Ron DeSanctimonious or the Real Deal?

Why Florida's Governor may not be a worthy heir to the MAGA movement, and certainly should not run against Donald Trump for president in 2024

DeSantis: Trump without the baggage?

On the surface, there seem to be more and more positive things to say about Ron DeSantis (or as Trump has now labeled him, “Ron DeSanctimonious,” a fitting sobriquet that Roger Stone helped mainstream in an interview with Mike Crispi earlier this year) these days as he potentially gears up for a 2024 challenge against the man who salvaged his political career. For one, DeSantis has continued his culture war crusade against woke institutions, a crusade which obtained national prominence when he originally stripped Disney World of its tax-exempt status for pushing chemical castration on prepubescent children under the guise of “Civil Rights.” DeSantis also recently dismissed the just passed congressional bill federalizing same-sex unions, which enjoyed bipartisan support, and which is bound to throw a wrench in the lives of millions of traditional Christians, increasingly a minority in this country, such as Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop infamy.

This was followed by DeSantis calling on Florida’s Supreme Court to investigate Anthony Fauci for “any and all wrongdoing,” an act that DeSantis hopes would position himself affirmatively to the right of Donald Trump on the vaccine issue. DeSantis’s strategy now appears to be surgically identifying (and attacking) Trump’s weaker issue areas. The vaccine is one such area of vulnerability DeSantis appears primed to exploit given that Trump was largely responsible for elevating Fauci to national prominence and ushered in the vaccine era with “Operation Warp Speed.” DeSantis’s persistent efforts to frame himself as a dogged culture warrior – and his decisive actions on covid and LGBTism, two critical prongs of the culture war – as well as someone who can get things done, even as the rest of the country paces leftward, has to his credit returned political dividends and has furnished a narrative of him being a legitimate alternative to the 45th president.

This perception was affirmed by this year’s midterms. DeSantis handily won his re-election over Charlie Crist, a former Republican, by double digit margins. In accomplishing that feat, DeSantis was one of the few prominent conservative firebrands to buck the trend of an otherwise disappointing evening for the party. Florida now rivals (if not surpasses) Texas as the most conservative large state in the union. Meanwhile, as President Trump stumbles with (albeit profitable) political gimmicks, and a seeming lack of direction (what else explains his reluctance to rejoin Twitter and shape the narrative, or shift his campaign into high gear with rally after rally; to say nothing of the reporting of his awfully premature support for Kevin McCarthy’s reelection as House Speaker?), the DeSantis momentum has been reflected in certain polls, which though doubtless unreliable due to inherent sampling biases, nevertheless help create a perception – however erroneous – that DeSantis is the future face of the party, and Trump increasingly the past (most polls, far more reliable in their projections, consistently showcase Trump with sizable, double digit leads over his nearest would-be challenger). The unfortunate reality is that in politics, perception is often truer than reality – and so long as this narrative continues, DeSantis will probably convince himself that he can take down Trump come 2024.

The Darker Reality about DeSantis’s record

These recent accomplishments, however, belie a much darker reality about DeSantis’s own record – a record whose pitfalls do not simply belong to the distant past, as many of DeSantis’s supporters would have you believe. For one, it is undeniable that DeSantis has been weak on the single most important issue of our times – immigration, the driving issue that was most responsible for rustbelt voters turning out for Trump in droves in 2016.

Starting with e-verify: while Florida has some version of the laws that require mandatory background checks of resident aliens to determine employability, DeSantis has slow-walked meaningful legislation of the kind long ago passed in states like Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi (and others) that would require mandatory e-verification for all or most businesses, not just public contractors. One former Florida state legislator described his state’s toothless e-verify laws as an “embarrassment to the state,” and called on DeSantis to encourage his Republican colleagues in the state legislature to join him in making the “law mandatory for all private and public employers when it was considered by the Legislature in 2020.”

The immigration crisis, while unquestionably bad in 2016, has achieved catastrophic proportions under Biden, where tens of thousands of newly arrived aliens cross a wide-open Southern border every single day – a figure that is on track to tally upwards of nine million new migrants entering this country by the end of Biden’s term. No country, however pluralistic, can withstand absorbing nine million new people (adding to the estimated 40 million plus illegals domiciled here already) without very serious economic and cultural ramifications.

One explanation for DeSantis’s reticence to take on the issue directly may be that he is still riding high off the mushrooming base of support from Cuban and Venezuelan constituents, who flipped Miami, a historically blue district, red for the first time in decades in 2022, and was a key reason for why Florida’s governor won by such large margins in the first place. Maybe DeSantis would prefer to refrain from doing anything that might alienate Hispanic supporters of his. After all, Florida is one of the few states in which that demographic has bucked national headwinds by returning handsomely in favor of the Republican Party.

This might further explain why DeSantis, instead of taking the type of meaningful action an immigration crisis that has reached this catastrophic level of urgency would normally require, has opted for theatrics like bussing several dozen resident aliens to lily-white Martha’s Vineyard, a favorite haunt for limousine liberals in the Northeast. The stunt, which garnered national publicity when it occurred, had achieved the desired result of further elevating DeSantis’s national image as an unapologetic culture warrior without alienating Latinos by resorting to the kinds of controversial measures needed to actually fix the problem, as even Jared Kushner recently pointed out. These would include passing meaningful e-verify or deporting the estimated hundreds of thousands of illegals currently domiciled within Florida’s borders to their native lands – not the astroturfed stunts that endear him to DC pundits, but whose effect is by and large performative. (It is also worth noting that DeSantis’s migrant stunt was itself coordinated by an illegally domiciled Venezuelan migrant, who was reimbursed by Team DeSantis to help pull off the feat despite himself not being eligible to work in the United States.)

