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    5 Takeaways From Ron DeSantis’s First Campaign Trip

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    He swung back at Donald Trump. He vowed to vanquish the “woke mob” and turn the country into mega-Florida. He had normal encounters with voters that didn’t become memes.After his unusual, buzzy and ill-fated presidential debut on Twitter last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida carried out a far more traditional campaign tour this week, barnstorming Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina to sell himself as the strongest Republican alternative to former President Donald J. Trump.Along the way, he drew sizable, enthusiastic crowds of DeSantis-curious voters. He held babies. He got testy with a reporter. He threw some punches at Mr. Trump. He warned of a “malignant ideology” being pressed by liberals and vowed to “impose our will” to stop it.Here are five takeaways.He won’t cower against Trump — but how hard he’ll counterattack is unclear.For months, Mr. DeSantis held his fire against Mr. Trump. Those days are clearly over.“Petty,” he labeled Mr. Trump’s taunts. “Juvenile.” The former president’s criticisms of him? “Bizarre” and “ridiculous.”But Mr. DeSantis made those remarks not from the stage, in front of Republican voters, but behind the scenes in comments to reporters, suggesting that he is not quite ready to attack Mr. Trump head-on. Instead, his most direct shots were saved for President Biden (“We’re going to take all that Biden nonsense and rip it out by the roots”). When it comes to Mr. Trump, the governor has said he is simply defending himself from a man with whom he avoided public disagreements for years.“Well, now he’s attacking me,” a seemingly aggrieved Mr. DeSantis said outside Des Moines.There are risks to bashing Mr. Trump. For some voters, part of Mr. DeSantis’s appeal has been his willingness to avoid warring with a fellow Republican.“DeSantis has Trump policies, without all the name-calling,” said Monica Schieb, an Iowa voter who supported Mr. Trump in 2016 but now plans to back Mr. DeSantis.Mr. DeSantis drew healthy crowds on the trip, as he did in Gilbert. He often sought to highlight his relative youthfulness at age 44, in contrast to Donald J. Trump and President Biden. Nicole Craine for The New York TimesA key message: He’s young and energetic and can serve two terms.Mr. DeSantis packed his schedule with three or four rallies per day, covering hundreds of miles in each state and addressing a total of more than 7,000 people, his campaign said.The events did not quite have the MAGA-Woodstock energy of Mr. Trump’s arena rallies, but they were lively and well-attended. Tightly orchestrated, too: There was no chowing of hoagies or cozying up to bikers at diners. Up-tempo country music and occasionally cheesy rock (“Chicken Fried” by the Zac Brown Band and “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor) preceded him onstage.The message behind the rigorous schedule?Turning the country into a mega-Florida takes a “disciplined, energetic president,” in his words.It’s a phrase we’re likely to hear more of, given that it takes aim at both of the major obstacles in Mr. DeSantis’s path to the White House: Mr. Trump and President Biden.At nearly every event, Mr. DeSantis, 44, used comments about his energy level as an indirect swipe at his much older opponents. Mr. Trump is 76; Mr. Biden is 80. And Mr. DeSantis regularly noted that unlike his main Republican rival, Mr. Trump, he would be able to serve two terms.The messaging allowed Mr. DeSantis to set a clear contrast with the former president without necessarily angering Mr. Trump’s loyal supporters.Two terms, the governor says, would give him more time to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices and unwind the “deep state.” (Mr. Trump responded angrily to the new line of attack, saying in Iowa on Thursday that “you don’t need eight years, you need six months,” adding, “Who the hell wants to wait eight years?”)The case Mr. DeSantis is making, however, sometimes seems to be undercut by his own delivery. Even supporters acknowledge that he is not a natural orator, and on the stump he sometimes calls himself an “energetic executive” in a neutral monotone.Mr. DeSantis kicked off the tour with an event on Tuesday at an evangelical church in Clive, Iowa. Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesHumbly, he compares himself to Churchill, fighting ‘the woke mob’ on the beaches.If Mr. DeSantis had to summarize what he believes is wrong with America in one word, his three-state tour suggests the answer might be “woke,” a term that many Republican politicians find easy to use but hard to define. The governor frequently rails against “wokeness,” which he describes as a “war on the truth,” in distinctly martial terms.At several events, Mr. DeSantis, a military veteran, seemed to borrow from Winston Churchill’s famous “We shall fight on the beaches” speech, given to exhort the citizens of Britain in their existential struggle against Nazi Germany.“We will fight the woke in education,” Mr. DeSantis said in New Hampshire. “We will fight the woke in corporations. And we will fight the woke in the halls of Congress. We will never surrender to the woke mob.”(Mr. Trump seemed to take a shot at his rival’s use of the word, saying on Thursday, “I don’t like the term ‘woke,’ because I hear ‘woke, woke, woke.’” He added: “It’s just a term they use. Half the people can’t even define it. They don’t know what it is.”)Earlier, at his kickoff rally outside Des Moines on Tuesday night, Mr. DeSantis seemed to put the various building blocks of his stump speech together into a coherent vision, one that portrayed the United States as a nation being assaulted from the inside by unseen liberal forces bent on reshaping every aspect of American life.“They are imposing their agenda on us, via the federal government, via corporate America, via our own education system,” he said. “All for their benefit and all to our detriment.”In turn, Mr. DeSantis promised to aggressively wield the power of the presidency in order to resculpt the nation according to conservative principles, much as he says he has done in Florida, where he has often pushed the boundaries of executive office.“It does not have to be this way,” he continued in his Iowa kickoff speech. “We must choose a path that will lead to a revival of American greatness.” The line drew cheers.Mr. DeSantis on Thursday in Manchester, N.H. Apart from a few contentious exchanges with reporters, he avoided awkward moments on the trip. David Degner for The New York TimesHis interactions: Pretty normal, overall.Both detractors and supporters were watching closely for how Mr. DeSantis, who sometimes appears uncomfortable with the basics of retail politics, interacted with voters. Democrats and Trump allies have made a legion of memes out of his uncomfortable facial expressions or clumsy responses to voters in casual conversations. (An emphatic “OK!” is often his answer to learning a person’s name or a child’s age.)But apart from a pugnacious exchange or two with the news media — episodes that are, of course, cheered by the Republican base — Mr. DeSantis avoided obvious awkward moments. He tried to make himself relatable, playing up his dad credentials. He told stories about taking his family out for fast food and contending with a 3-year-old who needed to use the “little potty.”After his speeches, he worked the rope line, talked with voters, snapped pictures and signed autographs. He always reacted enthusiastically when voters told him they lived part-time in Florida. “What part?” was his standard follow-up, before discussing how badly those areas had been hit by Hurricane Ian.While this all might be a low bar, it was set, in part, by Mr. Trump’s relentless mockery of Mr. DeSantis’s personality.Frank Ehrenberger, 73, a retired engineer who attended a DeSantis event in Iowa on Wednesday, said the governor had struck him as “genuine.”Still, Mr. DeSantis may need to do more. At events in Iowa and New Hampshire on Wednesday and Thursday, he did not take audience questions from the stage, leading to some criticism. Instead, at one stop in New Hampshire, Mr. DeSantis tossed baseball caps to the crowd.The early nominating states require a set of political skills different from the one that works in Florida, where politicians rely heavily on television advertising to get their messages across.By Friday, during his visit to South Carolina, he had seemed to shift his strategy, electing to answer voters’ questions from the stage alongside his wife, Casey DeSantis.Casey DeSantis has given remarks in the middle of Mr. DeSantis’s stump speeches at events, talking about both their family life and what she casts as her husband’s ability to clean up “the swamp” in Washington.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesYou’ll be seeing a lot more of Casey DeSantis.At his events, Mr. DeSantis has paused his stump speech to invite Ms. DeSantis onto the stage to deliver her own remarks. As she speaks, he usually stands smiling behind her before returning to the lectern to close out his speech. At one stop in New Hampshire, he kissed her temple after she had finished.These intermissions — not unprecedented, but unusual as a routine at presidential campaign events — underscore the high-profile role Ms. DeSantis is expected to play her in husband’s bid, after acting as an important adviser in his political rise.If this first tour is anything to go by, she is likely to be one of the most prominent and politically active spouses of a major presidential candidate in several election cycles, perhaps since Bill Clinton in 2008.Onstage, Ms. DeSantis tells the usual marital stories meant to humanize candidates and illustrate their family life — including an oft-repeated bit about the time one of their three children wielded permanent markers to decorate the dining room table in the governor’s mansion.But she is far from light entertainment. Much of her roughly five-minute speech is meant to portray her husband, whom she often refers to as “the governor,” as an authoritative, decisive leader, one capable of cleaning up “the swamp” in Washington.“Through all of the history, all the attacks from the corporate media and the left, he never changes,” Ms. DeSantis said Thursday in New Hampshire. “He never backs down, he never cowers. He never takes the path of least resistance.”Ann Klein More

