Donald Trump has declared his third presidential bid, pledging “to save our country”. But first, he must win the Republican Party nomination. And the person most likely to stand in his way is the man he mentored.
In the 1992 Hollywood military drama A Few Good Men, Tom Cruise plays a US Navy lawyer who fights against the odds to defeat a corrupt system and a brutal commanding officer. As an impressionable teenager, Ron DeSantis was hooked.
At Yale University, he became known for quoting lines from the film, especially Cruise’s big courtroom speech in which he declares, “I want the truth!”
In his second year at Harvard Law School, DeSantis joined the navy and was assigned to the Judge Advocate General Corps (JAG) as a junior grade lieutenant, the same position held by Cruise’s character, Daniel Kaffee. After graduating, DeSantis was posted to the US military detention centre at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba – again, just like in the movie.
The self-proclaimed champion of the fight against wokeism has been writing his own script ever since. Now 44 and the governor of Florida, his home state, with re-election under his belt last week and seen as a potential American President-in-waiting, DeSantis has positioned himself as the upstart protagonist of a political psychodrama gripping America and with huge implications for the future of the country. Dare he take on Donald Trump, the former President who acted as a mentor, for the right to represent the Republican Party at the 2024 presidential election? If he puts himself forward, will Trump – who announced his third presidential bid last week in a speech from his Mar-a-Lago estate, declaring that, “I am running because I believe the world has not yet seen the true glory of what this nation can be” – tear him down as he has done every other rival on his own side, destroying the man whom even most Trump supporters view as Trump 2.0?
Joe Biden, Trump’s nemesis in 2020, is one of those buying popcorn. When asked after the recent US midterm elections who would be the tougher competitor, Trump or DeSantis, the President said, “It will be fun watching them take on each other.”
For his part, DeSantis passed up an opportunity to confirm or deny whether he would run against the newly declared Trump. When asked what he thought about Trump’s “less than flattering” comments about him recently, DeSantis said: “You know, one of the things I’ve learned in this job is, when you’re leading, when you’re getting things done, you take incoming fire. At the end of the day, I would just tell people to go check out the scoreboard from last Tuesday night [when he won re-election as governor by 29 points]. The fact of the matter is, it was the greatest Republican victory in the history of the state of Florida.”
DeSantis established his popularity in Florida and across the firmament of American conservatives and libertarians with his approach to the Covid-19 pandemic. He reopened schools in the autumn term of 2020 after around four months of home learning (in Washington DC, by comparison, children were off for 13 months) and declared that, “The closure of schools was one of the biggest public health mistakes in modern American history.”
DeSantis started saying in speeches that he wished he had resisted early restrictions, in a dig at the Trump administration’s “30 days to slow the spread” campaign, which urged people to avoid groups, bars and restaurants. Florida has the 13th highest Covid-19 death rate among the 50 states and in 2021 it had the fifth-best economic growth rate – not bad given the collapse of tourism. DeSantis established a reputation as a fearless iconoclast and via regular Fox News appearances earned national attention, including a steadily rising profile among Trump’s own Maga (Make America Great Again) base. His stance against the prevailing medical wisdom also earned him the hashtag DeathSantis from opponents and the opprobrium of the Florida media. “We can’t trust the governor with our lives,” wrote the Miami Herald.
In person, DeSantis is a stocky and rather awkward figure, short on charisma and reluctant to make eye contact. He keeps his brown hair short and neat and often wears the white shirt, red tie and blue suit – the colours of the American flag – that has also become a uniform for Trump. The Tampa Bay Times described him as “aloof and a bit of a know-it-all” even among gatherings of political allies. But he cemented a place in the affections of Trump’s own following with his actions, which often seem designed to irk liberal opponents in America’s culture wars as much as solve burning issues. The best known is the Parental Rights in Education Act, nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by opponents, which bans instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in schools until the age of nine. It also requires schools to notify parents about any proposed change to the treatment of their child for emotional or physical health reasons, in a backlash against accommodating or encouraging children to question their gender identity. “Parents have every right to be informed about services offered to their child at school, and should be protected from schools using classroom instruction to sexualise their kids as young as five years old,” DeSantis said.
