Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is hoping to win the presidency by positioning himself as Donald Trump without the feral, off-putting personality. Or any personality, really. Does a subtly pained facial expression brought on by six days without a bowel movement count as a personality? If so, DeSantis is a regular (or, rather, irregular) Rip Taylor, but with marginally less confetti.
But hey, at least DeSantis has a military record, unlike his top GOP rival, Bone Spurious the Yellow. Unfortunately, it’s not a record anyone should be bragging about—at least if the alleged details of DeSantis’ stint at Guantanamo Bay are any indication.
Semafor is reporting that Showtime shelved a DeSantis-focused episode of its VICE documentary series earlier this year over fears of a potential backlash. The episode, titled “The Guantanamo Candidate,” examines DeSantis’ tenure at Guantanamo Bay, where he served as a lawyer from March 2006 to January 2007.
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Semafor:
Vice reporters had secured on camera interviews with a former detainee, Mansoor Adayfi, and a guard at the prison, staff sergeant Joe Hickman. Both said they remembered seeing DeSantis at the prison during a controversial detainee hunger strike. The Vice crew traveled to Guantanamo Bay to attempt to try to speak to military staff, and made several attempts to ask DeSantis about the allegations directly, eventually confronting him at a press conference in Israel, according to a detailed description provided to Semafor.
But Showtime viewers who turned on their televisions May 28 never saw the episode. (They were treated to a re-run of the scripted drama Yellowjackets.)
Well, “Yellowjackets” is damn good, to be fair. And it’s about a group of people who gradually lose their minds trying to survive in a desolate, unforgiving wilderness, eventually resorting to indiscriminate cannibalism to stay alive. So it’s a great primer for the 2024 GOP Iowa caucus if you really think about it.
In early June, VICE told The Hollywood Reporter, “As with all current affairs programming there can be scheduling changes, and we are very much still in discussion about the scheduling of this episode. We are proud of our reporting and of our continuing partnership with Showtime.” Meanwhile, Showtime simply stated, “We don’t comment on scheduling decisions.”
Since then, Semafor has learned that the network actually got cold feet.
But in fact, two people familiar with the incident said, the Paramount-owned cable channel ditched the DeSantis episode over fears of the political consequences. One person briefed on the decision told Semafor that the company’s Washington lobbyist, DeDe Lea, raised concerns about the piece.
For its part, VICE stated through spokesperson Elise Flick, “We not only stand behind our rigorous reporting but are proud of the incredible journalism showcased in this story.”
The decision was made as Showtime undergoes near-seismic changes to its business model. As Semafor reports, Showtime’s parent company, Paramount, has been making cuts “to reflect a gloomy streaming business.” It also conducted a round of layoffs, and among the casualties was the executive who approved these kinds of “prestige” documentaries.
Still, the episode’s cancelation seemed sudden considering it had already gotten the go-ahead from Showtime executives and VICE’s legal team. Showtime and VICE had also begun sending promotional materials to reporters. But just four days before the documentary was scheduled to premiere, Showtime’s post-production staff sent a note to VICE saying, “The broader network group teams are taking a deeper internal look at this Sunday’s episode, which will delay its premiere.”
VICE asked for more details on the decision, but Showtime failed to respond and “quickly scrubbed promotion of the episode from its website.”
And that in itself is a shame, because some of the details Showtime originally had on its site were tantalizing. For instance, it had claimed the episode featured allegations from “former detainees that [DeSantis] was present at force-feedings that were condemned as torture by the UN.”
According to a July 13 Hollywood Reporter story, Showtime eventually pulled the entire VICE documentary series in early July with half a season to go, and VICE is currently looking for a new home for the show.
But whatever the reason for the May disappearance of VICE’s DeSantis doc, the Gitmo scandal is unlikely to go away. Given the seemingly intractable MAGA-fication of the Republican electorate, revelations that DeSantis was present as detainees were tortured could actually help him in the primaries—but they might not seem quite as adorable to your average swing voter next November.
For instance, Ahmed Abdel Aziz, a former Gitmo detainee who was released after 13 years, claimed he remembers seeing DeSantis at the facility, and that DeSantis witnessed and got complaints about forced feeding. “He didn’t start as a very bad guy, but the course of events, I think, led him to have no choice,” Aziz told McClatchy via the Tampa Bay Times. “Many of the very big leadership, if they want to be harsh, it’s hard from the lower people to take a different turn. He aligned with the bad people in the end.”
Another detainee, whom VICE also interviewed for its documentary, told McClatchy he clearly recalls DeSantis being present during at least one force-feeding.
Mansoor Adayfi, a Yemeni national who was sent to Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and also held without being charged for 14 years, told McClatchy that he realized after seeing Florida’s governor on the news that DeSantis was present at one point as he was force-fed in Camp Delta. Adayfi said he remembers DeSantis being there alongside Zak Ghuneim, the camp’s longtime cultural adviser, and that he vomited on both of them, an account that Ghuneim denied in a phone interview.
Hopefully VICE’s DeSantis documentary sees the light of day before long, because if it looks like Trump might actually go to prison, Republican voters could remove their heads from their natural docking stations long enough to look for a viable alternative. And for some reason, DeSantis remains the also-ran with the best polling numbers.
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