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      In Iowa, DeSantis Signals the Start of a Slugfest With Trump

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      After absorbing months of attacks from the former president, the Florida governor is beginning to fire back — but carefully.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida came to Iowa for his first trip as a presidential candidate and made plain that he was done being Donald J. Trump’s punching bag.After absorbing months of attacks from Mr. Trump that went mostly unanswered, Mr. DeSantis has borrowed one of his rival’s favorite lines — “I’m going to counterpunch” — and jabbed back.He called one of the spending bills that Mr. Trump signed “grotesque” and accused him of increasing the national debt. He said the way Mr. Trump had sided with Disney in Mr. DeSantis’s war with the entertainment giant was “bizarre.” He described Mr. Trump’s criticism of the governor’s handling of Covid as “ridiculous.” And he dared Mr. Trump to take a position on the debt-limit bill pending in Washington.“Are you leading from the front?” Mr. DeSantis said, almost teasingly. “Or are you waiting for polls to tell you what position to take?”A tricky balancing act lies ahead for Mr. DeSantis. All of those comments came not onstage in his first campaign speech before hundreds of Republicans at an evangelical church, but during a 15-minute news conference with reporters afterward. He did not mention Mr. Trump by name when he spoke directly to voters in each of his first four Iowa stops, though he has drawn implicit contrasts.The two-pronged approach reflects the remarkable degree to which his pathway to the nomination depends on his ability to win over — and not alienate — the significant bloc of Republican voters who still like Mr. Trump even if they are willing to consider an alternative.Mr. DeSantis is trying to show voters that he is the kind of fighter who will not back down — even against his party’s dominant figure.Rachel Mummey for The New York Times“I don’t like to see them battle and do smear campaigns,” said Jay Schelhaas, 55, a professor of nursing who came to see Mr. DeSantis on Wednesday in Pella, Iowa. An evangelical voter, he said he was undecided on whom to support in 2024 after backing Mr. Trump in his two past presidential runs.Some themes have emerged in Mr. DeSantis’s early broadsides. He has sought to question Mr. Trump’s commitment to conservatism (“I do think, unfortunately, he’s decided to move left on some of these issues”); his ability to execute his agenda (“I’ve been listening to these politicians talking about securing the border for years and years and years”); and his ability to win the 2024 general election (“There are a lot of voters that just aren’t going to ever vote for him”).It was no coincidence that Mr. Trump arrived in Iowa on Mr. DeSantis’s heels on Wednesday, in a sign of the intensifying political skirmish between the leading Republican presidential contenders and the centrality of Iowa in their paths to the nomination. Mr. Trump holds an advantage of roughly 30 percentage points in early national polls of the Republican primary.In a statement, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said that Mr. DeSantis’s first speech was “crafted to appease establishment Never Trumpers who are looking for a swamp puppet that will do their bidding.”Mr. DeSantis is seeking a challenging middle ground as he begins this new, more confrontational phase. He is trying to show voters that he is the kind of fighter who will not back down — even against his party’s dominant figure. At the same time, he must avoid being seen as overly focused on Republican infighting.“I’m going to focus my fire on Biden,” Mr. DeSantis said at his kickoff speech on Tuesday night in Clive, a suburb of Des Moines, even as he stepped up his attacks on Mr. Trump. “And I think he should do the same.”Advisers to Mr. DeSantis said his more assertive posture stemmed largely from the fact that he is now an actual candidate. But it is a notable shift. At a recent dinner with donors in Tallahassee, Fla., Mr. DeSantis was asked when he would start slugging Mr. Trump, and he suggested he would not be doing so immediately, according to an attendee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.“Leadership is not about entertainment,” Mr. DeSantis said on Tuesday in Clive, Iowa, a suburb of Des Moines, in an implicit dig at Mr. Trump. Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesFor the third time in Mr. DeSantis’s three trips to Iowa this year, Mr. Trump planned to follow close behind with a two-day swing of his own. In March, when Mr. DeSantis came for his book tour, Mr. Trump arrived days later in the same city and drew a bigger crowd. In mid-May, Mr. Trump had scheduled a rally to stomp on the Florida governor’s trip, though he canceled at the last minute, saying it was because of the weather. It was Mr. DeSantis who one-upped him then, appearing at a barbecue joint nearby.“The weather was so nice that we felt we just had to come,” Mr. DeSantis said to laughs in Clive.Mr. Trump is doing a local television interview on Wednesday, and on Thursday he will host a lunch with religious leaders in Des Moines after attending a breakfast with a local Republican group. He is also holding a Fox News town hall event moderated by Sean Hannity.Mr. Trump has been far from subtle in his attacks on Mr. DeSantis, calling him “Ron DeSanctimonious,” denouncing his leadership of Florida and lashing him from the left for past proposals to trim Social Security and Medicare spending. No matter how much mud Mr. Trump slings, Republican voters have tended not to punish him, a double standard that has long worked to his advantage.“I guess he’s got to respond in some way,” Tim Hamer, a retired Iowan who worked in banking and owned a lavender farm, said of Mr. DeSantis. Mr. Hamer, who was at the governor’s event in Council Bluffs on Wednesday, said he had voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020 but was now leaning toward Mr. DeSantis.“The point is,” he added, “don’t descend to Trump’s level.”Among the issues over which Mr. DeSantis has explicitly broken with Mr. Trump is the legislation the former president signed that allows a pathway for nonviolent offenders to shrink their prison time. Last week, Mr. DeSantis called the measure “a jailbreak bill.”In stop after stop, Mr. DeSantis has also pointed to his ability to serve as president for two terms, unlike Mr. Trump, saying that the next president could appoint as many as four Supreme Court justices.He said on Tuesday, “I don’t need someone to give me a list to know what a conservative justice looks like.” Mr. Trump — whose appointment of the justices who tilted the Supreme Court rightward and overturned Roe v. Wade cheered conservatives — promised in the 2016 campaign to pick a justice from a list that was created by conservative judicial activists, and he has promised to release another list ahead of 2024.Mr. Trump has been far from subtle in his attacks on Mr. DeSantis, calling him “Ron DeSanctimonious” and denouncing his leadership of Florida.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesRegina Hansen, who attended the DeSantis event in Council Bluffs, said she wished Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis would patch up their once-friendly relationship. But in the meantime, she said, she thought the best way for Mr. DeSantis to win over Trump supporters was to keep talking about himself, his record and his family.“I have a very positive opinion of him, more so now than I did before I came here today,” Ms. Hansen said after hearing Mr. DeSantis speak.But Will Schademann, who came to the rally with a copy of Mr. DeSantis’s recent book, said he believed the governor needed to stay on the attack against the former president.“I just think it’s the right approach,” said Mr. Schademann, who added he voted twice for Mr. Trump. “He needs to contrast what he did with what Trump did.”At his stops on Wednesday in Council Bluffs, Salix and Pella, Iowa, Mr. DeSantis directed his verbal assaults at President Biden and kept his swipes at Mr. Trump more oblique.“Our great American comeback tour starts by sending Joe Biden back to his basement in Delaware,” he said in Council Bluffs.In contrast, Mr. DeSantis criticized Mr. Trump, a former reality television star, indirectly though pointedly.DeSantis supporters in Salix, Iowa, on Wednesday. Rachel Mummey for The New York Times“The Bible makes very clear that God frowns upon pride and looks to people who have humility,” he said.In recent days, Mr. DeSantis has seemed especially eager to discuss his handling of the coronavirus, which vaulted him to national prominence. Mr. Trump recently unfavorably compared the governor’s handling of the pandemic to that of former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, Democrat of New York.Mr. DeSantis has expressed shock at this line of attack, arguing that closures and isolation measures instituted early in the pandemic did more harm than help.“The former president would double down on his lockdowns from March of 2020,” Mr. DeSantis said.“Do you want Cuomo or do you want free Florida?” he added. “If we just decided the caucuses on that, I would be happy with that verdict by Iowa voters.”Bret Hayworth contributed reporting from Salix, Iowa. More

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      DeSantis Steps Up Attacks on Trump, Hitting Him on Crime and Covid