Ronny D: The Swamp’s Darling

Ken Griffin still remains DeSantis’s top donor, according to Politico, who “dropp[ed] $5 million” into DeSantis’s war chest during just this past cycle.

However significant an issue immigration is, the most important issue on which Trump’s scorecard still beats DeSantis’s decisively is the former’s ability to take on the Washington swamp no-holds-barred, which includes both party establishments, the administrative (or deep) state, the mainstream media propaganda apparatus, and the military industrial complex. In certain ways, the problem is unavoidable for DeSantis, whose prestige rests first and foremost on him being a politician – initially as congressman, later as Florida’s governor.

However purportedly “based” DeSantis has been on various matters of public policy, he can never quite escape the problems that naturally glom onto a man who has achieved notoriety from the system primarily and not, as Trump did, from the private sector originally (as a self-made billionaire, no less) only to figure out how to become a politician much later in life. (It is also worth noting that DeSantis, whose reported net worth of $300k, earnings made almost completely off the taxpayer’s dime from a government career, comprises less than one hundredth of a percent of Donald Trump’s $3.2 billion net worth (a likely undervalued figure), as reported by Forbes. DeSantis has also been reported to still owe more than $20k in unpaid student loans from college, which is ironic — if not downright embarrassing — given DeSantis’s hardline stance against Biden’s student loan relief initiative.)

DeSantis’s ties to the corporate wing of the Republican Party are perhaps most sharply illuminated by his donor breakdown: the Florida Governor has managed to amass a $200 million war chest, which has been overwhelmingly funded by big money donors like hedge fund manager Ken Griffin of Citadel LLC. In stark contrast, Trump’s war chest, a juggernaut in its own right, has been primarily fueled by small-monied grassroots contributions under $200. It is odd to think that anyone with such deep ties to Wall Street as DeSantis apparently has, particularly in the wake of the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal, in which the crypto billionaire defrauded investors and channeled tens of millions of dark money dollars into the coffers of Democrats and (by more clandestine routes) Republican lawmakers, would be able to earnestly take on the Washington swamp, however pure his intentions might be.  (As an aside, the identities of these Republicans still remain an under-investigated point of interest – Bankman-Fried himself stated that he was the GOP’s second or third largest donor this midterm cycle, though also asserted that “[a]ll my Republican donations were dark.” No evidence supports a link between SBF and DeSantis, of course, but it is certainly worth asking whether this cycle’s biggest winner for the Republicans benefitted at all from one of the party’s asserted biggest contributors, especially in light of the corroborated donations made between SBF and GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy.)

Griffin, like Bankman-Fried, is a controversial figure in his own right. Notably coming to prominence during last year’s GameStop short squeeze, in which Citadel retained an outsized stake in Melvin Capital, the hedge fund that nearly went insolvent after massively shorting “meme stocks” like GameStop, over-leveraging itself to the point where the trading platform, Robinhood, was pressured into temporarily suspending trading orders by powerful forces on Wall Street on those shorted stocks, resulting in billion-dollar losses for retail traders. (In some ways, this is even worse than SBF’s crypto Ponzi-like scheme, because those defrauded by SBF consisted of “$1.1 billion from approximately 90 U.S.-based [equity] investors,” according to the Securities and Exchange Commission; in other words, the venture capitalists and other investors subject to SBF’s scheme appeared to be largely institutional, unlike those mom and pop investors, some of whom were driven to suicide after having their life savings were wiped out overnight, most harmed in the Robinhood scam.)

Ken Griffin’s Chinese Connection

Apart from being known for his Robinhood infamy, Griffin notably has deep ties to China, which is reflected in many of Griffin’s public statements. He has already generated heated controversy from conservatives for “admitting that investment in China is a ‘center of focus’ for his company and revealed plans to ‘increase the size of our commitment’ in the region,” according to WarRoom.org’s Natalie Winters. In that same interview, Griffin went on to praise Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s commitment to “re-accelerating Chinese economic growth,” a quotation that reads callously tone-deaf in light of recent anti-lockdown protests in China, the largest of their kind since Tiananmen Square, where thousands of Chinese citizens have stormed the streets from Shanghai to Urumqi demanding their freedoms in light of some of the most draconian anti-covid measures on earth. Griffin still remains DeSantis’s top donor, according to Politico, who “dropp[ed] $5 million” into DeSantis’s war chest during just this past cycle.

Wall Street billionaire Ken Griffin, who is on record for saying that investment in China is a ‘center of focus’ for his company, remains Ron DeSantis’s top donor, and “dropp[ed] $5 million” into DeSantis’s $200 million war chest of mostly large money donors.

Griffin’s coddling of the Florida Governor is even more distressing in view of highly critical statements Griffin has made against the Trump administration’s hawkish pivot on trade. In that same report from Winters, Griffin lambasted Trump’s Chinese tariffs as “a huge loss for humanity,” which is worrisome, given that, as Claremont’s Michael Anton has persuasively (and repeatedly) argued over the years, a protectionist trade policy, coupled with stricter immigration regulations and a non-interventionist foreign policy constituted the three key pillars of the agenda that originally catapulted Donald Trump into the Oval Office.

Clearly post-Trump Washington has reverted to its old, neocon ways, already sending upwards of one hundred billion dollars already to the Ukrainians in their increasingly unpopular war against the Russians. And, as many know, old habits die hard. As more and more Americans grow weary of the Ukrainian conflict, Washington has begun to set its sights on another hopeful target: Taiwan. One should not dismiss the possibility that Ukraine’s war model may be soon extrapolated to the Middle Kingdom. And the opportunity would be especially ripe under a non-Trump, more conventional Republican president, ideally someone with a historically less antagonistic record to neoconservative foreign policy – and maybe someone whose largest donor has routinely made headlines for signaling that Taiwan should be a top priority for America, predicting dire outcomes such as a “global recession” if Washington instead chooses a soft approach like détente or — dare I suggest — noninterventionism toward Taiwan. (All this doomsaying by Griffin is odder still given that he has already committed a tenth of a billion dollars to a ritzy Shanghai beachhead, allowing the hedge fund manager to double down on his oriental campaign.)

