Small government or authoritarian conservative: Will the real Ron DeSantis stand up?

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A Florida governor has vetoed a bill that would have prevented cities and counties from banning plastic straws, arguing that it was an overreach and that citizens concerned about such bans could vote against local officials. that implement them.

A Florida governor also became so irritated by a private company’s criticism of him that he passed laws specifically to punish the company and said that perhaps, now, it would behave more in accordance with his wishes.

As it happens, the two examples describe the same governor, Ron DeSantis, separated in time by only three years and nine months. So, as national attention focuses on the 44-year-old as he prepares a potential run for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, an important question begs: Which one is he?

“I don’t know if anyone knows who the real Ron DeSantis is,” said Jennifer Horn, former chair of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee. “He Republican Party it has become very authoritarian. …He is feeding the beast. He is intentionally becoming what he wants the base of the party”.

while the Laws punishing The Walt Disney Co. for criticizing the “Don’t Say Gay” bill are probably the best-known examples of DeSantis’ use of state power to impose his will and hurt his perceived enemies, they’re not the only ones. DeSantis suspended the Tampa attorney-elect for stating that he would not prosecute people under a new abortion law. He attacked the state’s public liberal arts college as part of his war against the “awakening” and replaced your dash, which later installed a DeSantis ally as president. He has pushed legislation that cements his grip on Florida’s executive branch by stripping elected cabinet members of some powers.

And this year, he’s after a extent that would make it easier for him and other elected officials to sue news organizations for publishing stories they don’t like. Among other things, he would give plaintiffs a presumption that anonymous sources are simply fabricated.

“I don’t understand why people don’t realize how dangerous this is, one man deciding what’s right,” said a former Republican lawmaker who, like most republicans who agreed to be interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity due to DeSantis’ revenge story. “He is willing to punish anyone.”

DeSantis’ staff did not respond to HuffPost’s inquiries about this story.

A former senior official of donald trumpHowever, the White House said DeSantis’s approach appears designed to win over Trump supporters, and that it appears to be working.

“He is looking for fights in Florida. You are looking for fights with the right people. DeSantis can run the record that he is generating as we speak,” the former official said on condition of anonymity. “DeSantis knows how to win over Trump voters, and he’s doing it.”

Unlike Florida’s three previous governors, DeSantis was born in the state, in Jacksonville, before his family moved to Dunedin on the Gulf of Mexico side of Tampa Bay.

He became a local celebrity at age 12, when his team went to the Little League World Series in 1991. That baseball talent ended up taking him to Yale University on a full scholarship. After a year teaching high school history in Georgia, he returned to New England, this time to Harvard Law School, from where he entered the Navy as a general officer of the court.

After serving in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and a year-long deployment to Iraq, he joined the US attorney’s office in Orlando as a federal prosecutor before running for a vacant congressional seat in his Northeast Florida hometown in 2012.

It was during this period that DeSantis wrote his first book, “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers,” a rebuke to then-President Barack Obama, whose memoir “Dreams From My Father” had been published 16 years earlier and whose election had sparked the Tea. party movement.

DeSantis criticized Obama for pushing a “transformational” agenda and relying on executive authority to do so. He advocated a return to “Madisonian” democracy and “limited government.”

Eight years later, after three terms in the US Congress and a successful run for governor, that philosophy seemed intact when a bill arrived on his desk that would have outlawed local bans on plastic straws, in that time an active front in the culture wars.

To the surprise of many Floridians in both parties, DeSantis killed him. In his May 10, 2019 veto message, DeSantis said that the bogus bans by local governments were in no way hurting the state. “The state should simply allow local communities to address this issue through the political process,” he wrote. “Citizens who oppose plastic straw ordinances can appeal by electing people who share their views.”

Indeed, that first year in office surprised many who assumed he would govern on the model of the man whose endorsement earned DeSantis the Republican nomination a year earlier: Trump.

DeSantis moderated both his tone and his policies. He backed a pardon for the Groveland Four, the African-American men who were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in 1949 and whose families have been trying to clear their names ever since. He followed through on his commitment to raise funds to restore the Everglades.

A year later, however, COVID-19 hit, and with the coronavirus he reverted to his old Republican primary campaign persona. As Trump began to downplay the disease, so did DeSantis, and he, using the exact opposite justification to the one he had with the plastic straw bans, fought cities and counties that were trying to impose restrictions on businesses in interiors to slow transmission.

