Mark Leibovich’s Sloppy DeSantis Hit Piece Reveals More About the Source Than the Subject

Mark Leibovich‘s hit piece on Florida governor Ron DeSantis for The Atlantic garnered quite a lot of praise from the people it was written to please.

“Punchy, smart, and exceptionally well written piece by @MarkLeibovich on the Ron DeSantis phenomenon,” swooned Leibovich’s colleague, Derek Thompson.

“This is a great profile,” stated Vox’s Ben Jacobs.

“Read @MarkLeibovich on DeSantis,” the New York Times‘ Carlos Lozada urged his followers, as though he were introducing them to Scorsese, Beethoven, or Da Vinci.

Leibovich’s thesis is simple: DeSantis is prickly, and those close to him have little faith in his political abilities. The first assertion is common knowledge, and the second is evidenced nowhere in the article.

For anyone following politics closely enough to read The Atlantic, the fact that DeSantis’s strength isn’t his gregarious personality shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. As much has been submitted here, and here, and here and here and here. So it’s not exactly groundbreaking or even novel reporting that Leibovich is offering.

Is it even accurate reporting, though? DeSantis is no Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan when it comes to kissing babies, yes. But is it true, as Leibovich says, that “people who haven’t met him think he’s [DeSantis] a hot commodity. People who have met him aren’t so sure”?

Out of all of the sources quoted in Leibovich’s piece — it’s really not well-sourced enough to be called a profile — not one of them can be credibly considered a political ally of DeSantis’s.

To give you an idea of just how aware Leibovich was that he didn’t have the goods, consider that he described the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson, in an outright falsehood, as a “Republican media consultant.” For context: Just this morning, Wilson threw a tantrum over Senator Kyrsten Sinema‘s decision to leave the Democratic Party. The quote Leibovich lifted from the Democratic operative, who frequently fantasizes about having sex with strangers’ wives online, is that DeSantis is “a strange no-eye-contact oddball.”

Something about stones and glass houses comes to mind. So does something about reliable narrators.

Mac Stipanovich, a vocal Democrat and fanboi of Wilson’s, told Leibovich that he’d “rather have teeth pulled without anesthetic than be on a boat with Ron DeSantis,” and predicted that in a Republican primary, “Trump would gut DeSantis with a dull deer antler,” and “club DeSantis like a baby seal.”

Barbara Comstock, who served in Congress with DeSantis but hails from the moderate wing of the GOP, only offered that he was “standoffish in general.”

Chris Christie, who is considering a 2024 bid for the presidency that would pit him against DeSantis, said that he didn’t “think Ron hangs out with anybody.” Christie’s public flirtation with running for president goes unmentioned.

An anonymous Republican consultant declares that DeSantis’s greatest strength and weakness “is that he doesn’t give a fuck.”

The closest Leibovich comes to quoting someone in the governor’s orbit is getting Carlos Curbelo, who served in Florida’s GOP House delegation with DeSantis to tell him that DeSantis has “this robotic quality that he has to shed.”

“Everything else checks the box,” continued Curbelo. “He is smart and competent and committed to his ideology. He just has to humanize himself.” That’s not exactly a nail in the coffin from the prosecution’s “star” witness.

So, in sum, Leibovich marshaled two Democrats (whose partisan affiliations were lied about and obfuscated), one of DeSantis’s prospective rivals, two out of the hundreds of members of the House that DeSantis served with, and one anonymous consultant who “knows him” to make his case?

Does this motley crew’s inclusion in the piece (note that only Stipanovich and Curbelo spoke directly with the author) really back up Leibovich’s claim that “people who know him [DeSantis] better and have watched him longer are skeptical of his ability to take on the former president”?

The incentives to manufacture a hit piece on DeSantis are obvious, for Leibovich or anyone in that part of the media. A sloppy, low-effort, phoned-in hit piece quoting members of the piece’s target audience and trashing that audience’s latest boogeyman is more than adequate to the aim of basking in a shower of accolades from peers and press.

A more important question is, how did The Atlantic move forward with an article offering no new information, mischaracterizing the conclusions that could be drawn from the reporting performed, and which contained basic, seemingly intentional factual errors? How does Lozada, a professional critic, come to apply so little scrutiny to such an obviously lacking hit piece?

What it did not reveal about DeSantis it may have about Leibovich and his peer-audience: shamelessness.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.