Then there was the Stop WOKE (the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) Act. This blocks school lessons or workplace training about race or sex that could make some people feel “guilt” or “anguish” by teaching that individuals are “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously”, or that people are privileged or oppressed based on race, gender or national origin. This is aimed at banishing “critical race theory”, the academic study of pervasive racism in US society and institutions, which has become a key target of the right. “We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other,” DeSantis said at the launch of the bill.
In a sop to Trump’s incessant fake claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him, DeSantis opened a new Office of Election Crimes and Security despite little evidence of fraud in Florida voting. In August it announced it had discovered that 20 former criminals, banned from voting under Florida law, had in fact taken part in the 2020 election, out of 11,067,456 votes cast.
In April, DeSantis stressed his support for moves to allow Floridians to keep their guns on them in public, without the need for a training course or an open-carry permit.
“I can tell you, before I am done as governor, we will have a signature on that bill,” he said. In September, to burnish his tough-on-immigration credentials, DeSantis arranged for two flights of asylum-seekers who had just crossed the US border into Texas to be dumped in Martha’s Vineyard, a well-to-do liberal enclave in Massachusetts, garnering massive media coverage. Much to Trump’s annoyance, all these actions only increased the governor’s popularity, to the point where he regularly comes second behind only Trump himself in polls of Republicans for the party’s next presidential candidate. In some polls, including one of Florida voters in August, DeSantis came top. Trump wanted to hear DeSantis commit to not running against him for the 2024 nomination but, when no such undertaking was received, Trump consequently declared war.
For once, it is not hard to understand Trump’s fury. In June 2018, when Congressman DeSantis was running to become the Republican candidate for governor of Florida, a Fox News poll put him on 17 per cent support, a long way behind his main party rival, Adam Putnam, on 32 per cent. The following day Trump tweeted, “Congressman Ron DeSantis, a top student at Yale and Harvard Law School, is running for Governor of the Great State of Florida. Ron is strong on Borders, tough on Crime & big on Cutting Taxes – Loves our Military & our Vets. He will be a Great Governor & has my full Endorsement!” Trump followed up with a rally alongside DeSantis in Tampa the following month. The endorsement helped to bring in billionaire conservative donors including casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, investment tycoon Foster Friess, and the co-owner of the extreme right-wing Breitbart website, Rebekah Mercer. DeSantis filmed a TV advert playing with toy blocks with his daughter, Madison, aged nearly 2, urging her to “build the wall” – a reference to Trump’s signature policy of constructing a barrier along the Mexico border. DeSantis is then seen reading Trump’s book The Art of the Deal to his baby boy, Mason, saying, “Then Mr Trump said, ‘You’re fired.’ I love that part.” His wife, Casey, appears, saying, “People say Ron’s all Trump. But he is so much more,” before the camera shows Mason lying in his cot dressed in a red “Make America Great Again” onesie. DeSantis leans over him. “Bigly,” he says. “So good.”
Trump, who first spotted DeSantis on Fox News, where he made numerous appearances defending the former President, could have been forgiven for thinking he had a loyal supporter. Now, however, DeSantis appears to be exhibiting one of the most Trumpian of character traits, summed up by a former navy colleague: “Ron’s a user. If you had utility to him, he would be nice to you. If you didn’t, he wouldn’t give you the time of day.”
Yet DeSantis is too easily cast as a Trump clone – not least by Biden, who described him as “Trump incarnate”. His humble background, his brains and his moral grounding in Catholicism mark him out as a different character despite the similarities in policy platform and their shared disdain for the “fake news” media (which DeSantis has rephrased as the “regime media”). As in Trump’s case, all DeSantis’s great-grandparents were born outside the USA, in his case in Italy. Unlike Trump, his parents had little money. His mother, Karen, worked as a nurse and his father, also Ron, as a field installer for Nielsen, the television ratings company, fitting its monitoring boxes in homes.
Young Ron was athletic from an early age and his father spent hours coaching him in baseball. He was also into books. One of his early favourite reads was The Science of Hitting by Ted Williams, a baseball legend, which advised young players to choose carefully which pitches to swing at. “I must have thrown a half million pitches to Ron, and I think he swung at about 500 of them,” Ron snr told The New Yorker. “I wish he would have never read it.” It paid dividends, though. When DeSantis was 12 in 1991, his team from Dunedin School, near Tampa, won through to the Little League World Series, an international schoolboy tournament, reaching the last eight. Photos of young Ron in his Little League outfits are sometimes deployed on a big screen as part of the warm-up to his speeches. Asked what his son was like as a boy, Ron snr said, “He was stubborn. If he set his mind to something, you couldn’t shake him.”