If, for whatever reason, one were to (foolishly) dismiss any reason to be concerned about the relationship between the Florida Governor and China due to the former’s largest donor’s business interests there, in addition to Ken Griffin’s many public criticisms leveled against Trump’s extraordinarily successful tariffs, the influence of another Chinese actor, the Koch-funded 501(c)(4) Club for Growth will do little to assuage those concerns. In fact, the opposite is true: Club for Growth, which reportedly gave DeSantis $2 million in August alone (and which also notably slighted Trump by endorsing JD Vance’s primary challenger, Josh Mandel, for the Ohio Senate race this past cycle), has taken a decidedly hardline position against Chinese tariffs. Instead, it has sided with the demonstrably globalist positions of Ken Griffin and company, members of the Davos club, who prefer open borders policies on both trade and immigration. In a word, Club for Growth is globalist, and unapologetically so – not to be unexpected from the amnesty-loving Kochs.

Of course, all this negatively reflects back on DeSantis, who is dependent on not just Griffin, but now, with the Club for Growth addition, several groups in thrall to policies that could well prioritize Chinese interests over American interests. This would risk undoing the tremendous gains made under President Trump in the trade war with China, this century’s foremost conflict for global hegemony, an opportunity that America – especially now two years into Biden’s disastrous term – simply cannot afford to squander.

Free trade makes natural bedfellows with open borders, and DeSantis, being so heavily indebted to these groups with globalist tendencies, naturally at some point would be expected to be required to make good on those debts. How those debts would be repaid is yet to be seen, but one could easily imagine a scenario in which DeSantis would foreseeably have to compromise on lax immigration policies or loosen some Trump-era tariffs, which have gone a long way towards protecting domestic industries from being further outsourced and exploited by foreign actors with groups, such as Club for Growth, that have bankrolled his political career.

When he served as a congressman, DeSantis’s voting record and statements while on the House floor were far from indicative of someone with non-interventionist and populist views. For one, DeSantis voted alongside known neoconservatives Kevin McCarthy, Adam Kinzinger, and Liz Cheney while serving with them in the 2017-2018 congress 93%, 94%, and 95% of the time, respectively. DeSantis’s agreement with fellow congressional neoconservatives did not stop with their shared voting records, however. The now-Florida Governor has accumulated a history of making neoconservative or interventionist statements.

DeSantis voted alongside known neoconservatives Kevin McCarthy (pictured), Adam Kinzinger, and Liz Cheney (pictured) while serving with them in the 2017-2018 congress 93%, 94%, and 95% of the time, respectively.

As the Twitter user “johnny maga” pointed out, in 2014 DeSantis spoke in favor of aligning the national security state with protestors in Iran who comprised the disastrous Arab Spring revolt which unleashed millions of Islamic “refugees” upon Europe and America. This not only aligned DeSantis with fellow neoconservatives like Liz Cheney and John McCain, but moreover, put him squarely in the camp of Barack Obama, who enthusiastically supported the Arab Spring for several years when it first broke out, insisting that “the United States has supported forces of change … because we recognized our own beliefs in the aspiration of men and women who took to the streets” in 2012 remarks to the United Nations General Assembly. 

And lest we need reminding, only a year after DeSantis made what history has quickly proven to be extraordinarily shortsighted remarks, Paris was rampaged by some of the worst terrorist attacks by radical Islamic groups in modern European history — the deadliest of these being the horrific attacks in Paris by ISIS militants in November 2015, which left 137 dead and well over another 400 injured – the worst attacks on French soil since World War II.

Ron, an Establishment Icon?

Another bugaboo for DeSantis has been his inability (or willingness) to distance himself from the Republican establishment. This is reflected in the groups from which DeSantis has been comfortable regularly taking money, such as the aforementioned, Koch-funded “Club for Growth,” which has already funded several high-profile “polls” showing DeSantis prevailing in a head-to-head matchup over Trump. It seems plausible that DeSantis would like to position himself to Trump’s right on issues that resonate most with the base – priority among these seemingly being a candidate’s ability to frame himself as a formidable challenger and outsider to the Washington swamp.

Ron DeSantis has every reason on earth to prove to the world that, given his past ties to the Washington establishment, his loyalties truly belong to the grassroots. But so far, he leaves much to be desired.

But given DeSantis’s outstanding debts to Washington, being a career politician after all, and his previously discussed deep financial commitments to swampy groups, this framing would appear to be a particularly hard sell for him to make. Accordingly, it would seem as though DeSantis has every reason on earth to prove to the world that, given his questionable background, his loyalties truly belong to the grassroots. It might therefore be expected that he would denounce the swamp whenever given the opportunity (and do so repeatedly), while severing any and all remaining ties he has with it in clear and unambiguous terms.

So far, DeSantis has done nothing of the kind. And for many conservatives, DeSantis’s silence has been deafening – especially considering how many Republican establishment figures, from various Bushes and McCains to Karl Rove and Paul Ryan – to the Murdoch media empire and its legacy appendages in Fox News to the Wall Street Journal to the New York Post – if stopping short of giving their full-throated endorsement of the Florida governor, have at various points (and with increasing frequency) signaled their unmistaken preference for DeSantis over Trump in 2024.

Now, one might argue that it is no fault of DeSantis’s own that these legacy institutions have affixed themselves to his would-be campaign: it is not like DeSantis (at least publicly) courted their favor. And to the extent he has enjoyed positive coverage from them, it has come organically, much like the free press that drove Trump’s 2016 campaign.

