Rick Wilson slams DeSantis for spending weeks on 'immigrant spectacle'

On MSNBC Tuesday, former Republican strategist Rick Wilson tore into Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) for his chartered flights dumping migrants in the Northeast.

The entire saga, and its seven-figure price tag, are less defensible than ever with Hurricane Ian bearing down on his state, Wilson argued.

"For DeSantis, when you look at the lack of scale of this stunt, it's not to make an analogy, Rick, it's not like when Bannon and Trump tried to do an actual travel ban and then you had it go into force, everyone thought of, that I would call that real policy," said anchor Ari Melber. "The court significantly narrowed it as illegal. But it was policy, at a minimum. This isn't at a scale of doing anything what conservatives might call excess or excessive immigration, what they would view as how do you tamp that down there. Is a valid way to do that? Does that factual limitation matter? Or is this fundamentally, as you said, is this more just content?"

"This is a post-content, post-ideological environment where everything is about the show," said Melber. "Everything is about the spectacle. Everything is about the phenomenon of, watch Ron DeSantis own the libs. Watch Fox turn this into one of their weekly moral crises. And the irony of this is, A, it happened in Florida. Where ... we have an enormous diaspora of folks from around the world. We have Venezuelans and Cubans and Dominicans and Haitians and folks from across the Caribbean, across South and Central and Latin America and in every possible dimension in this state."

RELATED: How climate change supercharged Hurricane Ian.

"The irony of this is the folks who are fleeing from Venezuela, these were legal asylum seekers," continued Wilson. "And they're being treated in this abusive and horrifying way, even though they're coming here, fleeing an abusive authoritarian socialistic dictatorship, which for normal Republicans in Florida, those are the trigger words that send them out of their minds, and they lose their bearings instantaneously. And so it really is a deep irony."

"I will say there is one other irony right now, is the state spent $12 million so far on this program," Wilson added. "He will continue to do it to get more headlines, and they spent weeks and weeks and weeks planning and plotting for this in the middle of hurricane season. Now we have a cat 2, cat 3 bearing down on Sarasota and Southwest Florida. And you know what? Weeks of planning for an immigrant spectacle has done nothing to get our property insurance market fixed, to get our state ready for a crisis like this — and we live in Florida! You ought to know what's coming in the fall, guys."

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