Interview on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher"

Watch the full interview HERE.

BILL MAHER: And first up, he is the governor of Florida, who is -- wow, currently on our show? -- Currently running to be the Republican nominee for president in 2024, Governor Ron DeSantis. Ron, how you doing? That's a pretty good blue state welcome.

GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS: I know, I know.

MAHER: All right. On a scale of 9 to 10, what did you think of my monologue?

GOV DESANTIS: Honestly, I was laughing. I'll give you that.

MAHER: Right?

GOV DESANTIS: Laughing on both sides of the aisle, too, so it was good. And, welcome back to the show. I know you guys were on hiatus for a while.

MAHER: Oh, thank you.

GOV DESANTIS: I do got to put in a plug, like, if you ever have problems in California, you know in Florida, not only do we have no income tax, no vaccine mandates allowed in the state of Florida.

MAHER: We're going to get to that. We're going to get to that. I know, but people do wear cowboy boots with a suit. So, I'm not going to Florida. That's just a crazy thing to do.

GOV DESANTIS: We're proud of it. We're proud of it.

MAHER: But there were no cowboys in Florida, Ron.

GOV DESANTIS: You should try Florida. We're one of the top cattle states in America. Once you go from the beach, you go to the interior of Florida, nothing but cattle ranches.

MAHER: Oh, all right. Well, I stand corrected. Because I'm wearing orthopedic shoes.

GOV DESANTIS: There you go.

MAHER: Okay, so the debate, it was a shitshow. But I -- Right? I mean, even you said you wouldn't have -- you would have turned it off if you were watching. I mean people screaming over each other, I couldn't hear what anyone was saying. It was terrible. But I heard you won. I heard the polling said you won. What did you win? Honestly, with Trump not in the race, what did you win?

GOV DESANTIS: Well, but I think that, you know, he's not showing up. He's missing an action. He owes it to voters to show up and defend his record. And I think he thinks he can take a juice poll, and then people don't get to vote. That's not the way the system works. You got to go earn votes. So I'm showing up; I'm showing that -- and that's, here's the thing. In the midst of all the show that happened, I was the one guy that people said, you know what, this guy is actually acting like a president when the rest were not. And so okay, there I am. I told Donald, let's do a debate. I'm debating your Governor Gavin Newsom --

MAHER: We're going to get to that.

GOV DESANTIS: -- But let's do a debate with me and him. I'll do it.

MAHER: Alright. But there's -- can I ask you one thing about these debates? Can you get rid of this guy Doug Burgum? This guy -- this bugs me. He is not going to be president. This guy could start dating Taylor Swift and nobody would care. North Dakota is not even a state. Alright. But you know, the thing is, you did not take my advice.

GOV DESANTIS: What was it?

MAHER: I was on the show. A few times we talked, I said, this guy's crazy to run this time. He's splitting 45 years old. You just had a birthday, right? That -- you could run for the next 20 years. If you were Biden, the next 40. Okay, why run against Trump? You're trying to thread this needle that will never happen.

GOV DESANTIS: Well, there's a couple reasons --

MAHER: You can't disavow him because you -- that's the base, and yet you're running against him. And that's why, I mean, let's face it. If this campaign was going well, you wouldn't be on this show.

GOV DESANTIS: Oh, that's not true. So, one, I don't think he can win the election. I could win the election. Two, I don't think he could actually get the job done that we need to do. For example: COVID. I think we need accountability for what this government did to this country with the COVID restrictions, mandates, and lockdowns. Donald Trump is not going to do that. He says he did everything right. He says he saved millions of lives with lockdowns. He claims his MNRA shot saved 100 million lives. He's not going to clean house at CDC, NIH, FDA, or any of that. I will do that. I will get the job done. And a lot of other things we'd do. The one thing about me in Florida even like critics will acknowledge, if he says he's going to do something, he will follow through and get the job done. So it's about the country. Are we going to get the country turned around or not? I don't think he's a vehicle that's doing. And I have been -- when I supported him on the things I like, I've said it, but I've been critical about the things that he didn't do. And I'll continue to do that.

MAHER: Okay, but -- but you campaigned for election deniers in 2022. This I do not forgive.

GOV DESANTIS: Well look --

MAHER: To quote the Godfather. I mean, Kari Lake, who said Biden's an illegitimate President. Trump didn't --

GOV DESANTIS: Well now she's attacking me, so maybe I did make a mistake there because she's out there saying -- she's trying to say that we mandated vax in Florida. We did the opposite. We protected people, even from private mandates, so that may have been --

MAHER: But Trump lost the election, right?

GOV DESANTIS: Yes.

MAHER: Okay, so why did you campaign for people who said he didn't?

GOV DESANTIS: Because I wanted to see Republicans win key races, and I said --

MAHER: That's not a deal breaker issue for you? That's not democracy?

GOV DESANTIS: Okay, well, let's go back to 2016. Your friends in Hollywood were cutting ads telling the Electoral College to vote against Trump in the Electoral College because it was stolen. They said Russia stole the election; for years they said that, so don't act like this is like a unique thing in modern history of the country.

MAHER: First of all, Ron, I have no friends in Hollywood.

GOV DESANTIS: You do remember the commercials, though? I remember them.

MAHER: Okay. I mean, the thing that you seemed to stake your campaign on is where woke goes to die. You said that's where -- and look, I'm fed up with woke too. That's why I have trouble with friends in Hollywood. I'm an old school liberal, and that's a whole different thing than woke. And I'm sympathetic to you because, you know, you very often, like, take on an issue where I feel like, yeah, there is crazy stuff going on in schools. There is crazy stuff. But the problem is, it doesn't resonate with a lot of people who don't see it, for whatever reason. And so they're like, why is this guy picking a fight with Mickey? Right?

