Florida Governor Ron DeSantis broke out his now-trademark smile during Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate.
And it went over about as well as his past attempts at flashing his pearly whites.
DeSantis went viral during the first debate over the summer with his awkward attempt to smile, then again this week when his smile included an odd flash of tongue during a TV interview.
On Wednesday night, he started with the tongue version, then seemed to catch himself:
DeSantis’ smile has been coming under extra scrutiny in recent days.
″[W]hen you have to take actual laughing lessons and you have to practice smiling, it’s a problem,” Washington Times opinion editor Charles Hurt wrote this week in a column about DeSantis’ struggle to connect with voters.
“Someone needs to tell DeSantis that no smile is better than a fake smile,” the National Review’s Rich Lowry wrote on the magazine’s debate liveblog.
DeSantis’ critics on X joined the smile pile-on: