According to “Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinski, Ron DeSantis’ continuing fight with Disney isn’t simply a political misstep. It’s a rookie move.
“Joe was right,” Brzezinski said Friday during Friday morning’s broadcast, backing previous statements made by her co-host Scarborough saying, “Mickey Mouse has brass knuckles because he’s taking on Bob Iger… You don’t do that.”
“This is politically such a rookie move to do these gesture politics, to try and own the libs and maybe get in a small subset of the Tampa area,” Brzezinski said Friday. “In the end, you end up costing Florida jobs.”
The MSNBC host added that the Florida governor “can’t see one foot in front of his face.” “I don’t know how that plays on the big stage, and I think it gives Trump a lot of material.”
On Thursday, Disney announced it had pulled the plug on an employee campus that was expected to come to Florida, citing “changing business conditions.” The complex was a $1 billion investment that would have brought an estimated 2,000 white-collar jobs to the state.
Around the time this news dropped, Disney’s CEO Bob Iger was standing alongside Harrison Ford at the Cannes Film Festival and receiving a standing ovation for “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” “Bob Iger won this round,” Matt Lewis, senior columnist for The Daily Beast, said on “Morning Joe.”
Lewis also said that DeSantis’ battle with Disney has morphed into a three-front war, pitting the Florida politican against Disney, California governor Gavin Newsom and former president Donald Trump, his biggest political opponent should he choose to run for president in 2024.
“Disney can do this forever. There can always be a big project Disney was going to roll out, but now they’re not going to,” Lewis said. “I just don’t know where this ends for Ron DeSantis and how he gets out of it.”
But it was former U.S. senator Claire McCaskill who had the most savage critique of the politician on Friday. “The biggest hit on DeSantis for this entire presidential primary campaign is that he represents big government. He represents anti-business. He represents telling people what they can read and what they can learn,” McCaskill said. “As it turns out, he kind of just looks like a mini-me of Trump.”
Watch the full “Morning Joe” segment in the video above.