That may be true to a certain degree, but that narrative is complicated by DeSantis’s own track record, which reads like a laundry list of compliments for establishment bigwigs (or as we Italians like to say: pezzonovante). Recall that in 2018 – years after Trump took the Bush family to task on the campaign trail for their disastrous handling of 9/11 and the war in Iraq, famously labeling it a “big fat mistake” in a primary debate with Jeb Bush, which was groundbreaking at the time because Trump was the first major Republican candidate to call out the Bush administration for lying about Weapons of Mass Destruction to drag us into a decades-long quagmire in the Middle East. Obviously not getting the memo about his party’s changed tenor with respect to the Bushes, DeSantis — his head apparently stuck in 2004 — still lavished praise upon the Bush family when given the opportunity to do so on the occasion of President George H.W. Bush’s death in December of that year.

Rather than opt for more appropriately subdued remarks, given the litany of problems the Bush family has wrought upon this country (and which indirectly was responsible for both Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s rise to power), DeSantis instead took the opportunity to wax obsequiously about the 41st President’s special place in American history, groveling that “President Bush amassed prodigious accomplishments and he did it all with uncommon grace, class and honor,” and going so far as to call the 41st President “an American hero, a faithful servant and the greatest Yalie of them all.”

While kind remarks are not out of place for the solemn occasion of the death of a president, regardless of party affiliation, DeSantis’s borderline sycophantic remarks are grossly out of touch with the current political moment. This, particularly when compared with the more appropriately measured statements of President Trump, who despite recognizing the sobriety of the occasion, also understood – and this was reflected by the muted tone of his remarks – that it was the Bush legacy which has rendered incalculable, indeed likely permanent damage, upon our nation.

Even allowing for the premise that DeSantis had time to evolve as a politician since 2018, he appears if anything to have only further ingratiated himself with the establishment since that time. For example, since July 2021 DeSantis has donated a whopping $100k to Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, a historically anti-Trump media and GOP-establishment outfit. It can be easily forgotten, because of his uncanny tendency to shift with the political winds, that Shapiro was one of the loudest conservative anti-Trump critics in 2016. And although Shapiro changed his tune for 2020, he has since reverted to his former anti-Trump ways, and with a vengeance, this time attempting to wage what has (thankfully) been a largely unsuccessful digital crusade to date to elevate DeSantis’s profile over that of the 45th President for 2024.

While the Daily Wire’s history with Trump may be described as lukewarm at best, of all the legacy conservative publications that repudiated Trump on his 2016 bid for the White House, perhaps no outfit did so as brazenly (and correspondingly revealed itself for being so grievously out of touch) as National Review, which infamously dedicated an entire issue in 2016 to the subject. The unreadable article, which fashioned itself as a sort of rallying cry at the time for the conservative “movement,” with signatures ranging from such “luminaries” who would soon develop chronic (and, as it would turn out, lifelong) cases of TDS (e.g., Bill Kristol), to washed-up geriatrics from the Reagan years (e.g., Thomas Sowell and Edward Meese), to people nobody has ever even heard of (e.g., “Michael Medved”), would expose NR for the farce it is, an out of touch relic of an utterly bygone age.

Yet, National Review is back in the game of (at least trying) to anoint kingpins, and this time around its obvious choice is none other than Ronny D. While the publication has yet to make an official endorsement, article after article would suggest that Florida’s governor is the preferred candidate of the de facto literary mouthpiece of the Republican establishment.

To the extent NR ever (gently) criticizes DeSantis anymore, it is usually because DeSantis acted in a way that was too Trump-like, and not for the reasons genuine conservatives might occasionally take umbrage with the 45th President – namely, for deviating from the 2016 MAGA rhetoric and platform which cemented The Donald forever to the history books. And while National Review is functionally irrelevant today, the larger point holds that it would have been (and still remains) unthinkable for the magazine to give so much as positive coverage, let alone deep-throated praise, to Donald Trump, whether that may be his 2015-16 version or present iteration. In sharp contrast, it has done just that (and then some) with Ron DeSantis, the man who “would pave the way for a post-Trump GOP return to normal,” according to one of their senior political correspondents.

Jim Geraghty (pictured), Senior political correspondent of National Review, the man who sees in Ron DeSantis the key to “pave the way for a post-Trump GOP return to normal.”

Beyond the conservative “intellectual” establishment, DeSantis has even enjoyed (albeit qualified) support from many well-known self-identified liberals, perhaps the most high-profile case of these being Bill Maher, who has made a decades-long career of browbeating heartland conservative yokels into submitting to destructive liberal policies that would later pave the way for the more ruthless “woke mind virus” that ravages the country today. Unwilling to reap the woke fruits of the invective he has been sowing for decades, however, and still viewing conservatives as easily exploitable sheeple, Maher now has been observed attempting to win at least tentative favor among some of their ilk. This comes at a time in which liberals continue to radicalize– and devour former members deemed out of step with the everchanging, leftward-pacing cultural zeitgeist. Of course, even in the face of existential risks to his professional reputation (if not worse), Maher would not stoop so low as to praise Donald Trump – instead, he has treaded more politically correct waters in pronouncing that Ron DeSantis would be way better than Donald Trump as president. Which, like National Review’s unofficial endorsement – both perceiving Ron as a “safe choice” – is extremely telling about the would-be candidate.

Now one may counter that DeSantis is merely trying to carve out opportunities within a conservative media space still largely monopolized by Trump – and thus it is only reasonable that he should exploit whatever few opportunities come his way. Sure. The fact that the compliments are only coming from legacy outfits – the kinds of media networks that would otherwise like to turn the page on the Trump era and return to “business as usual” in Washington – are but minor details that are best dismissed without asking further questions.