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida vowed to repeal the First Step Act, a Trump-era criminal justice law, if elected president. He called it “basically a jailbreak bill.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida escalated his hostilities with former President Donald J. Trump on Friday, arguing that his Republican presidential rival was weak on crime and immigration, and accusing him of ceding critical decision-making during the coronavirus pandemic to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.In an appearance with the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, Mr. DeSantis accused Mr. Trump, the G.O.P. front-runner, of “moving left” on criminal justice and immigration issues after winning over the party’s base in 2015 and 2016.He pledged that he would repeal what is known as the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal justice measure signed into law by Mr. Trump in 2018 that expanded early-release programs and modified sentencing laws, including mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.“He enacted a bill, basically a jailbreak bill,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It has allowed dangerous people out of prison who have now reoffended and really, really hurt a number of people.”This year, The New York Times reported that Mr. DeSantis and his allies saw the criminal justice bill, which Mr. Trump signed at the urging of his son-in-law Jared Kushner — and instantly regretted — as an area of political weakness, and that Mr. DeSantis had signaled he would use it in the nomination fight. The bill is unpopular with parts of Mr. Trump’s hard-core base.But for Mr. DeSantis, assailing Mr. Trump over the First Step Act is potentially complicated. Mr. DeSantis himself voted for the first version of the bill when he was in Congress, and Trump allies have sought to highlight that fact.“So now Swampy Politician Ron DeSanctimonious is claiming he voted for it before he voted against it,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement. “He sounds just like John Kerry. What a phony! He can’t run away from his disastrous, embarrassing, and low-energy campaign announcement. Rookie mistakes and unforced errors — that’s who he is.”(Mr. DeSantis’s allies note that the version of the bill he voted for looked significantly different, and that the final version passed when he was no longer in the House.)When Mr. Shapiro asked Mr. DeSantis about Mr. Trump’s recent criticism that crime had risen on his watch in Florida, the former president’s adopted state, Mr. DeSantis bristled and said Mr. Trump’s policies had undermined law and order.Mr. DeSantis stepped up his attacks on his onetime ally, whom he had avoided criticizing directly for months, less than 48 hours after he entered the race in a bumpy Twitter event.And as Mr. DeSantis seems to veer to the right on issues like crime, some of his campaign’s internal strategy is coming to light.At a fund-raising meeting in Miami on Thursday, donors peppered Mr. DeSantis’s top campaign staff members with questions about his policy positions and how they should be presented to other Republicans, according to a leaked audio recording posted online by the website Florida Politics.One donor raised a question about the rightward shift, to which a campaign official eventually responded, “We just got to win a primary in order to be in a general.”The donors and officials also discussed how to talk to Republicans who support abortion rights. (Mr. DeSantis last month signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida, which contains limited exceptions, while Mr. Trump has been hesitant to support a federal ban.)A staff member offered one possible answer.“Abortion is safe, legal and rare in Florida,” he said, parroting a phrase coined by former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. “It has not been banned,” he added. “It is limited.”In his interview with Mr. Shapiro on Friday, Mr. DeSantis sought to cast himself as unwavering on illegal immigration, saying that Mr. Trump had attacked him for opposing amnesty legislation while in Congress.He also faulted Mr. Trump for his administration’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak in 2020, especially the level of influence exerted by Dr. Fauci, the longtime top infectious disease expert and face of the federal government’s pandemic response.Dr. Fauci, who retired in January, has been a frequent target of Republican attacks over issues like remote learning, stay-at-home orders and vaccine mandates.“He responded by elevating Anthony Fauci and really turning the reins over to Dr. Fauci, and I think to terrible consequences for the United States,” Mr. DeSantis said. “I was the leader in this country in fighting back against Fauci. We bucked him every step of the way.”He said that Dr. Fauci should have been fired, but Mr. Trump had honored him.“I think the fact that Donald Trump gave Anthony Fauci a presidential commendation on Trump’s last day in office, that was a gut punch to millions of people around this country who were harmed by Fauci’s lockdowns,” Mr. DeSantis said.A day earlier, in a post by Mr. Trump on his Truth Social platform, the former president slammed Mr. DeSantis over Florida’s response to the pandemic. He said that even former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York had done a better job limiting the loss of lives to the virus than Mr. DeSantis had.Mr. DeSantis described Mr. Trump’s claim as “very bizarre,” and said that it suggested he would double down on his actions if there were another pandemic. More

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      Will DeSantis Destroy Conservatism as We Know It?

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      Ron DeSantis’s botched, awkward entry into the G.O.P. presidential primary highlights that there are two important internecine Republican conflicts unfolding at once. First, there is the obvious argument about Donald Trump’s suitability for the presidency. But there’s a second, less obvious question that is closely related to the first and often mistaken for it: What is the nature of contemporary conservatism? Or to put it another way, if Trump loses, what will take his place? And when viewed through that prism, DeSantis is particularly significant. More than anyone else in the race, he has the potential both to defeat Trump and to end conservatism as we have known it.But first, let’s define terms. What is a conservative? It’s a hard question to answer, and it gets harder each day. Since the second half of the 20th century, conservatism as an ideology has been largely synonymous with something called “fusionism,” an alliance between social conservatives and economic libertarians. In the Cold War era, the additional commitment to a strong national defense resulted in what was often called the “three-legged stool” of the Republican Party.Under this formulation, the G.O.P. perceived itself as a party united more by ideology than by identity. That’s certainly how I perceived it before Trump, and it’s why I mistakenly believed it would reject him as a standard-bearer. Though he pledged to be socially conservative as president, he was a thrice-married libertine who kept a framed photo of himself on the cover of Playboy in his office. His economic program was more populist than libertarian, and his foreign policy was far more isolationist than those of previous G.O.P. presidents and presidential nominees.In other words, I looked at him and thought, “He’s not a real Republican.” Trump, by contrast, correctly perceived that the party was not — or was no longer — primarily an ideological party. It was more clearly defined by what it was against than what it was for. While Trump’s vision of Trumpism was primarily an extension of his personal ambition, the ideological definition of Trumpism became something else entirely: a full-spectrum political and cultural opposition to the left, however it might be defined.This transformation was also tied to a