There’s sucking up to Donald Trump and then there’s this: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took it to the next level on Thursday morning when he not only signed a voter suppression bill inspired by Trump’s election lies, he turned the event at which he signed the bill into a Fox News exclusive. And not just Fox News—specifically Trump’s favorite show, Fox & Friends.

The signing had an audience of hundreds of supporters of DeSantis and Trump, but all the reporters other than Fox were shut out.

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It took just minutes after DeSantis signed the bill for pro-democracy organizations, including the League of Women Voters of Florida, Black Voters Matters Fund, Florida Alliance for Retired Americans, and NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund to file lawsuits challenging it. 

The new Florida law includes by-now-familiar restrictions on voting like limiting the availability of ballot drop boxes, making it more difficult to vote by mail, and preventing groups from offering water or snacks to people waiting in long voting lines. Once people get in to vote in person, they could be confronted by the army of partisan poll watchers the new law allows, who will be able to crowd in around election workers. Additionally it replaces special elections for some local office vacancies with appointments by the governor—at a time when DeSantis is also delaying a special election in a majority-Black district for 280 days after the death of Rep. Alcee Hastings. In other words, it’s a mixture of some of the worst things we’d already seen in states like Georgia with some extra special Florida twists.

Turning the signing into a spectacle for Fox News really shows off the partisan intent here. DeSantis has praised how well Florida’s 2020 elections were run—elections in which 40% of voters used mail ballots—yet his embrace of Trump’s election lies is so complete that he wanted to make extra certain Trump saw that Republicans in the state were pivoting their laws around those lies. And how better to make sure Trump notices something than to put it on Fox & Friends? This law is equal parts about making it more difficult for Democratic-leaning groups to vote—a longtime Republican goal—and about showing loyalty to Trump through embrace of his claims that they only reason he lost is because of a rigged election. Both goals are terrible and dangerous, but the latter is also ridiculous.

DeSantis is showing his determination to be Trump’s favorite special boy, but what does he think the endgame is? If Trump doesn’t run in 2024, no amount of sucking up will guarantee that he remains loyal—the minute another Republican looks likely to replace him as the party’s leader, Trump will turn on that person. And if Trump does run in 2024, DeSantis functionally can’t be his vice presidential pick unless one of the men changes his residency from Florida, because electors cannot vote for both a president and a vice president from their own states, and Florida’s electoral votes are kind of a big deal. Do you think Trump is going to bother changing residency for someone else’s political ambitions?

But wherever DeSantis thinks his own personal political ambitions are going, the voter suppression law he just signed is another case of Republicans going to the extreme both to rig elections in their own favor at whatever cost to representative democracy, and to show their fealty to Trump despite the electoral losses he brought to their party.