Even giving that (exceedingly implausible) theory an iota of credence, it would seem to only elevate the urgency for DeSantis to put a quash on the rumors that he could be (or eventually become) an establishment shill, which could easily be done by simply stating, in unambiguous terms, that he is aligned with the grassroots. One no brainer opportunity for DeSantis to prove his MAGA bonafides would have been to throw his support wholeheartedly behind Harmeet Dhillon (or for that matter, Mike Lindell) over Ronna McDaniel for RNC Chair. Doing so would give assurances to the base that, at least on this one issue, DeSantis is firmly aligned with their priorities, the overwhelming majority of which are greatly disappointed with the midterm results and deeply dissatisfied with current Republican leadership.

This would seem like a pretty uncontroversial stance for DeSantis to take as well, especially considering how deeply unpopular McDaniel is among the base – only made worse by reports that McDaniel effectively jerry rigged the RNC during her tenure into a personal slush fund for her own amusements – including expending several hundred thousand dollars on cupcakes, candles, coffee, and “Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn, West Elm, and Restoration Hardware” (yes, you read that correctly!).

This outrageous misuse of resources, especially at a time in which inflation remains at forty-year highs and many Americans are struggling mightily to put food on the table, would seem to tee-up the perfect opportunity for DeSantis to formally disavow McDaniel by officially endorsing one of her challengers – and in doing so, steal even Donald Trump’s thunder, who has yet to make an official endorsement on the matter. Indeed, this egregious misuse of resources warrants a full-throated condemnation from the Republican Party’s most powerful officeholder.

Regrettably, DeSantis has so far even slow-walked an official endorsement for RNC chair. There is absolutely no reason, however you might square it, that DeSantis should not have already gobbled up this debate – especially given his prior endorsement of Lee Zeldin, who was considered a potential RNC candidate to succeed McDaniel, and who himself has called for a change of leadership before deciding to withdraw from the race entirely a few short weeks ago. In other words, if a moderate Republican from New York like Zeldin could take the anodyne position of denouncing McDaniel (a member of the Romney family, lest we forget), it should be easy for an alleged conservative firebrand like Ron DeSantis to do the same.

But alas, so far (and at a time when the bully pulpit of America’s most powerful governor is desperately needed: on one front Harmeet Dhillon has taken up arms with party elites while on another Kari Lake is waging the battle of her political life with Hail Mary lawsuits to fight on behalf of election integrity, our time’s gravest injustice, against a deeply rigged Maricopa County political machine), there have been mostly crickets from Team Ron.

As a Matter of Loyalty, Ron Owes the Don His Patronage

Also where the DeSantis camp has been found wanting was its response to this past summer’s totally unprecedented and unconstitutional FBI-orchestrated raid on Mar-a-Lago, the official residence of the 45th President. The raid, which was greenlit by Florida Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, whose previous claim to fame was representing clients linked to Jeffrey Epstein, was one of the most invidious, vindictive power grabs in recent American history by an administrative state agency (all the more impressive given the long list of recent abuses of power made by deep state forces against President Trump and acolytes over the past half decade, from the allegations of campaign wiretapping to the phony Mueller witch-hunt to the two sham impeachments, to the January 6 show trial, etc., etc., etc.)

In light of this obvious corruption, DeSantis has remained more or less stoic, doing little more than tweeting that the “raid on [Mar-a-Lago] is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves.” By sweeping it in one fell swoop along with the Hunter Biden story (the latter albeit noteworthy, though for separate reasons), DeSantis failed to convey that he adequately grasped the gravity of the raid itself, the first of its kind exacted against a man who served as President of the United States.

The fact that DeSantis only telegraphed his gentle disapproval (and dishonoring its seriousness by tweet, no less) — treating it not as a standalone tragedy, but trivializing its importance by grouping it alongside the Hunter Biden story – further adds insult to injury. The message from DeSantis could not be clearer: while bad for the republic, the FBI raid is obviously politically expedient for the man who wants to claim Trump’s mantle. Thus, however much at odds DeSantis and the deep state might be, they are aligned in their shared goal to bring down Trump, and so, for the purposes of the raid, too harsh an indictment on DeSantis’s part might jeopardize what could otherwise be a mutually beneficial partnership between his camp and the Feds — namely, one forged of the ancient precept: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

By sharp contrast, Trump has made a point of calling on all permanent employees in the federal bureaucracy to be fireable at will with so-called “Section F” reform, which would demarcate a historic overhaul of the civil service system, arguably the greatest reform since its inception in the late nineteenth century. Similarly imaginative is President Trump’s recent proposal to radically alter the digital landscape for speech, in which he outlined in a videotaped address a comprehensive, multi-pronged plan that “would target government agencies and employees, universities and tech companies with a series of executive orders and policies aimed at their purported censorship of speech and ideas.” The boldness of Trump’s vision was lauded by none other than Dr. Darren Beattie, editor in chief of Revolver News and one of the leading voices on this issue, who had high praise for Trump’s ambitious plan, calling it “one of the most powerful, informed, and serious statements on the critical issue of Big Tech censorship ever given by an elected official.”

For his part, DeSantis has not proposed anything that would be considered even within the same ballpark as Trump’s call to reform the administrative state and the landscape for speech. Even if Trump is unable to pass such dramatic reforms, by at least articulating a proposal of such magnitude in scope and vision, it not only demonstrates that Trump’s head is in the right place for gauging the scale of the kind of reforms needed to fix the administrative state, but moreover, it helps rhetorically sets goalposts from which MAGA allies, both now and in the future, could later build.