change in the way that Republicans perceive government. Fusionists such as me read the Declaration of Independence and reaffirm that governments are instituted for the purpose of securing our “unalienable rights.” Thus, the protection of liberty is an indispensable aspect of American government.By contrast, the nationalist conservative movement that Trump has helped bring center stage has different priorities. In its view, the right should — to cite the words of David Azerrad, a professor at Hillsdale College — use the power of government to “reward friends and punish enemies (within the confines of the rule of law).” In an excellent 2022 piece, Philip Klein, the editor of National Review Online, called this “fight club” conservatism and raised the obvious alarm. Any government strong enough to reward friends and punish enemies is also strong enough to do the reverse, to wield the same power to punish you and to reward your opponents. The legal instruments you create to combat your foes can just as easily be turned to attack you.Which brings me back to DeSantis, a keynote speaker at the 2022 National Conservatism Conference and the ultimate example of fight club conservatism. His primary victory would signal that the transformation of conservatism since 2016 wasn’t a mere interruption of Republican ideology — one in which Republicans would return to fusionism once Trump leaves the scene — but rather the harbinger of more permanent change.That does not mean that Trump and DeSantis are the same. There’s at least one key difference. Trump fights for himself above all else. His political impulses are selfish, sub-ideological and subject to revision at a moment’s notice. He is equally content attacking Democrats and any Republicans who get in his way.DeSantis is likewise ambitious, but his political commitments have an underlying consistency that extends beyond that ambition: He fights the left. When you understand that distinction between the two men, you understand the course of the race so far and its likely shape going forward.Trump, fighting for himself, relentlessly attacks DeSantis, including with gross and unsubstantiated rumors. DeSantis, hoping to fight the left and not Trump, largely ignores his competitor and instead doubles down on attacking his progressive enemies, including “woke” universities and “woke” companies such as Disney.But whom DeSantis attacks is ultimately less important than how he does it. Republicans, after all, have long fought the left, but DeSantis does it differently, in part by abandoning fusionist commitments to free speech and limited government.Thus, DeSantis punishes Disney for merely speaking in opposition to a Florida law that restricted instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida public school classrooms. DeSantis likewise attempts to regulate social media moderation, intruding on private corporations’ decisions about who to platform and what kinds of speech to moderate. He attempts to restrict speech about race and racial equality in public universities and private corporations. He’s banned even private employers from imposing a Covid vaccine mandate.When you view DeSantis as more anti-left than conservative in the classic sense, then other aspects of his rhetoric begin to make sense. Once a Covid vaccine advocate, he has since asked the Florida Supreme Court to convene a grand jury “to investigate crimes and wrongs in Florida related to the Covid-19 vaccines.” A strong supporter of lethal aid to Ukraine during the Obama administration, he recently and notoriously referred to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute.” Why the flip-flops? Because support for vaccines and for Ukraine are now seen in populist right circles as “coding left” or — equally unacceptable — as positions of the “regime” or the “uniparty” or the “establishment.”For conservatives like me who want both to defeat Trump and to begin a restoration of the fusionist principles that once defined the G.O.P., DeSantis presents a dilemma. As I’ve written before, I disagree with DeSantis on many things, but I see Trump as an entirely different order of threat — one who is demonstrably willing to help precipitate mob violence to sustain his hold on power. So should someone like me quiet his critique of DeSantis in the interest of defeating Trump?I say no. I believe we can walk and chew gum at the same time, opposing Trump while upholding a vision of state power that limits its ability to “reward friends and punish enemies” so that all Americans enjoy the same rights to speak, regardless of their view of the government.Moreover, suspicion of state power should extend beyond the protection of civil liberties. Conservatives have long raised proper concerns about the ability of the government to achieve the economic or cultural outcomes it desires when it institutes sweeping, large-scale government programs. And this concern is not exclusive to conservatives. My colleague Ezra Klein has done outstanding work, for example, demonstrating how in California many of the best-intentioned progressive government programs are simply not working well.Here it’s worth repeating the pragmatic concerns about wielding government power. Any government strong enough to suppress my opponents’ speech is also strong enough to suppress mine, and any G.O.P. effort to erode American liberty will hand the same powers to the party’s political opponents. Republicans could live to rue the day when they rejected economic freedom and scorned free speech. This is particularly true if — as many advocates of DeSantis-like measures attest — liberalism is otherwise dominant in American culture.I’m reminded of a memorable scene in the 1990 movie “The Hunt for Red October.” A Soviet submarine captain, in his eagerness to sink a defecting Soviet submarine, recklessly launches the very torpedo that sinks his own ship. His executive officer’s final words hang in the air. Condemning his superior for his arrogance, he tells him, “You’ve killed us.”Speaking of exceptional colleagues, I want to close with a brief note about Ross Douthat’s latest column. He expertly outlines the competing arguments of pro-Trump and Never-Trump Christians:When religious conservatism made its peace with Donald Trump in 2016, the fundamental calculation was that the benefits of political power — or, alternatively, of keeping cultural liberalism out of full political power — outweighed the costs to Christian credibility inherent in accepting a heathen figure as a political champion and leader.The contrary calculation, made by the Christian wing of Never Trump, was that accepting Trump required moral compromises that American Christianity would ultimately suffer for, whatever Supreme Court seats or policy victories religious conservatives might gain.Ross is right, but there’s something else worth considering. Christian credibility is important, but not as important as Christian character. I opposed Trump for many reasons, certainly including concern over what such overt moral compromise would do to the witness of the church. I also opposed Trump because of what loyalty to Trump would do to Christians.To put it another way, after years of engagement with Trump, has Trump influenced the church more than the church has influenced Trump?The verdict is in. I see it with my own eyes. Trump has influenced the church. You see it in casual Christian cruelty online. You see it in the conspiracy-addled ReAwaken America rallies that are packing churches from coast to coast. You see it when genuine Christian candidates such as Mike Pence and Tim Scott struggle to gain traction even though they purportedly share the faith and values of tens of millions of American evangelicals, while Donald Trump self-evidently does not.Trump’s influence should not be surprising. After all, as the Apostle Paul wrote, “Bad company corrupts good morals.” Trump has been bad company for evangelicals since the day he rode down the escalator. And he has corrupted the morality of all too many American Christians. More