Then, when COVID-19 vaccines first became available, DeSantis aggressively pushed for them, setting up immunization clinics across the state and making numerous personal visits. But as anti-vaccine voices began to dominate Trump’s voter base, DeSantis backtracked on his efforts, largely shutting down the newly created vaccination infrastructure as shots became generally available to more groups. old.

Horn, the New Hampshire Conservative, said she has watched it closely in 2020 and saw a clear evolution as the year progressed. “That was a very transformative year for him,” she said.

On February 27, 2023, exactly 1,389 days after his plastic straw veto, DeSantis signed a bill giving him the authority to personally elect the board that oversees Disney’s tax district. He told his audience that the company had lost its way in recent years. “I think all of these board members would really like to see the kind of entertainment that all families can appreciate,” he said.

In his new book, “The Courage To Be Free,” DeSantis boasts of conspiring with Republican legislative leaders to sneak through the Disney bill quickly, before the company could react.

The evolution from limited government conservative to “government will tell you what kind of movies to make” populist was complete.

“Did the base follow DeSantis or did DeSantis follow the base?” said Horn. “I would suggest the latter.”

Governing philosophy aside, there are real-world consequences for Floridians who cross DeSantis and face his wrath.

The Walt Disney Co. must now contend with a politically hostile board run by a taxing district that governs Disney land, and virtually only Disney land, in central Florida. Suspended Hillsborough County District Attorney Andrew Warren is in the middle of a lawsuit to get back the job that even a federal judge has said DeSantis did not have just cause to take away.

Disney, of course, can draw on its many lawyers and lobbyists in its battles with DeSantis, and Warren also has the connections to pursue his challenge. But DeSantis has also upended the lives of people without the means to defend themselves.

Last year, his “election integrity” squad was arrested 20 ex-criminalsmost of them black, on suspicion of voting illegally, even though state and local election officials had approved their voter registrations.

He also made bogus offers of homes and jobs to trick Venezuelan asylum seekers in Texas into traveling to Martha’s Vineyard, using Florida taxpayer money to charter his planes. And he alerted Fox News to exclusively film his arrival at the Massachusetts vacation spot.

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them. And the governor has shown who he is,” Warren said. “He’s focused on being a carnival barker willing to break the law to further his political agenda.”

“All of DeSantis’ victims are collateral damage in his culture war offensives,” added Mac Stipanovich, former chief of staff to former Republican Gov. Bob Martinez. “Their lives of his are radically altered for the worse because he’s cast them as extras in one role or another, but that doesn’t have any more impact on him than a BB bouncing off a boxcar. … He cares only about the fleeting applause from the right-wing peanut gallery and nothing about the lasting difficulties that result.”

Meanwhile, DeSantis has ramped up an unofficial presidential campaign that began last summer when he toured the country in support of Republican candidates.

In Arizona on Aug. 15, DeSantis spoke primarily about himself and his record in Florida, rather than the Republican candidates running for state office there. “What we did in Florida was we really led the nation,” he said of his response to the pandemic.

“Hello, Western Pennsylvania,” he told a crowd in Pittsburgh four days later before giving a speech that was much more about his own background and achievements than the virtues of Doug Mastriano, the gubernatorial candidate there.

This month, DeSantis has held fundraisers for local parties in Texas, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, and county committees in Iowa. All are technically part of a post-release tour for his new book, and attendees receive copies as a gift for your donation to the host group. This has provided intense news coverage of an as-yet-unannounced presidential campaign, while generating substantial personal income that a top state Republican said DeSantis had never earned before despite his Ivy League law degree.

“People do not realize. He wants the money and he needs the money,” the supporter said on condition of anonymity. “He can do it in a way that advances his campaign without campaigning.”

According to his latest available financial disclosure filed with the state ethics commission, DeSantis at the end of 2021 had a net worth of $318,987 with an income of $134,181 from his salary as governor.

Regardless of his approach and timing strategy, the things DeSantis is doing are definitely working, the former Trump White House official said, adding that there is clear “Trump fatigue” among Republicans in general. “At this distance from 24, he is very well positioned. It all comes down to how you present yourself in the big game,” the former official said.

Horn, who worked to defeat the former coup president, said that at this point, DeSantis has not descended to Trump’s level. “He has not led a deadly insurrection against the government,” he said. “So, so far, he’s better than Trump.”