DeSantis, by contrast, continues to tout Section 230 reforms to regulate Big Tech, which has almost obtained a meme-like status in certain right-wing circles for its essentially meaningless definition. And moreover, in light of Twitter’s recent acquisition by Musk, a reform of Section 230 risks potentially opening Pandora’s Box by opportunistic leftists and their biglaw allies to wage lawfare by weaponizing any Republican-issued changes to the law and litigate Twitter and other tech companies vaguely amenable to right wing causes out of existence. That is not, of course, to dismiss the viability of Section 230 out of hand. But it does illustrate that Ron’s big tech jeremiads, which make easy fodder as lowbrow campaign talking points, are at best incomplete thoughts, at worse indicative of a leader who has incompetently grasped the flexible approach that is needed to adequately navigate, let alone correct, the everchanging landscape of Big Tech censorship.

DeSantis: All Data, No Political Instinct!

Separate and apart from a questionable history of policy decisions, DeSantis has yet showcased an uncanny political instinct anywhere commensurate with Donald Trump’s, whose gut ran circles around the mediocre recommendations of every DC focus group, lobbyist, political consultant, and career bureaucrat. Indeed, it was largely due to Trump’s rarefied talent to cut through the nonsense suggestions of hack careerists that won him an indelible place in the hearts of millions of his fellow countrymen, and which surely will reward him a venerable place in history once all is said and done.

The indicator of a world historical statesman, perhaps above all else, is his ability to make sound judgments with limited information on a moment’s notice, using the wisdom cultivated over years of life experience – and often bucking the countervailing prejudices of his own time in tow. In order to see what is best for the people, it often requires a foresightedness, born of greatness, which remains elusive to lesser men. And so, the people may act with hostility against the stateman’s agenda even though that same agenda is most conducive to their best interests over the long run.

The exceptional statesman, willing to take on this burden, understands it as his birthright to do what is necessary to revitalize the lost virtues which in past generations made his country strong, even if his own generation fails to properly recognize the enormity of his achievements. This is the heavy burden carried by all great presidents and statesmen, from Lincoln to Churchill to Trump – and it is the reason why the latter stands head and shoulders above any would-be challenger – those challengers themselves being largely manufactured counterfeits of an out of touch media elite, itself partially responsible for the very crisis that inspired Trump’s political movement in the first place.

From Churchill to Trump – world historic statesmen carry the heavy burden of going against popular opinion, due to extraordinary foresight, to achieve what is best for the common good — this is why history immortalizes these rare men of greatness.

DeSantis’s unstatesmanlike political instincts, by contrast, are readily observable and in no short supply. Indeed, his lack of killer instinct is what many mainstream outfits have latched onto to help distinguish DeSantis’s political identity as a more “polished” or “scripted” (read: traditional politician) alternative to Donald Trump. This for example was on display in covid’s early days when DeSantis was photographed alongside President Trump with a mask wrapped tightly around his face like a diaper. One can easily forget that when photographed, DeSantis was still in the first half of his first term as governor following the heels of a hotly contested race in which he barely defeated his opponent, the now-disgraced Andrew Gillum (who would later be charged with conspiracy, wire fraud, and making false statements – several months after Gillum was at the scene of a police raid on a Miami Beach hotel responding to calls of a meth overdose involving several adult men) by only the slimmest of margins – likely only carried across the finish line by Donald Trump’s endorsement. Accordingly, in trying to carve out his own political identity, DeSantis made a strident effort at the time to fashion himself as a technocratic version of Trump, embracing – if not actively directing – his growing reputation as a problem solver who relished in “following the data.”

This, of course, is not to excuse President Trump for his full-on embrace of the vaccines through “Operation Warp Speed,” which he continued to tout months after much scientific evidence had demonstrated the vaccine’s failure to meaningfully prevent covid, to say nothing of its undeniable correlation with myocarditis and a slew of other potentially fatal health ailments, particularly among children and adolescents. But it is to say that inasmuch as DeSantis would like to position himself to Trump’s right on covid, maybe the only issue on which there is some argument, DeSantis’s own track record with the bureaucratic-scientific establishment can at best be described as conciliatory, at worst, bedfellows. Repeatedly would DeSantis gauge public policy based on the dictates of “the data.” And although Florida was one of the first states to reopen, it was less the result of economic and personal devastation, but because “the data” told him that masks and lockdowns were ineffective to combat the spread of the virus.

Beyond optics and covid, DeSantis’s less-than-spectacular political instincts are readily seen in a variety of different policy contexts. It has become an unfortunate but constant mainstay in recent years that woke forces will threaten to reimagine American history by physically tearing down statues and monuments, a phenomenon that has picked up exponentially in the wake of the George Floyd riots. These forces are readily enabled by spineless Republican governors who, out of cowardice and ignorance, forfeit their country’s history to the tyranny of the woke, rather than put up a fight and defend their cultural patrimony. In the years before Trump’s political ascendancy, the standard-bearer for how Republican governors would handle these matters was Nikki Haley, who so quickly capitulated to woke cries to take down South Carolina’s Confederate battle flag from the state Capitol, which in modern times developed an entirely new meaning, much as the Auschwitz concentration camp does in Poland today, as a memorial to remind current generations not to repeat the wrongs of the past.

Rather than learn from the lessons of history, Haley instead sided with those leftist forces who would prefer to tear history down, both good and bad, and in so doing – risk repeating history’s gravest atrocities. This playbook of cowardice, followed by most Republicans, reached cartoonish proportions when Mitt Romney was observed marching alongside BLM rioters as cities were still smoldering and small businesses being looted from the summer 2020 riots. These pathetic trends still continue, as more recently evidenced by the number of Republicans (all but fourteen) who voted to make “Juneteenth” a federal holiday, solemnizing those destructive headwinds that caused billions of dollars of economic devastation, and far greater untold cultural devastation, likely to persist for generations, upon our country.

Still in the early days of covid, DeSantis was photographed with a mask wrapped tightly around his face alongside President Trump, who chose to go maskless — knowing it a farce from the get-go — resisting intense pressures from even his own administration.

