Turned into a Republican benchmark at 44 years old and with the echo of his re-election still resonating, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, keeps his cards in the face of the 2024 presidential elections, but shows signs that he is willing to fight for the House White, even with Donald Trump.
The attacks against DeSantis by former President Trump (2017-2021), for now the only official contender for the Republican nomination, show that he sees his former protégé as a rival.
An autobiography of DeSantis due to be released in February and plans to change a state law so he won’t have to resign as governor if he wants to run for office outside of Florida indicate the Florida governor is aiming for the Presidency. .
The rise within the Republican Party of this lawyer, ex-combatant in Iraq and ex-congressman who in 2018 won the governorship of Florida by a slight advantage has been brilliant.
So much so that four years later DeSantis was being considered as one of the ten finalists for Time magazine’s 2022 Person of the Year title, with a real chance of becoming president.
DeSantis has points in common with whoever was his political godfather, but he does not carry the negative baggage of the former president, who is weighed down by the capture of the Capitol in January 2021 by his followers, the investigations into his companies and the alleged mismanagement of secret official documents.
Also, DeSantis is much younger and apparently less of a problem than Trump.
His popularity among Floridians, a state whose electorate moved to the right after the presidency of Barack Obama (2009-2017), has been on the rise as seen last month when he was re-elected for four more years with almost 60%. of the votes
THE PANDEMIC MADE IT KNOWN
With his radical anti-mask, anti-confidence and anti-closing of businesses position during the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, DeSantis began to become known outside of Florida, one of the states with the most accumulated cases and the most deaths (more than 83,000) due to the disease in absolute numbers.
The governor distanced himself from the health policy of the government of the Democrat Joseph Biden and began to publicly mock the government’s chief epidemiologist, Anthony Fauci, while taking measures such as prohibiting cruise companies, badly hit by the pandemic, from requesting certificates of vaccinate their passengers.
DeSantis, whom Trump defined in 2018 as “a conservative warrior,” has shown in four years that he is not afraid of confronting anyone who tries to oppose his designs.
The powerful Disney group, Florida’s largest employer, was stripped of special status simply because company management sided with LGBTQ employees who protested a popularly known “don’t say gay” law, which bans teachers from talk about gender identity in the first years of primary school.
With the help of a state Congress dominated by the Republican Party, which even expanded its majority in the last midterm elections, the governor has carried out a battery of restrictive laws that also affect abortion, the spread of the theory of systemic racism and immigration. .
CHANGING THE SUBJECT WITH THE SAME PURPOSE
Once the acute phase of the pandemic was over, DeSantis changed health policy for immigration as a battlehorse against Biden, whom he accuses of having left the border with Mexico “open.”
Last September, while he was campaigning for re-election, he sent fifty immigrants, most of them Venezuelans, who had requested asylum at the border, by plane from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, an island in Massachusetts.
That trip paid for with money from a Florida public program aimed at “relocating” undocumented immigrants in Democratic states earned him a barrage of criticism and several lawsuits, as well as an investigation by federal authorities.
But pre-election polls last November showed that half of the Florida electorate agreed with that measure, which DeSantis “copied” from other conservative states like Texas.
The Floridian also recently responded to a move by Louisiana and Missouri, also conservative states, by announcing that he will withdraw $2 billion of public funds from investment firm BlackRock for disagreeing with his social and environmental policies.
Among the Florida governor’s supporters is billionaire Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla and Twitter, who calls him a “sensible and centrist” option in the Republican Party.
Significantly, outlets like Fox News, which staunchly supported Trump during his presidency (2017-2021) and beyond, have turned their backs on the former president and now look only to DeSantis.
Critics of him, such as the governor of California, the Democrat Gavin Newsom, call him “cruel.”
He answers them with a sharp tongue: he compared Charlie Crist, the Democratic candidate for governor of Florida, to an “old donkey” and the African-American Andrew Gillum, whom he defeated in his first gubernatorial election, to a “monkey.” .
De Newsom said that the gel he uses for his hair has burned his brain.
His supporters adore DeSantis and only lament that he can’t be in the White House and Governor of Florida at the same time.