Ron DeSantis finally responds to Tucker Carlson’s ‘bizarre’ attacks

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

Gov. Ron DeSantis and former cable television host Tucker Carlson once were closely linked.

But times have changed, DeSantis told Dana Loesch on Tuesday.

“You know, when he lost the Fox show, I kind of lost track of what he was doing,” the Governor said.

Carlson recently made news with a quote criticizing DeSantis that suggested the Governor was “paid off” by developers and environmental groups, as he spoke out against sprawl replacing rural areas such as farms.

“You’re not going to make me feel like a socialist because I’m against building a gas station, or whatever disgusting complex you’re getting rich from, and paying off every politician in the state of Florida, including the Governor,” Carlson said at the time. “I’m opposed to that. I’m for the people who grow food, I’m against the people who make the country uglier.”

DeSantis told Loesch that wasn’t the first Carlson critique he’d endured, alluding to previous hits covered by Florida Politics.

“I think he was saying that I signed an anti-semitism bill, which shows somehow I’m controlled by donors. I’m thinking to myself, this was like a unanimous bill that passed. I don’t know that donors are even involved in it. So some of this stuff is just bizarre, but I’ll let people say what they want. What I don’t want to do is is give anyone grist for the mill to try to increase their engagement or anything like that.”

Carlson had offered such critique earlier this year.

“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 back in January.

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 Carlson, in a seeming effort to curry favor with the now-former Fox News host.

DeSantis 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.”