podcast.

The book is a cavalcade of homophobia, classism, widely debunked conspiracy theories, and weird falsehoods, all of which Johnson has described as a “valuable and timely contribution” to public discourse.

McKay “has managed here to articulate well what millions of conscientious, freedom-loving Americans are sensing,” Johnson said in the foreword.

What are they sensing? Well for starters, the book pushes multiple conspiracy theories, including the “Pizzagate” conspiracy that promotes the idea that prominent Democrats were running a child sex trafficking ring partly through a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C. Pizzagate has fueled a spiraling array of other conspiracy theories and myths; its most direct ideological successor is QAnon.

McKay’s tome also repeats the falsehood that the Democratic National Committee’s emails were not hacked in 2016 but rather leaked by staffer Seth Rich, whose later death in an attempted robbery fueled further conspiracy theories alleging he was murdered in a hit ordered by Democratic Party officials. This became a popular right-wing conspiracy, and Rich’s parents sued Fox News for publishing a story linking Rich’s death to these myths. The Rich family settled with Fox in 2020.

Elsewhere in the book, McKay claims climate change is just “hysteria” and says it is not linked to carbon dioxide emissions. He also says that the Biden administration is letting undocumented immigrants in to create more Democratic voters.

McKay implies that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was linked to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. He also repeatedly insults Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, calling him “openly, and obnoxiously, gay.” Elsewhere in the book, McKay defends podcaster Joe Rogan for using the n-word and says poor voters are “unsophisticated and susceptible to government dependency.”

In addition to writing the book’s foreword, Johnson promoted the book repeatedly on his social media accounts in 2022. He also had McKay on an episode of the podcast Johnson hosts with his wife. During the episode, Johnson said McKay was a “dear friend” and that the book “really could make some waves.”

At this point, it really should come as no surprise that Johnson espouses such far-right beliefs. The man flies a Christian nationalist flag outside his office and regularly speaks at right-wing events. His new chief of staff spent the last year working for an organization that supports conversion therapy.

Johnson has cited the “great replacement theory,” the far-right theory that white people are being replaced by nonwhite immigrants, and he has blamed the fall of Rome on LGBTQ people. (Johnson, it must be said, has range.)

The most shocking thing about all of this is that Republicans didn’t check to see who exactly Johnson was before they decided to make him the new, weird face of their party.

Well, it’s official: 2023 was the hottest year on record, but cheer up, it will likely pale in comparison to the heat waves in years to come, according to a new report by the World Meteorological Organization.

The last year was hotter than both 2020 and 2016, the previous hottest years on record, with a mean surface temperature 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit higher than preindustrial levels. The report’s release coincides with COP28, the United Nations–hosted climate change summit in Dubai, in an effort to inform negotiations among the 198 countries that are both in attendance at the conference and stuck together on a rapidly warming planet. It’s unlikely, however, December’s temperatures will impact this year’s ranking—according to the report, which noted that 2023 is “virtually certain” to be the “warmest year in the 174-year observational record.”

“We are living through climate collapse in real time,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres told a crowd of delegates at the conference on Thursday, according to The Guardian.

“This year has seen communities around the world pounded by fires, floods, and searing temperature—and the impact is devastating,” he added. “Record global heating should send shivers down the spines of world leaders. And it should trigger them to act.”

Some of the worst heat was felt across Southern Europe and North Africa in July, thanks to a grueling combination of climate change, an El Niño warming the Pacific Ocean, and what was referred to as a “heat dome” across the Mediterranean—a high-pressure zone that acts like a lid on a pot, trapping hot air inside.

Climate scientists say that climate change, fueled by greenhouse gas emissions, will continue to result in more frequent, severe, and dangerous heat waves, reported Al Jazeera.

“These are more than just statistics,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas in a statement. “Extreme weather is destroying lives and livelihoods on a daily basis—underlining the imperative need to ensure that everyone is protected by early warning services. We cannot return to the climate of the 20th century, but we must act now to limit the risks of an increasingly inhospitable climate in this and coming centuries.”

With rising global temperatures also came an alarming and record-breaking drop-off in the Antarctic ice shelf, which recorded a loss of one million square kilometers in its maximum end-of-winter extent—an area larger than France and Germany combined.

“We have the roadmap to limit the rise in global temperature to 1.5C and avoid the worst of climate chaos,” said Guterres. “But we need leaders to fire the starting gun at Cop28 on a race to keep the 1.5C limit alive, by committing to triple renewables and double energy efficiency, and committing to phase out fossil fuels, with a clear timeframe aligned to the 1.5C limit.”

OK, we’ll check back in a year to see how everyone’s doing.

With his expulsion looking more likely by the hour, Representative George Santos has apparently decided that he won’t be going down alone.

The House introduced a resolution Thursday to expel the serial fabulist from Congress. As lawmakers debated the motion, Santos ended up trading barbs with his fellow freshman representative, Ohio Republican Max Miller.

“I myself have been a victim of George Santos, as well as other members of Congress in terms of defrauding through public donations, receiving an ethics complaint from the FEC which I had to spend tens of thousands to defend myself,” Miller said.

“You, sir, are a crook,” he said, addressing Santos directly.

Santos quickly asked that Miller’s comment be stricken from the record; he was just as quickly denied. Santos then accused his colleague of “hypocrisy.”

“My colleague wants to come up here, call me a crook,” Santos said. “The same colleague who’s accused of being a woman beater. Are we really going to ignore the facts that we all have pasts, and we all have the media coming out against us on a daily basis?”

Santos was referring to allegations made against Miller by former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham. Grisham and Miller dated while they were both working as aides to former President Donald Trump.

In 2021, Grisham alleged that Miller physically abused her on the day they broke up. Miller, who was running for Congress at the time, sued her for defamation in response (a trick he may have picked up from his former boss).

Grisham’s accusation is worthy of investigation, and Miller should be held accountable if her claims are found to be true. None of this is an affirmative case for why Santos should get a pass, as Santos seems to imply he should, just because one of his accusers also has had accusations made against him.

Santos seems unusually determined to air everyone’s dirty laundry on his way out. During a three-hour-long X (formerly Twitter) space last week, he accused his Republican colleagues of alcoholism and cheating on their spouses with lobbyists.

On Thursday, Santos also introduced a motion to expel Democratic Representative Jamaal Bowman for pulling a fire alarm in a House office building ahead of a key vote. The resolution is privileged, meaning lawmakers have two legislative days to act on the measure—unless Santos is expelled first, nullifying it.