Strings attached: Tucker Carlson calls Ron DeSantis ‘donors’ puppet’

Lenny Curry pivots from football to watch Tuker Carlson. That's saying something.

America’s Governor isn’t in control when it counts.

That’s the take of podcaster Tucker Carlson, who is criticizing a man who courted him heavily during his political rise ahead of the 2024 presidential primary.

“I would say this to his face. I hope he sees this because I mean it with love. You can’t be a pure puppet of your biggest donors. Everyone’s influenced by the people around him, donors have a great deal of influence, inordinate influence, probably, but you can’t do exactly what they say every time,” Carlson told Piers Morgan.

During comments that aired this week, Carlson spotlighted two issues on which he thinks DeSantis was “totally a marionette of his donors.” One was a hate speech law he signed in Israel in 2023; the other was DeSantis’ flip flops on Ukraine.

“And it made DeSantis look weak, and it made him look controlled, and this is a moment where people are kind of hip to that trick and they sort of know the politicians, you know what I mean, aren’t really acting on their behalf or even independently, they’re acting because some billionaire told them to do what they’re doing. And I think DeSantis was just too obvious about that, and it destroyed him.”

DeSantis’ position on Ukraine particularly ran the gamut, and Carlson has blamed Ken Griffin for DeSantis switching it up from arguing “it’s a regional conflict we shouldn’t get involved in” to “It’s a super important thing. We should send more money.”

DeSantis originally deemed the war a “territorial dispute” and not one of America’s “vital national interests” in a statement provided to Tucker Carlson, in a seeming effort to curry favor with the now-former Fox News host.

He soon enough walked that position back, telling the aforementioned Piers Morgan “it wasn’t that I thought Russia had a right to that, and so if I should have made that more clear, I could have done it.”

He would go on from there to call for a “settlement” in the war, before a spirited exchange in July with Carlson in Iowa at the Family Leadership Summit.

DeSantis took issue with Carlson saying he changed his position from telling Carlson that the Russian invasion was a simple “territorial dispute,” rejecting Carlson’s restatement of DeSantis’ position as changing his view “to describe Putin as a war criminal and say that it was central to America’s foreign policy.”