Sport was central to DeSantis’ social life at Yale, where he studied history and was captain of the university’s Bulldogs baseball team, following in the footsteps of former president George H W Bush, and scoring the best batting average of 2001. DeSantis became lasting friends with long-serving team coach John Stuper, one of those close enough to call him simply “D”. Besides baseball he had several part-time jobs – as an electrician’s assistant and a baseball camp coach – to supplement his living costs, and still graduated magna cum laude (the 10 per cent of high achievers immediately below the top 5 per cent). Fellow Yale graduate Charles Finch recorded gossip about a strange dating technique DeSantis is said to have employed as an undergraduate.
A friend whose room-mate was on the baseball team told him that, “When D took women out, he would tell them he liked Thai food, but he would pronounce it ‘thigh’. If they corrected him, he would make up an excuse and leave the date.” Finch, writing in his memoir What Just Happened: Notes on a Long Year, added, “He didn’t want a girlfriend who corrected him.” Finch also alleged, “[DeSantis] always told people he was going to marry a local news anchor: successful, pretty, but not too smart.”
DeSantis eventually met his future wife at a golf range. By this stage he had completed a year at Guantanamo Bay as a lawyer working with detainees and followed that by volunteering in 2007 for a sought-after assignment with the elite Navy Special Operations Sea, Air and Land (Seal) Team One, deployed to Iraq. His role was to advise the Seals on rules of engagement, such as when to shoot, how to treat prisoners and whether to venture into certain areas. DeSantis seems to have been a good fit with the notoriously insular group, known to be hostile to outsiders. He earned a bronze star for meritorious service, an award usually reserved for senior officers. “Of course, we were worried about him,” his father said. “Ron told us he was just in one place, in Ramadi, but afterwards we found out that he’d been moving all around the area, from city to city, with the Seals. It really upset my wife.” Returning to the US in 2008, he was appointed as a special assistant US attorney in the Middle District of Florida federal prosecutor’s office until his honourable discharge from the navy in 2010. It was this posting that led to the encounter with Casey Black, a reporter and anchor for the independent station WJXT in Jacksonville.
Casey, who later worked for the PGA Tour hosting and producing two TV golf shows, was practising her swing at the University of North Florida driving range. “I kept looking over my shoulder because I wanted the bucket of balls that somebody had left, because my swing was so terrible,” she told First Coast News. “I needed as much practice as I could possibly get. As I’m looking over behind me, Ron is over there. He thinks I’m looking at him. I was really looking at the balls. Long story short we started to talk and that’s how we met.” They married in September 2009 at Walt Disney World in Florida at the Grand Floridian Resort’s wedding pavilion, a non-denominational chapel overlooking the Seven Seas Lagoon where “behind the altar, a leaded arched window perfectly frames a view of Cinderella Castle, accentuating the fairytale moment when you exchange vows”, according to the Disney website. A Catholic priest from Casey’s native Ohio officiated and a reception was held for the 150 guests at the nearby Epcot theme park.
The couple have three young children and Casey, 42, is credited with being DeSantis’s closest adviser and image-maker. A former colleague from WJXT told Vanity Fair earlier this year, “I remember I once said [to a colleague], ‘Casey wants to be a senator’s wife.’ And he said, ‘No, she fully intends on being a president’s wife.’ " From the time DeSantis won election to the US House of Representatives in 2012 for Florida’s conservative 6th district, his wife reportedly has been copied into every email and calendar invitation and is credited with bustling along her husband’s meteoric rise. DeSantis announced in October 2021 that Casey had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was facing the “most difficult test of her life” but “will never, never, never give up”. In March this year, he told Floridians that “after going through both treatment and surgery for breast cancer, she is now considered cancer free … She still has more to do, but I’m confident she’s going to make a full recovery.” Casey parlayed the experience into a campaign ad for Ron’s recent re-election campaign, entitled “That is Who Ron DeSantis Is”. After some vintage photos of hubby in Little League and the navy, narrated by Casey, she spoke directly to camera: “When I was diagnosed with cancer, he was the dad who took care of my children when I could not. He was there to pick me up off the ground when I literally could not stand … That’s who Ron DeSantis is.” Acquaintances say they have heard her say, “You have a moment,” meaning that the time to make a pitch for the White House is now.