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      Takeaways From DeSantis’s 2024 Presidential Campaign Announcement

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      Ron DeSantis’s long-awaited entry into the presidential race showed some potential strengths as a Republican candidate, after an embarrassing start on Twitter.Gov. Ron DeSantis’s glitch-marred 2024 debut on Twitter was a distraction from his chance to introduce himself as a serious contender to take down former President Donald J. Trump.It was a much-anticipated moment for the Florida governor to reset after months of dropping in the polls, which made the painfully long 20-plus minutes of Twitter malfunctions on Wednesday all the more disappointing to his supporters.For all the media attention on the Twitter fiasco — The Daily Mail called it a “De-Saster,” Fox News a “disaster,” Breitbart News a “DeBacle” — Mr. DeSantis appeared to have later found his footing on the familiar airwaves of Fox News, a far more traditional — and effective — method of communicating to primary voters. His appearance there was the first time he laid out a substantive case for what a DeSantis presidency would look like.Still, it was a night his team will be eager to put behind them. And it highlighted both Mr. DeSantis’s potential successes as a candidate but also a campaign still in formation while under intense attack from a dominant Republican front-runner.Here are five takeaways.Taking risks on Twitter backfiredThe delay was longer than some campaign speeches.For more than 25 minutes, Twitter wheezed its way through what was supposed to be Mr. DeSantis’s grand pronouncement of his 2024 candidacy, with long stretches of dead air interrupted by frantic, hot-mic whispers before they pulled the plug and started over.The Twitter event with Mr. DeSantis was marred with technical problems.A presidential announcement is the rarest of opportunities. It is the moment when a candidate can draw all the attention on themselves and their vision. Instead, Mr. DeSantis wound up almost as a panelist at his own event, sharing the stage with Elon Musk and his malfunctioning social media site.Fox News splashed a banner headline at one point on its website that featured a photo of Mr. Musk, not Mr. DeSantis. “Want to actually see and hear Ron DeSantis?” read a breaking news alert on the site. “Tune into Fox News.”Even in advance, the decision to begin his campaign on Twitter with Mr. Musk had drawn mixed reviews. It was innovative, yes — and a chance to reach a potentially huge online audience — but also risky.The technically challenged result obscured some of Mr. DeSantis’s arguments and sapped him of listeners, and potential donors. For a candidate whose promise of competence is a Republican selling point, it was a less-than-ideal first impression. Mr. Trump and President Biden both mercilessly mocked the rollout.His aides said Mr. DeSantis raised $1 million in an hour, a sizable amount but far from the record for a presidential kickoff, with no details provided about how many individual donors gave small contributions.Mr. Biden’s campaign was also seeking to capitalize, buying Google ads to show Biden donation pages for those searching for terms like “DeSantis disaster” and “DeSantis flop.”The candidate of educated right-wingersThe DeSantis-Musk discussion on Twitter meandered at times into a cul-de-sac of the hyper-online right.Here’s a taste of the highly ideological and wonky message Mr. DeSantis delivered:“Some of the problems with the university and the ideological capture — that didn’t happen by accident, you can trace back all the way to the accreditation cartels. Well, guess what? To become an accreditor, how do you do that? You’ve got to get approved by the U.S. Department of Education. So we’re going to be doing alternative accreditation regimes, where instead of saying, ‘You will only get accredited if you do D.E.I.,’ you’ll have an accreditor that will say, ‘We will not accredit you if you do D.E.I. We want a colorblind, merit-based accreditation scheme.’”Got that?Mr. DeSantis repeatedly highlighted his blue-collar roots. But it has long been apparent that Mr. DeSantis polls far better with college-educated Republicans than he does among those without college degrees, who heavily favor Mr. Trump and form the increasingly rural base of the Republican Party. And his campaign introduction night showed why that’s the case.The conversation detoured into complaints about the horrors of The Atlantic and Vanity Fair magazines and into discussions of cryptocurrencies and the “de-banking” of “politically incorrect businesses.”Later, in his interview with Trey Gowdy on Fox News, Mr. DeSantis rattled off acronyms — E.S.G. (environmental, social and governance investing) was just one — without explaining what they meant.DeSantis is ready to hit Trump — only indirectlyMr. DeSantis made clear on Wednesday that he isn’t ready to punch Mr. Trump just yet — but he signaled where he will aim once he does.He went through the Twitter Spaces session and two interviews — one on Fox News with Mr. Gowdy, his former congressional colleague, and the other on the radio with the conservative host Mark Levin — without uttering Mr. Trump’s name. (The word did come out of his mouth at one point: “Merit must trump identity politics,” the governor said during the Twitter talk.)But his attempts to contrast himself with the nameless one were frequent.Mr. DeSantis said on Fox News that the reason Mr. Biden could get away with “shenanigans” at the southern border was because there was not a wall protecting it. Mr. DeSantis promised to build a “full” border wall — a rebuke of Mr. Trump’s failure to keep that signature promise.Mr. DeSantis also previewed a line of attack he is expected to center his campaign on: Mr. Trump’s personnel appointments in his first term.Mr. DeSantis blamed the Federal Reserve — Jerome H. Powell was appointed the Fed’s chair by Mr. Trump — for exacerbating inflation. And he said he would fire the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, another Trump appointee, on Day 1. (A Trump senior adviser noted on Twitter that Mr. DeSantis publicly supported the selection of Mr. Wray at the time.)Mr. DeSantis took his sharpest jab at Mr. Trump in the final moments with Mr. Gowdy, who asked him what he would say to candidates who may not want to debate. It was a clear reference to Mr. Trump, who has indicated he may skip one or both of the first Republican debates. Mr. DeSantis, who needs the debates in order to have breakout moments, called for people to take part.“Nobody’s entitled to anything in this world, Trey, you’ve got to earn it,” Mr. DeSantis said. “That’s exactly what I intend to do, and I think the debates are a big part of the process.”DeSantis made his case as a China hawkMr. DeSantis previewed his hard-line policies to confront the Chinese Communist Party. While Mr. Trump focused largely on the trade dimension of the relationship during his presidency, Mr. DeSantis talked more broadly about countering China’s influence, territorial expansion and military ambitions.On Fox News, Mr. DeSantis called for a 21st-century version of the Monroe Doctrine to counter China’s influence in Latin America. The Monroe Doctrine, laid out by President James Monroe in the early 19th century, warned European countries not to colonize America’s backyard.Mr. DeSantis also said the U.S. needed to form stronger partnerships with India, Australia and other allies to counter Chinese expansion in the Pacific. And he called for the reshoring of critical manufacturing — saying the U.S. was too closely mingled, economically, with China.His remarks indicated that as president, Mr. DeSantis would be more comprehensively aggressive against China than Mr. Trump was in his first term. Mr. Trump spent the first three years of his presidency mostly averting his gaze from China’s military expansionism and human-rights abuses because he wanted a trade deal with Beijing. Mr. DeSantis has signaled he wants to confront China from the outset on all fronts.DeSantis plans broad use of executive powerMr. DeSantis laid the groundwork for what his allies say will be one of his most important contrasts against Mr. Trump: his skill in using power effectively.In his Twitter Spaces live chat, Mr. DeSantis talked about his extensive record of enacting conservative policies as governor in Florida. He cited his talent for using governmental power for conservative ends. He said he had studied the “different leverage points under Article 2” of the Constitution and would put that knowledge to work if elected president. On Fox News, he repeated his plans to use Article 2 to remake the government.Mr. DeSantis hinted that he would be more heavy-handed than Mr. Trump was with the federal bureaucracy. It is part of one of his core arguments: that not only will he fight harder than Mr. Trump but that he’ll deliver sweeping change where the former president fell short.In his interview on Fox News, he portrayed the F.B.I. as one of many federal agencies run amok, and said he would exert much stronger control over the entire Justice Department.He rejected the notion that presidents should view these agencies as independent and said if, as president, he learned that F.B.I. officials were colluding with tech companies — a reference to requests by government officials to Twitter to take down content viewed as harmful — then “everybody involved with that would be fired.” More