Only Donald Trump stands athwart the tides of chaos in defending America’s cultural touchstones. As riots plundered the country, Donald Trump repeatedly defended our traditions and heritage. This, despite calls from so many members within his own party – and administration – to follow Mitt Romney and Nikki Haley’s playbook of cowardice. For his part, DeSantis took a page from the Romney-Haley playbook. Despite recurrently positioning himself as an anti-woke crusader for the press, in reality DeSantis has similarly capitulated to woke cultural forces when push came to shove.

In 2019, for example, DeSantis asked U.S. capitol officials to take down the statue of a monument of a Confederate general that had stood firm for over a century. In this one act, DeSantis demonstrated the limits of his anti-woke proclivities, showing that he would surrender to forces intent on tearing down the United States root and branch – and this, before the worst of the cultural firestorm would be triggered a year later with George Floyd’s death.

DeSantis’s penchant to side with leftists on culture war issues does not stop at monuments. Even on something as ostensibly anodyne as the left’s war on plastic straws, in which DeSantis yet again sided with liberals in vetoing local prohibitions on paper straw bans, matters a lot in our day and age when every public act carries political import. At a bare minimum, especially when contrasted with Trump’s totally off-the-cuff (and deeply relatable) anti-plastic straw ban remarks in a political speech, it demonstrates DeSantis’s inability to connect with the American people in a way that only Donald Trump can. The war on plastic straws (and DeSantis’s corresponding failure to take the right stance on this issue), though maybe trivial from the perspective of a DC consultant, means everything to normal Americans. This is because it not only stands as a kitchen table problem, but more importantly, it stands as an indictment of DeSantis’s political instincts, which are not perfectly aligned with the instincts of everyday people in a way that Donald Trump’s uniquely are.

If DeSantis is siding with the woke on straws, where might he side on bigger, costlier issues – such as continuing to fund NATO, the war in Ukraine, and the southern border, all of which pose existential threats to our national sovereignty? These are fair questions to ask, particularly of a man whose instincts cannot get right something as basic as plastic straws!

Ron’s Dubious Track Record of Political Endorsements

Although many have wrongly wanted to assign blame for this year’s underwhelming midterm results to Donald Trump’s endorsements (the vast majority of which, by the way, were successful), in reality, Ron DeSantis’s endorsements fared arguably worse. And though it is true that DeSantis’s and Trump’s endorsements mostly overlapped, in those rare cases in which Trump either remained noncommittal or endorsed but did not actively campaign with (or enthusiastically support) his chosen candidate, such as Lee Zeldin’s bid for New York Governor, and where DeSantis instead took Trump’s place, the Florida Governor proved mightily underwhelming.

The Zeldin example is a great case in point: considering Hochul’s unpopularity – even among Democrats in a state as deep blue as New York purportedly is – Zeldin’s bid for governor, in which he came within a seven point margin of the incumbent Democratic governor, the most formidable challenge by a Republican for state office in literally decades, one is behooved to ask that had it been Trump, not DeSantis, campaigning alongside Zeldin, how much of a difference would that have impacted the final results?

One can easily imagine the advice being transmitted to Zeldin’s campaign from RNC-funded DC-based consultants, none of whom likely ever once stepped foot in New York state through the duration of the campaign:

“Mr. Zeldin, we have run several simulations, ran countless focus groups, and have reached the conclusion that it would be in your best political interest to campaign alongside Ron DeSantis, not Donald Trump, even though most New Yorkers are intimately familiar with the latter, who lived in the state for the first seven decades of his life. This is based on the soundproof logic that New York is a ‘blue’ state, and DeSantis, the non-New Yorker, being the more ‘palatable’ of the two candidates – Trump without the baggage, if you will – therefore plays better to the political sensibilities of most Republican New Yorkers.”

Zeldin, himself with much to be desired in killer political instincts, nods appreciatively of the advice he had just been given. He then smiles and clicks the goodbye emoji to close out the four-way Zoom call consisting of Zeldin, Nick Langworthy, Ronna McDaniel, and Frank Luntz. (Note to readers: THIS IS SATIRE – I have no evidence that such a call ever occurred, though the imagined scenario certainly illustrates the kinds of communications routinely made between Republican elites centered in Washington and the candidates they commission to run for office across the country.)

The above story further underscores the point that DeSantis is hardly Trump’s political superior, let alone substitute, because his rally with Zeldin on Long Island did not result in Zeldin’s victory. But even on the assumption that all of DeSantis’s friends at National Review were one hundred percent correct, and that conservative Americans in the northeast and rustbelt who turned out for Trump in 2016 now see in the Florida Governor a better alternative, this still overlooks the deep-seated structural problems for any Republican candidate running a national campaign in the United States. With Pennsylvania and Arizona now completely in Democratic hands – and Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and other states dealing with problems arising from voter fraud, ballot harvesting, mail-in ballots, bought off (or blockheaded — a problem, I might add, not isolated to a single party) judges, and lack of overall transparency and corruption in the electoral process (again, look no further than the countless obstacles facing Kari Lake and her ongoing lawsuit for election integrity in Maricopa County), it is not like those problems would disappear overnight, as some DeSantis supporters would have you believe, if it were he and not Trump at the head of the ticket in 2024.

These structural barriers, themselves increasingly difficult to overcome with each passing election cycle as Democrats further consolidate and monopolize their power, are something that in an ideal world should unite both Trump and DeSantis. The fact remains that DeSantis, for all his faults, remains the most powerful elected Republican in the country. If his heart is truly aligned with the MAGA movement, he should be doing everything in his power to ensure not only that Florida remains red, but that other states – Texas, Georgia, Arizona, Ohio, Virginia, etc. – implement Florida’s election integrity playbook by registering hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of new voters, doing away with machine and multi-day voting, and fundamentally overhauling the entire election system to guarantee fairness and restore trust in the process – thus making Trump’s reelection a forgone conclusion.