GOV DESANTIS: Well, they picked the fight with us. But, well, listen. So first of all, I do a lot more than just that. I think that's a little bit of a caricature. But this idea of ideology corrupting institutions, I see it in Los Angeles with the amount of crime that's here and the homelessness. There are people that commit crimes who are not prosecuted like they would be in Florida. Our state's crime rate is at a 50-year low. You elect these people like Gascon and what they did in San Francisco. You can break into somebody's house or mug somebody, and you don't end up going to jail? That doesn't work but that's driven by ideology. So it's not just we're having just a philosophical debate. I think woke ideology has corrupted institutions. I think it's corrupted things like the CDC with how they handled COVID with the nonsense that they did. So it's a broader issue than just a philosophical fight.

MAHER: You keep wanting to get back to that. And I don't blame you because you're right. We're on the same page there. And I think it's unfair what they did to you because you did handle it better. You did handle it better. You were right. You were like, let's target the people, protect the people, who are most vulnerable, and everybody else can go on with their lives a little better. You opened schools sooner. And a lot of the stuff that's come in, the information we have after now we've had a few years to look at it, you were more right, and they won't give you credit with it. The New York Times --

GOV DESANTIS: Well, it's not about credit for me, though. It's not about credit for me. It's about --

MAHER: Well, okay, but --

GOV DESANTIS: It's about them admitting that they were wrong.

MAHER: Right.

GOV DESANTIS: They are setting us up --

MAHER: Right.

GOV DESANTIS: -- if this happened again, they would repeat the same playbook all over again. And if we don't have accountability, that's what's going to happen. So I'll bring accountability, so it never happens in our country again.

MAHER: I saw the New York Times with such a despicable hit piece on you that I saw, because -- I forget what the lead headline was, but it was basically Ron DeSantis fucked up the pandemic. And then like, at the very end, it says Florida's death rate, overall, is better than the national average. And if you're going to do an article -- If you're going to do an article about Florida and the pandemic, shouldn't that be the lead? Shouldn't that be the head--I mean, talk about bury the lead.

GOV DESANTIS: Shouldn't it be that we're the number one state for in-migration? I mean, if we did so bad, people would have been leaving Florida. People are coming, wealth's moving into the state, our economy's done better than any other large state, and education -- we're now ranked, I think, in the top five on most metrics in education. Now, that wasn't true when I was a kid growing up in Florida. So we did it right, but what we did is we understood, you can't stop society because of one respiratory virus. That's not even the way to help health overall.

MAHER: Well, you could if it was bad enough, but not that.

GOV DESANTIS: Right. Well, they were wrong on the death rate, they were wrong on closures, they were wrong on everything. And yet, we act like, what, we're just going to shrug our shoulders and move along?

MAHER: So, that's the part of you I like. And then there's the part of you, like, you're going after -- I mean your state voted to restore voting rights for felons. And then through some political bullshit ju-jitsu, that got undone. Now you're like --

GOV DESANTIS: No, that's not true.

MAHER: It's true.

GOV DESANTIS: No, no.

MAHER: And you're going after people now. I mean, you some --

GOV DESANTIS: They didn't qualify though. So that amendment did not include murderers and sex offenders. So we had sex offenders, convicted sex offenders, who voted who were not eligible under that amendment, so we held them accountable. That was absolutely consistent with the law.

MAHER: Yeah, but there really isn't in-person voter fraud. Like 11 million people voted in Florida, and I think you found 41 people. I mean, that's --

GOV DESANTIS: Right, but if you have somebody that's illegally in the country, and they vote, should they be held accountable or not? I think they should be held accountable.

MAHER: I mean, that's .00000 --

GOV DESANTIS: In a statewide race, but we've had local elections decided by 15, 20, 30 votes in the last few years. And so, I think we want legal people to vote. You know, if you're not a citizen of this country, you should not be voting in American elections.

MAHER: Okay, but that's not the biggest issue we have. Is it? I mean --

GOV DESANTIS: No one's saying it's the biggest. We've taken on all kinds of issues in Florida.

MAHER: It looks like you're just trying to stop black people from voting.

GOV DESANTIS: Oh, that's nonsense.

MAHER: It looks -- I don't think it's nonsense. Black folks don't vote for the Republican Party in very big numbers.

GOV DESANTIS: But I got a bigger percentage than other Republicans have gotten when I ran for reelection.

MAHER: Whoop die doo. That's not a -- I wouldn't brag about that.

GOV DESANTIS: We're making progress, man.

MAHER: And then the abortion ban -- a six-week abortion ban. I don't get that either because six weeks, like, if you're -- I know you say it's a case of conviction. If it's conviction, wouldn't it be moment of conception? That's what conviction is to me. Like, if you believe the second, you know, before the guy can get the towel, there's a third person in that room?

GOV DESANTIS: Well, no, I mean, it's a legislative issue. So they have to figure out what they think. And so, the legislature identified the moment where there's a detectable heartbeat as the time where there's legal protections. Now, they did provide exceptions for all the difficult cases that you hear about, but basically, once there's a heartbeat, it shouldn't be used as a form of birth control.

MAHER: Okay, so you're going to debate Newsom.

GOV DESANTIS: We are.

MAHER: You know he's taller and better looking. Good luck. Thank you for being here. Governor Ron DeSantis, everybody.