A new book about Fox News put Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in a tight spot. According to “The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty,” DeSantis ‘kicked’ Tucker’s dog during a dinner in Florida.
DeSantis was Rupert Murdoch’s pick to be the GOP presidential candidate in 2024 and he wanted his top anchors to get on board. But Tucker wanted to get to know Ron first and more importantly, he wanted his wife, whose opinion he valued above all others, to do the same. So Tucker Carlson and his wife Susan invited Ron DeSantis and his wife Casey to dinner.
But during dinner, Ron kicked Tucker’s dog under the table causing a horrified Susie and Tucker to turn their backs on DeSantis. From the book:
“There had been quiet urgings at Fox for Carlson to be open-minded about Murdoch’s favored candidate.
“By early spring 2023, this had culminated in the DeSantises coming to lunch at the Carlsons’ home in Boca Grande, an exclusive community on Florida’s Gasparilla Island. And certainly, for DeSantis, this was a significant moment — an opportunity to reach out, to break bread, to make nice, to suck up to a plausible kingmaker.
“The DeSantis strategy, to the degree that he had one other than embodying the media dream of any alternative to Trump, was to make quick proof-of-product inroads into the MAGA base, for which he was heavily dependent on Fox.
“Winning Carlson over would be an important part of making good use of the network.
“Carlson put DeSantis’s fate to a focus group of one: his wife. When they lived in Washington, Susie Carlson wouldn’t even see politicians. Carlson himself may have known everyone, dirtied himself for a paycheck, but not his wife.
“In her heart, it was 1985 and still a Wasp world, absent people, in Susie Carlson’s description and worldview, who were “impolite, hyperambitious, fraudulent.” She had no idea what was happening in the news and no interest in it.
“Her world was her children, her dogs, and the books she was reading. So the DeSantises were put to the Susie Carlson test.
“They failed it miserably.
“They had a total inability to read the room — one with a genteel, stay-at-home woman, here in her own house.
“For two hours, Ron DeSantis sat at her table talking in an outdoor voice indoors, failing to observe any basics of conversational ritual or propriety, reeling off an unself-conscious list of his programs and initiatives and political accomplishments.
“Impersonal, cold, uninterested in anything outside of himself.
“The Carlsons are dog people with four spaniels, the progeny of other spaniels they have had before, who sleep in their bed.
“DeSantis pushed the dog under the table. Had he kicked the dog?
“Susie Carlson’s judgment was clear: She did not ever want to be anywhere near anybody like that ever again. Her husband agreed.
“DeSantis, in Carlson’s view, was a “fascist.” Forget Ron DeSantis,” the book says.