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      Ron DeSantis Joins 2024 Race, Hoping to Topple Trump

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      Ron DeSantis’s long-awaited official entry into the 2024 presidential campaign went haywire at its start on Wednesday during a glitch-filled livestream over Twitter.Despite the problems, Mr. DeSantis, the combative 44-year-old Republican governor of Florida who has championed conservative causes and thrown a yearslong flurry of punches at America’s left, provides Donald J. Trump the most formidable Republican rival he has faced since his ascent in 2016. His candidacy comes at a pivotal moment for the Republican Party, which must choose between aligning once more behind Mr. Trump — who lost in 2020 and continues to rage falsely about a stolen election — or uniting around a new challenger to take on President Biden.But on Wednesday, Mr. DeSantis’s official run for the White House got off to an embarrassing start as the planned livestream with Twitter’s eccentric billionaire owner, Elon Musk, was marred by technical problems and dead air. The audio cut in and out amid talk of “melting the servers,” hot mic whispering and on-the-spot troubleshooting.When, after more than 25 minutes, Mr. DeSantis finally spoke, he declared, “I am running for president of the United States to lead our great American comeback.”The extended social media hiccup — as more than 500,000 people were waiting — was gleefully cheered on the very platform Mr. DeSantis was supposed to be commandeering for his campaign. Donald Trump Jr. wrote a single word: “#DeSaster.” Mr. Biden posted a donation button to his re-election campaign with the words, “This link works.” The audience when Mr. DeSantis did deliver his remarks was smaller than it had been during the initial minutes when no one was speaking.Despite his inauspicious start on Wednesday and having slipped well behind Mr. Trump in polls in recent months, Mr. DeSantis retains a host of strengths: a mountain of cash, a robust campaign operation and a series of conservative policy victories in Florida after a landslide re-election triumph last fall. The governor, who rose to national prominence with his restriction-averse handling of the coronavirus pandemic, argues that his “Florida Blueprint” can be a model for reshaping the United States in a starkly conservative mold, especially on social issues.“American decline is not inevitable,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It is a choice. And we should choose a new direction, a path that will lead to American revitalization.” He accused Mr. Biden of taking “his cues from the woke mob.”Mr. DeSantis did not mention Mr. Trump by name. But he did sketch out some of the contrasts he is expected to sharpen in the coming months. “We must look forward, not backwards,” he said on the Twitter Space livestream. “We need the courage to lead and we must have the strength to win.”The DeSantis campaign had invited prominent donors to Miami on Wednesday for a fund-raising event, hosting them at a conference space at the Four Seasons as the Twitter discussion was projected onto a large screen. Then they waited. And waited.“Elon’s got to staff up a little more to boost that server capacity,” said Brandon Rosner, a donor from Milwaukee. He was not discouraged. “Once we got through the original glitch there, I think people were very excited,” he said.Mr. DeSantis is confronting the daunting endeavor of toppling a former president whose belligerence and loyal base of support have discouraged most leading Republicans from making frontal attacks against him. Mr. Trump, who has a mounting list of legal troubles, clearly sees Mr. DeSantis as a political threat and has unloaded on him for months, mocking him as “Ron DeSanctimonious” and slamming his stewardship of Florida.“Trump is not as invincible as he once seemed and DeSantis is a serious contender,” said Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican strategist. “There are Republican voters looking for someone who can move beyond Trump, someone who can fight the liberals but also win elections. That’s the space DeSantis is trying to inhabit.”Mr. DeSantis’s chances of capturing the nomination may depend on whether the Republican primary becomes a crowded, Trump-dominated food fight — something similar to what unfolded in 2016 — or if he can turn the contest into a two-man race. The Republican field has slowly ballooned, with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina announcing a bid this week and Vice President Mike Pence expected to join soon.To winnow the field back down, Mr. DeSantis is likely to need strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two nominating states, with anti-Trump voters coalescing around him. His advisers and allies see a victory in socially conservative Iowa as a must, and believe he needs to follow with at least a close second-place finish in more moderate New Hampshire.Mr. DeSantis has the financial ammunition to compete: He is likely to start with more money in an outside group than any Republican primary candidate in history. He has more than $80 million expected to be transferred from his state account to his super PAC, which says it has also raised $40 million, in addition to having tens of millions more in donor commitments, according to people familiar with the fund-raising.A key focus of the primary, and the general election should Mr. DeSantis make it that far, will be his record as governor. He and a pliant Florida Legislature have passed contentious laws that have excited the right and angered many Democrats, including Black and L.G.B.T.Q. people, students and abortion-rights supporters in Florida. The bills seem to reflect Mr. DeSantis’s plan to run to the right of Mr. Trump in the primary, which could leave him vulnerable with moderates and independents.In the most recent legislative session alone, Florida Republicans banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy; expanded the use of the death penalty; allowed Floridians to carry concealed guns without a permit; restricted gender-transition care for minors; limited teaching about gender identity and sexual orientation; defunded diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public colleges; and shielded records of his own scrutinized travel from the public.Mr. DeSantis has also shown a willingness to use executive power in ways little seen before in Tallahassee, the state capital, leading some Democrats and civil rights leaders to worry that he shares Mr. Trump’s strongman style but has a greater ability to carry out that vision.He has picked a long-running fight with Disney, one of Florida’s largest employers and a canny political adversary. He removed a local prosecutor from office in what records show was a decision motivated by politics, installed his allies at a public liberal arts university in a bid to transform it into a bastion of conservative thought, said he would reject a high school Advanced Placement course on African American studies for “indoctrinating” students and had state law enforcement officers monitor holiday drag shows for lewd behavior.While his stump speech focuses on a lengthy recounting of those and other conservative policy achievements, Mr. DeSantis is expected to start talking more about his biography, with help from his wife, Casey DeSantis, a former television journalist who plays an influential role in his office and decision-making.Raised in Dunedin, a suburb of Tampa, Mr. DeSantis grew up in a working-class home. He excelled at baseball, captaining the squad at Yale University as a hard-hitting outfielder.He later enrolled at Harvard Law School, then served in the Navy as a military lawyer, deploying to Guantánamo Bay and Iraq. He worked as a federal prosecutor in Florida before winning election to Congress in 2012. He was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of anti-establishment conservatives.After three terms in Washington, he ran for Florida’s open governorship, winning the Republican primary largely thanks to an endorsement from Mr. Trump. But they fell out when Mr. DeSantis began making noises about running for president in 2024.The pandemic turned Mr. DeSantis into a Fox News fixture. He has criticized social distancing measures, masks and vaccines — tools fitfully employed by the Trump administration — and has already hinted that he will contrast his actions in Florida with Mr. Trump’s approach. In particular, Mr. DeSantis has gone after Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who led the nation’s pandemic response.But the step-up from a statewide campaign, even one as successful as Mr. DeSantis’s nearly 20-percentage-point romp, to a presidential campaign is not easy. As the initial Twitter Space floundered on Wednesday, Mr. Musk was forced to post a new link, severely reducing the audience for Mr. DeSantis’s announcement.While more than 500,000 people tuned in to the first Twitter Space, the second one had only 163,000 listeners by the time Mr. Musk and the technology entrepreneur David Sacks began interviewing the governor. The conversation quickly turned into a surprisingly dry discussion about the overreach of federal agencies, the merits of Twitter and occasionally bizarre tangents like the license plate number of Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis and joined the online conversation.Mr. DeSantis’s campaign tried to put a positive spin on the technical mishaps, writing on Twitter: “It seems we broke the internet with so much excitement.” An aide announced they had raised $1 million in an hour. All the while, Mr. Trump’s team rejoiced. “This is criminal for a campaign,” said Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser to the former president.Mr. DeSantis had waited months to declare his candidacy, citing a need for Florida’s Legislature to first complete its session in early May. The delay allowed Mr. Trump to test out attacks on Mr. DeSantis and secure the endorsement of numerous members of Congress, including several from Florida.As Mr. DeSantis ramped up his presidential preparations this year with a book tour and a trip abroad, he has seemed to struggle at points.Awkward moments — including cringeworthy facial expressions — generated negative headlines. So did some poorly calculated policy pronouncements, particularly his declaration that defending Ukraine from the Russian invasion was not a vital U.S. interest. Some major donors who once saw him as the most suitable Trump challenger backed away.At the heart of the criticism is the perception that Mr. DeSantis, a supreme believer in his own abilities, can seem aloof and quick to anger. Even his allies acknowledge he is not the backslapping, baby-kissing type — concerns he has tried to address by spending more time greeting voters and taking selfies.“He is an introvert in an extrovert’s job,” said Alex Andrade, a Republican state representative from the Florida Panhandle who says he admires the governor’s reserved and analytical approach.In recent weeks, Mr. DeSantis has seemed to recover from his wobbles, hitting back with more force against Mr. Trump. He has criticized the former president for not endorsing Florida’s six-week abortion ban and has described a “culture of losing” overtaking the Republican Party under Mr. Trump. He also told donors in a private call that Mr. Trump could not beat Mr. Biden.In the Twitter event, Mr. DeSantis took some sideswipes at the former president, a onetime reality television star, at one point saying, “Government is not entertainment. It’s not about building a brand or virtue-signaling.”As they wrapped up the hourlong conversation, which meandered from Article 2 of the Constitution to Bitcoin, Mr. DeSantis said, “We should do it again. I mean, I think it was fun.”Mr. Sacks concurred. “It’s not how you start,” he added, “it’s how you finish.”Jonathan Swan More