In the days following the midterm elections and with media interest in DeSantis as a potential future President reaching stratospheric levels, the Florida governor suddenly had two hurricanes on his hands. One, Nicole, was downgraded to a tropical storm as it moved across the Sunshine State; the other lashed the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee from 640km away at its base in Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach resort club that Trump has made his home. First Trump tried out a new nickname, Ron DeSanctimonious, a moniker thought up by the former President’s chief dirty-tricks guy, Roger Stone (all Trump’s political enemies get nicknames). Then the social media posts started – on Trump’s own Truth Social as he remained banned from Twitter despite its acquisition by Elon Musk. “An average REPUBLICAN Governor with great Public Relations … Ron came to me in desperate shape in 2017 – he was politically dead, losing in a landslide … Ron had low approval, bad polls, and no money, but he said that if I would Endorse him, he could win … So I said, ‘Let’s give it a shot, Ron.’ When I Endorsed him it was as though, to use a bad term, a nuclear weapon went off.”
DeSantis, by contrast, is usually restrained on social media, leaving the bare-knuckle fighting to his spokeswoman Christina Pushaw, a 31-year-old blonde Californian with sculpted features who found her way to Tallahassee via two years in Tbilisi, Georgia, working for former President Mikheil Saakashvili. As the Washington Post recently observed, her style of running a press office is akin to a public brawl. Amid an outcry that Florida Republicans banned some journalists from attending an annual get-together, she tweeted, “It has come to my attention that some liberal media activists are mad because they aren’t allowed into #SunshineSummit this weekend. My message to them is to try crying about it. Then go to kickboxing and have a margarita. And write the same hit piece you were gonna write anyway.”
When the Archbishop of Miami, Thomas Wenski, criticised DeSantis for “a new low” in February over an executive order banning Florida from funding shelters for unaccompanied migrant children, saying this would be akin to co-operating with human smuggling, Pushaw, a Catholic, pushed back. DeSantis had said it was “disgusting” for migrant campaigners to compare children arriving now from Central America to youngsters fleeing Cuba in the 1960s. Wenski responded: “Children are children – and no child should be deemed ‘disgusting’ – especially by a public servant.” Pushaw had the last word. “Lying is a sin,” she tweeted, over a photo of the archbishop.
In a sign that he will be up for the battle against Trump, DeSantis has also built a reputation for not ducking a fight with powerful opponents. Following his “small government” principles, he voted against government subsidies for Florida’s mighty sugar industry. This led Big Sugar to support his rival, Adam Putnam, for governor. In June DeSantis vetoed a bill that would, according to the libertarian Cato Institute, have strengthened the sugar industry’s claim over water resources at the expense of the Everglades.
His most infamous Florida showdown came earlier this year. After DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education Act, Disney, the corporation that hosted his wedding, declared that the legislation “should never have been signed into law … Our goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts.” DeSantis asked the Florida legislature for a bill striking down the quasi-governmental status granted to Disney in the 60s to develop its theme park area out of Florida swampland. The corporation will start to lose its special rights over building roads and other infrastructure from next year. “We do not subcontract our leadership to woke corporations in California,” DeSantis said during his successful re-election bid in October.
The campaign also marked a return to Ron’s Tom Cruise fixation, in an advert where he acted out the role of “Top Gov”, a fighter pilot instructor dressed identically to the character of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun. “Today’s training evolution: dogfighting. Taking on the corporate media.” Lessons included “fire back with overwhelming force” followed by a clip of DeSantis arguing with a reporter during a press conference, Trump-style. All the performative aspects of his mentor were there – the media-bashing, the finger-pointing confrontation, the theatrical anger – allied to another Cruise character who dared to defy his superiors. In A Few Good Men, the Cruise character provokes the nasty commanding officer to make an enraged outburst that brings about his downfall.
So will the pupil become the master in real life? While much of the fanbase built up by Trump would rather see DeSantis wait until 2028, most admire the protege and talk of him as the natural heir. His supporters in Florida gave their own seal of approval on midterm election night this month as his crushing victory secured another four-year term as governor. The euphoric chant of, “Two more years! Two more years!” could be heard all the way to Mar-a-Lago.
Written by: David Charter
© The Times of London