BONUS PODCAST

Ron DeSantis Going ‘Full Donald Trump’ Won’t Work

Will Ron DeSantis create his own cult of weird meanness the same way Trump has? New Abnormal host Andy Levy weighs in. Plus! NBC’s Ali Vitali explains why Everyone Hates Kamala.

Ron DeSantis went there. The Florida governor went full on Donald Trump during his “Keep Florida Free Tour” last week when he said that he wants to “chuck” “little elf” Dr. Anthony Fauci across the Potomac. Will being “the poor man’s Donald Trump,” as co-host Molly Jong-Fast put it, help him gain traction ahead of a potential 2024 presidential run? Andy Levy, host of political podcast The New Abnormal, doesn’t think so.

“I have to take something back that I said on the podcast a week or so ago. I said the danger of DeSantis is that he’s a little smarter than Trump and wouldn’t go there the way Trump does. And clearly, I was completely wrong about that,” he tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast. But, says Levy, DeSantis doesn’t have that Trump-y charm.

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“Trump has that sort of weird charisma that some people like. DeSantis has none of that,” adds Levy. “DeSantis just sounds like an asshole. He just sounds like a mean asshole. Whereas Trump, somehow, when he says these things, there’s something kind of a little funny in the way he phrases it. It takes a little bit of the edge off. DeSantis just doesn’t have that. And I don’t know that this is gonna work for him. Like this whole idea of going full Trump.”

And this conversation is before the hosts listen to a clip of DeSantis talking about the woke crowd.

Also on this episode, NBC’s Capitol Hill Correspondent Ali Vitali joins to share some of the reporting she writes about in her new book, Electable: Why America Hasn't Put a Woman in the White House… Yet, including why Kamala Harris is hated on.

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“I think part of the reason why people are so frustrated with her is because they seemingly expected her to recreate the role of vice president that has been around for hundreds of years simply because she doesn’t look like everyone else who has held that role. And that is just a fundamentally unfair expectation,” says Vitali.

Where’d it all start? Vitali has an answer for that too.

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