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      How Ron DeSantis Maximized the Might of the Florida Governor’s Office

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      Ron DeSantis methodically expanded his powers and pushed legal boundaries to enact his policies. He suggests he would do the same as president.Few knew what to expect from Ron DeSantis when he was first elected Florida governor in 2018 as a little-known congressman. He had barely eked out a victory. He had almost no ties to the State Capitol. His policy agenda seemed unclear.But he knew, at least, how he wanted to govern: He directed his general counsel to figure out just how far a governor could push his authority. He pored over a binder enumerating his varied powers: appointing Florida Supreme Court justices, removing local elected officials and wielding line-item vetoes against state lawmakers.Then he systematically deployed each one.Four years later, Mr. DeSantis is entering the 2024 Republican presidential primary race with a promise to make the country more conservative — just as he did Florida, using nearly every means necessary to muscle through his right-wing vision.“We proved it can be done. We chose facts over fear, education over indoctrination, law and order over rioting and disorder,” Mr. DeSantis said on Wednesday, as he announced his candidacy in a repeatedly delayed and awkwardly glitchy livestream on Twitter, with its owner, Elon Musk. “We also understand governing is not entertainment. It’s not about building a brand or virtue-signaling. It is about delivering results.”Mr. DeSantis’s willingness to exert that power in extraordinary ways has led him to barrel through norms, challenge the legal limits of his office and threaten political retribution against those who cross him. Unlike former President Donald J. Trump, the 2024 Republican front-runner who considers the governor his top rival, Mr. DeSantis is a keen student of American government who has expanded his influence tactically and methodically, using detailed knowledge of the pliable confines of his office to his advantage.“What I was able to bring to the governor’s office was an understanding of how a constitutional form of government operates, the various pressure points that exist, and the best way to leverage authority to achieve substantive policy victories,” Mr. DeSantis, a Harvard-educated lawyer, wrote in his recent book, “The Courage to Be Free,” which described his systematic approach to using executive power.Jeff Brandes, a former state senator and a rare Republican who has raised concerns about Mr. DeSantis’s use of power, called Mr. DeSantis “the most powerful governor Florida has ever seen. Democrats have been scathing in their assessment, describing the governor with words usually reserved for foreign demagogues.“Americans want to live in a democracy with freedoms,” Nikki Fried, the chairwoman of the Florida Democratic Party, wrote this week on Twitter, “and not under an authoritarian regime.”Jeremy T. Redfern, the press secretary for the governor’s office, rejected the assertion that governor has pushed the boundaries of his authority, calling it “nonsense” and a “leftist talking point.”Removing elected officialsMr. DeSantis was elected by a mere 32,463 votes in 2018 — a margin so narrow that it required a recount and could have prompted him to not “rock the boat,” the governor wrote in his book. Instead, three days after being sworn into office in January 2019, he suspended the elected Democratic sheriff of Broward County over his handling of the Parkland high school shooting a year earlier.That moment put the state on notice that Mr. DeSantis did not intend to govern like his predecessors, who typically suspended elected officials only if they had been charged with crimes.Mr. DeSantis removed from office the Democratic elections supervisor of Palm Beach County for her handling of the 2018 recount.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times“I earned 50 percent of the vote,” Mr. DeSantis told Republicans at a dinner this month, “but that entitled me to wield 100 percent of the executive power.”Mr. DeSantis has continued targeting local, elected officials. In 2019, he removed from office the Democratic elections supervisor of Palm Beach County for her handling of the 2018 recount. Mr. DeSantis called the suspensions necessary for accountability.Last August, Mr. DeSantis suspended four members of the Broward County school board — citing a special grand jury investigation on school security failures that he had requested from the Republican-majority state Supreme Court. All four of those ousted were Democrats who had been elected since the shooting; Mr. DeSantis replaced them with Republicans.That same month he suspended Andrew H. Warren, the top prosecutor in Tampa, after Mr. Warren, a Democrat, vowed not to criminalize abortion. The governor did not cite any specific case that Mr. Warren had failed to prosecute, and records showed that the removal had been fueled by politics.A federal judge ruled that while Mr. DeSantis went too far in suspending Mr. Warren, the court had no authority to reinstate him. Mr. Warren has appealed.Amassing power during a pandemicWhile Mr. DeSantis showed an early interest in consolidating power in his office, the Covid pandemic allowed him to centralize and expand his authority. During the declared emergency in 2020, the governor had the authority — and used it — to spend $5 billion in federal aid without legislative approval.He went beyond that, prohibiting local mask and vaccine mandates, calling the Legislature into special session to write those bans into law, and threatening to withhold pay for administrators of public school districts that tried to defy him.His hard line helped him build a larger national profile and appeared to propel Mr. DeSantis to govern more assertively, especially when it came to heated cultural issues popular with his political base. He reached deep into his administration to compel obscure agencies and boards to enact his policies.The governor filled state boards for hospitals and colleges with like-minded appointees, eventually orchestrating a takeover of New College of Florida, a public liberal arts school in Sarasota that he and his allies hope to turn into a conservative bastion. Two state medical boards whose members were appointed by the governor prohibited gender-transition care for minors and education regulators expanded a prohibition on classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity.More recently, he has used the Department of Business and Professional Regulation to try to take away the liquor licenses from a Miami restaurant, a Miami hotel and an Orlando theater because children have attended drag shows at the venues.“What is scary in Florida is that we’re seeing the governor’s continued efforts to consolidate power under himself so that there are not any checks and balances for what he does,” said Kara Gross, the legislative director and senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.Political paybackMr. DeSantis has also relied on raw political power and threats of retribution — often aimed at allies.He has intervened in legislative races, where his endorsements have helped him stack the Legislature with loyal Republicans and sent a clear message to lawmakers to get in line or possibly face a primary challenge. Last fall, he turned to school board races, working with Moms for Liberty, a right-wing group, to publish a list of endorsements for seats that are technically nonpartisan.During redistricting last year, when senators drew a congressional map not to Mr. DeSantis’s liking, he vetoed it and forced the lawmakers to adopt a map that he had put forward — the first time anyone in the State Capitol could remember a governor taking such a brash step.The Senate initially resisted Mr. DeSantis’s map, which eliminated a majority Black district in North Florida and effectively gave Republicans four more seats in Congress. But lawmakers knew that Mr. DeSantis could use endorsements and primaries as a cudgel. In fact, he did not back the Senate president’s campaign for state agriculture commissioner until after the chamber gave the governor his map. (The map still faces a court challenge.)Yet the episode that most crystallized the Legislature’s deference to Mr. DeSantis involved a foe that Florida Republicans would have previously been loath to take on: the Walt Disney Company, one of Florida’s largest taxpayers.Last year, when Disney’s chief executive at the time opposed legislation restricting classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, Mr. DeSantis did not hesitate to push back. Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesWhen Disney’s chief executive at the time opposed legislation last year restricting classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, Mr. DeSantis did not hesitate to push back. He called on lawmakers to strip Disney’s special tax district from many of its powers, pitting traditionally business-friendly lawmakers against Florida’s most famous corporate giant.The standoff has spilled over into this year, with Disney making moves to limit the state’s new oversight board and the state countering to undo Disney’s plans. Disney recently sued Florida in federal court and canceled a $1 billion development near Orlando.It’s far from clear Mr. DeSantis will win his battle with Disney. Still, he sees political upside in boasting that he did not bow to corporate pressure.After the sugar industry backed his opponent in the 2018 Republican primary, Mr. DeSantis, in his first week in office, signed an executive order on water quality that took aim at some of the industry’s polluting practices.“While Big Sugar did not like it,” Mr. DeSantis wrote in his book, “most people across the political spectrum in Florida were thrilled.”Legal ‘cleanup’Legislators have been so quick to do Mr. DeSantis’s bidding that they have had to repeatedly return to the State Capitol to retroactively give the governor authority for actions already taken.“We had a recent seventh special session — which is supposed to be an extraordinary measure — basically to clean up all of the outstanding issues,” State Senator Jason W.B. Pizzo, a Democrat, said earlier this year. “A colleague referred to it as ‘cleanup on aisle five’ for the governor.”During that session, held in February, lawmakers passed legislation detailing their authority over Disney’s special tax district. But they also amended laws passed last year that had mired the DeSantis administration in court.Mr. DeSantis created an office of election crimes in 2022 that brought fraud charges against people who may have inappropriately cast ballots. But judges threw out case after case, saying that statewide prosecutors lacked the authority to bring those charges. Lawmakers changed the law this year to explicitly empower the prosecutors.Mr. DeSantis announced last year that the Office of Election Crimes and Security was arresting 20 people for voter fraud. After some of the cases were dismissed, the Legislature changed the law to empower prosecutors.Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesLegislators also did away with language that had complicated the governor’s legal justification for flying Venezuelan migrants from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts last summer. The original language adopted in 2022 gave the DeSantis administration the authority to transport migrants “from this state” — not from Texas, Mr. Pizzo argued in a lawsuit after the Martha’s Vineyard stunt. In the special February session, lawmakers scrapped that phrase and expanded Mr. DeSantis’s authority to transport migrants from anywhere in the country.“He completely controls the Legislature,” Mr. Pizzo said.Last week, Mr. DeSantis used his influence to line up endorsements for his presidential campaign. His political team announced the backing of 99 of the state’s 113 Republican legislators, even as some said privately that they felt pressured to support Mr. DeSantis for fear that he might otherwise veto their bills or spending projects.Were Mr. DeSantis to win the White House, he would likely face tougher opposition in Washington than he has in Tallahassee. There have already been signs of division: Last month, 11 of 20 Republican representatives in Florida’s congressional delegation endorsed Mr. Trump over Mr. DeSantis.Alexandra Berzon More