An ideal suggestion for the Governor would be to assist fellow Republicans governors as well as grassroots organizations, such as the movement spearheaded by Scott Presler to register voters across the country, in creating and implementing a strategy so that Florida’s example eventually becomes the norm, not the exception, for the nation (or at least for red and purple states). This is the kind of information that would make a truly valuable book, not another run-of-the-mill memoir usually written by presidential hopefuls looking to make a quick buck, which are almost always bankrupt in literary value. A book exhaustively detailing DeSantis’ (quite effective) strategy to register upwards of a hundred thousand new Republicans in the state of Florida may not be the kind of bestseller that typically accompanies the candidate on the campaign trail, but it would add real value to the movement — a movement in dire need of leadership and direction. Unfortunately, so far, on this score Ron leaves much to be desired.

Furthermore, DeSantis should recognize the urgency and magnitude of the present crisis affecting our nation at large, and throw his weight around candidates and causes (even in the “off season” for elections) that should naturally align with his asserted political views. I mentioned earlier the desperate need to replace Ronna McDaniel as RNC Chair with either Harmeet Dhillon or Mike Lindell. Even though neither Trump nor DeSantis are directly involved in the selection process, it is obvious that if they were to both mutually back Harmeet Dhillon, for example, that would certainly go a long way towards landing her the job (at the very least, it would further erode at McDaniel’s authority to carry on in the position).

Ditto the ongoing crusade among MAGA loyalists to replace Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker. Could you imagine if again both Trump and DeSantis were to mutually agree on a better alternative – maybe the Florida native Matt Gaetz, for example, or Andy Biggs, or Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Lee Zeldin, or Elise Stefanik, or really anyone else (even Donald Trump, maybe?) – their alignment would send a powerful signal to Washington that MAGA, not the establishment, controls the Republican agenda – indicating to McConnell and company that their time has passed, and they should be put out to pasture.

The bottom line is that, at 44, Ron DeSantis has potentially decades of political life still to come. He should not listen to aids who tell him that 2024 is a do-or-die moment for his presidential prospects. Indeed, the political landscape has changed drastically over these past several years, and all the old rules have been tossed out the window. DeSantis should thus not fear becoming another Chris Christie, someone who peaked too soon and is now considered a pariah in his own party. What DeSantis has accomplished in Florida is impressive, but what Trump did in four years in Washington cannot be replicated — and is therefore something that DeSantis’s own record, however remarkable, will never be able to hold a candle to.

2024: A Time for Trump

All of this leads to the obvious conclusion: 2024 is Donald Trump’s moment, and his alone. Knowing this, DeSantis should do everything in his power to conciliate, rather than alienate, the man responsible for making his political stardom. This is not mere political debt or gratitude, though it is that in part, nor even a question of loyalty – that most rarefied virtue that is all but missing in American public life today. Indeed, it is one of prudence, that most important virtue for statesmen.

And beyond those higher considerations, DeSantis should understand that our age is one in which older authorities and rules are being discredited by the day. The Florida governor has an opportunity to therefore become a kind of wunderkind with few if any precedents in American history. He should thus use these next four years to creatively put his talents to their proper use – understanding the shifting political landscape, and recognizing that as politics continues to polarize, and this country fractionalize, governorships will only become more and more powerful within their individual capacities.

Indeed, in many ways DeSantis can accomplish much more as the governor of Florida, setting a model for other red states, than he would ever be able to accomplish as President of the United States. DeSantis also still has not anointed a true successor for his post – which is improvident given that Florida’s fate as an island for sanity in a country engulfed by chaos is so intertwined with Ron DeSantis’s political career. The good of both the state and nation would require that DeSantis cultivates a successor, worthy of building upon the programs he spearheaded – in other words, a candidate at least as capable (if not greater) than the man himself. This undertaking will take some time, both to identify the right person and moreover, to ensure that he (or she) is adequately trained for the task.

In the meantime, Mr. DeSantis: let Donald Trump run for president, and continue to model Florida as a paradigmatic example for red states (and even blue ones) to follow. Many states, including “red” ones, still have much to learn from Florida – there is no reason, for instance, why your immediate neighbor to the north still cannot figure out how to run a clean election. Nor is there reason why Texas, another large red state, has failed to replicate Florida’s success for election integrity — alongside a host of other issues Florida has done better than anyone else.

DeSantis should not rest on his laurels, either: while much progress has been made, there is still a ton of work to be done. And so, Mr. Governor, it would be in your best interest to listen to those who have put themselves on the frontlines of this battle: consulting someone like former state legislator Anthony Sabatini, who has pioneered the movement to identify a panoply of problems that Florida, much like the rest of the nation, will need to overcome – from controlling its borders, to corporate-driven wokeness, to the rot of the intelligence agencies, which continue to resort to unconstitutional means to haunt political opponents, now branded as “enemies of the state” domiciled within Florida and other states across the country — would be a good first start.

There is a long, long way to go before the United States restores due process or even the propriety of the rule of law apropos of a constitutional republic originally founded on liberty and natural right. Today, in more ways than not, we increasingly resemble the banana republics to our south, in thrall to an irremediably corrupt ruling class hellbent on extinguishing what embers of freedom might still exist on these shores, further dwindling by the day, making it plausible that ours will be the generation to witness “government of the people, by the people, for the people” perish from the earth.

Paul Ingrassia is a two-time Claremont Fellow: he was the Jack Roth Charitable Foundation John Marshall Fellow for 2022 and a Publius Fellow in 2020. Mr. Ingrassia graduated from Cornell Law School in 2022. His Twitter handle is: @PaulIngrassia.