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      The DeSantis Delusion

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      If Ron DeSantis is supposed to be more electable than Donald Trump, why did he sign a ban on most abortions in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy? That’s manna for the Christian conservatives who matter in Republican primaries, but it’s a liability with the moderates and independents who matter after that point. It steps hard on DeSantis’s argument that he’s the version of Trump who can actually beat President Biden. It flattens that pitch into a sad little pancake.If DeSantis is supposed to be Trump minus the unnecessary drama, why did he stumble into a prolonged and serially mortifying dust-up with Disney? Yes, the corporation publicly opposed his “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and that must have annoyed him. He’s easily annoyed. But the legislation was always going to pass anyway, and he indeed got what he substantively wanted, so there was no need to try to punish Disney and supercharge the conflict — except that he wanted to make a big, manly show of his contempt for the mighty Mouse. He wanted, well, drama. So there goes that rationale as well.And if DeSantis, 44, is supposed to be tomorrow’s Trump, a youthful refurbishment of the 76-year-old former president, why does he seem so yesteryear? From his style of hair to his dearth of flair, from his emotional remove to his fugitive groove, there’s something jarringly anti-modern about the Florida governor. He’s more T-Bird than Tesla, though even that’s too generous, as he’s also more sedan than coupe.On Wednesday he’s expected to rev his engine and make the official, anticlimactic announcement of his candidacy for the presidency. I just don’t get it. Oh, I get that he wants to be the boss of all bosses — that fits. But the marketing of DeSantis and the fact of DeSantis don’t square. Team DeSantis’s theory of the case and the case itself diverge. In many ways, he cancels himself out. His is a deeply, deeply puzzling campaign.Which doesn’t mean it won’t be successful. Right around the time Trump was declared the 2016 winner, I exited the prediction business, or at least tried to incorporate more humility into my own storefront, and I humbly concede that I feel no certainty whatsoever about DeSantis’s fate.He has a legitimate shot at the Republican presidential nomination. He absolutely could win the presidency. He governs the country’s third most populous state, was re-elected to a second term there by a nearly 19-point margin, wowed key donors, raised buckets of money and has widespread name recognition. To go by polls of Republican voters over recent months, they’re fonder of him than of any of the other alternatives to Trump. Nikki Haley and Asa Hutchinson would kill to have the kind of buzz that DeSantis has, which mostly tells you how buzzless their own candidacies are.But do Republican voters want an alternative to Trump at all? The polls don’t say so. According to the current Real Clear Politics average of such surveys, Trump’s support is above 55 percent — which puts him more than 35 percentage points ahead of DeSantis. Mike Pence, in third place, is roughly another 15 percentage points behind DeSantis.There’s an argument that Trump’s legal troubles will at some point catch up to him. Please. He’s already been indicted in one case and been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in another, and his supporters know full well about his exposure in Georgia and elsewhere. The genius of his shameless shtick — that the system is rigged, that everyone who targets him is an unscrupulous political hack and that he’s a martyr, his torture a symbol of the contempt to which his supporters are also subjected — lies in its boundless application and timeless utility. It has worked for him to this point. Why would that stop anytime soon?But if, between now and the Iowa caucuses, Republican voters do somehow develop an appetite for an entree less beefy and hammy than Trump, would DeSantis necessarily be that Filet-O-Fish? The many Republicans joining the hunt for the party’s nomination clearly aren’t convinced. Despite DeSantis’s braggartly talk about being the only credible presidential candidate beyond Biden and Trump, the number of contenders keeps expanding.Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Hutchinson and Larry Elder, a conservative talk radio host, have been in the race for a while. Tim Scott filed his paperwork last Friday and made a public announcement on Monday. Pence and Chris Christie are expected to join the fray in the coming days or weeks, and three current governors — Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Doug Burgum of North Dakota — remain possibilities. That’s one potentially crowded debate stage, putting a premium on precisely the kind of oomph DeSantis lacks. Next to him, Pence sizzles.Most of these candidates are in a pickle similar to DeSantis’s. It’s what makes the whole contest so borderline incoherent. Implicitly and explicitly, they’re sending the message that Republicans would be better served by a nominee other than Trump, but they’re saying that to a party so entirely transformed by him and so wholly in thrall to his populist rants, autocratic impulses, rightward lunges and all-purpose rage that they’re loath to establish too much separation from him. They’re trying to beat him without alienating his enormous base of support by beating up on him. The circus of him has them walking tightropes of their own.And DeSantis has teetered, time and again. His more-electable argument is undercut not only by that Florida abortion law — which, tellingly, he seems to avoid talking about — but also by the measure he recently signed to allow the carrying of concealed firearms in Florida without a permit. That potentially puts him to the right of the post-primary electorate, as do some of the specific details — and the combined force — of legislation that he championed regarding education, the death penalty, government transparency and more. In trying to show the right wing of the Republican Party how aggressive and effective he can be, he has rendered himself nearly as scary to less conservative Americans as Trump is.And as mean. The genius of Scott’s announcement was its emphasis on optimism instead of ire as a point of contrast with Trump, in the unlikely event that such a contrast is consequential. “Our party and our nation are standing at a time for choosing: victimhood or victory?” Scott said. “Grievance or greatness?” Victimhood, grievance — gee, whoever could Scott have in mind? But DeSantis is all about grievance and retribution, and he’s oh so grim. He sent two planeloads of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. He exults that Florida is “where woke goes to die.” How sunny! It’s the Trump negativity minus the Trump electricity.His assertion that he wants to end Republicans’ “culture of losing” is an anagram for the accusation that Trump has prevented the party from winning, but I doubt the dig will resonate strongly with the Republican base. As Ramesh Ponnuru sagely observed in The Washington Post recently, Trump’s supposed toxicity is a longstanding part of his story and his brand. “For many conservatives,” Ponnuru wrote, “Trump’s 2016 victory reinforced the idea that ‘electability’ is a ploy used by the media and squishy Republicans to discredit candidates who are willing to fight for them.”The campaigns of DeSantis and the other would-be Trump slayers rest on the usual mix of outsize vanity, uncommon ambition and stubborn hopefulness in politicians who reach for the upper rungs.But their bids rest on something else, too — something I share, something so many of us do, something that flies in the face of all we’ve seen and learned over the eight years since Trump came down that escalator, something we just can’t shake: the belief that a liar, narcissist and nihilist of his mammoth dimensions cannot possibly endure, and that the forces of reason and caution will at long last put an end to his perverse dominance.DeSantis is betting on that without fully and boldly betting on that. It’s a hedged affair, reflecting the fact that it may be a doomed one.I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni).The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      Why It’s Far Too Soon to Say DeSantis Is Done

      by

      Despite his struggles, fortunes can change very quickly in presidential primaries.Will Ron DeSantis start attacking Donald Trump?Sophie Park for The New York TimesIs the Ron DeSantis campaign already over?After the last few months, it’s hard not to wonder. His poll numbers have plummeted. Would-be donors seem skeptical. Pundits have questioned whether he should even run at all.But as he finally announces a presidential bid, expected later today, it is worth mulling his path back to contention. Despite it all, Ron DeSantis could still be the next Republican nominee.That might seem hard to imagine, but fortunes can change astonishingly quickly in presidential primaries. There are still more than six months until the Iowa caucuses, and there will be plenty of opportunities for him to right his ship.In the end, the factors that made Mr. DeSantis formidable at the beginning of the year could prove to be more significant than the stumbles and miscues that have recently hobbled him. The damage is not yet irreparable.Of course, the fact that he could mount a comeback doesn’t mean he will come back. His campaign’s decision to announce his bid on Twitter tonight forfeits a rare opportunity to be televised live on multiple networks in favor of a feature, Twitter Spaces, that I don’t even know how to use as a frequent Twitter user. And even if his campaign is ultimately run differently than it has been so far, it’s not clear that even a perfectly run Republican campaign would defeat Donald J. Trump — at least if the former president survives his various legal challenges politically unscathed.But if you’re tempted to write off Mr. DeSantis, you might want to think again. The history of primary elections is littered with candidates who are written off, only to surge into contention. Unknown candidates like Herman Cain briefly become front-runners. Early front-runners like Joe Biden and John McCain are written off, then come back to win. Even Barack Obama spent six months struggling and trailing an “inevitable” Hillary Clinton by double digits.Perhaps one day we’ll say something similar about Mr. DeSantis’s candidacy. As with the candidates who ultimately surged back to victory, the strengths that made Mr. DeSantis seem so promising after the midterms are still there today. He still has unusually broad appeal throughout the Republican Party. His favorability ratings remain strong — stronger than Mr. Trump’s — even though his standing against Mr. Trump has deteriorated in head-to-head polling. He is still defined by issues — like the fight against “woke” and coronavirus restrictions — that also have broad appeal throughout his party. If this was enough to be a strong contender in January, there’s reason it might be again.While it’s easy to see Mr. DeSantis’s decline over the last few months as a sign of profound weakness, the volatility of the polling can also be interpreted to mean there’s a large group of voters open to both candidates. They might be prone to lurch one way or the other, depending on the way the political winds are blowing.Mr. DeSantis’s strategy so far this year may have also increased the likelihood of big swings. As I wrote last week, there are two theories for defeating the former president — Trumpism without Trump, and a reinvigorated conservative alternative to Trump. Of the two, the proto-DeSantis campaign can more easily be interpreted as a version of Trumpism without Trump. If his campaign has done anything, it’s to narrow any disagreement with Mr. Trump — even to a fault. Mr. DeSantis hasn’t really made either an explicit or implicit case against the former president. Perhaps worse, he hasn’t punched back after being attacked.This combination of choices has helped set up an unusually rapid decline in Mr. DeSantis’s support. After all, the only thing that unifies a hypothetical Trumpism without Trump coalition is opposition to Mr. Trump and the prospect of beating him. If you’re not attacking him and you’re losing to him, then you’re not saying or doing the only two things that can hold your supporters together.The evaporating basis for Mr. DeSantis’s support has played out subtly differently on two different fronts. On the right, conservative voters open to someone other than Mr. Trump nonetheless have returned to the side of the former president. What kind of conservative wants Trumpism without strength? Toward the center, the many relatively moderate and neoconservative establishment Republicans who yearn for a candidacy opposed to Trumpism, not just to the conduct of the man himself, have withheld crucial support for Mr. DeSantis and flirted with other options, from Chris Christie to Chris Sununu.But if the DeSantis campaign can revitalize the case for his Trumpism without Trump candidacy, he might quickly reclaim many of the voters who backed him a few months ago. Indeed, it’s even possible that the current media narrative and low expectations are setting the stage for a DeSantis resurgence.Imagine what it might feel like if he launched a successful, vigorous attack against Mr. Trump after all of these months on defense. What might have otherwise been a routine sparring match would be imbued with far greater significance, unleashing months of pent-up anxiety among his supporters. What if part of the reason he’s announcing his candidacy on Twitter is to mock Truth Social? Silly as it sounds, successfully putting down Mr. Trump might breathe life into his candidacy — and the media loves a comeback story.One important factor keeping Mr. DeSantis’s path open is that, so far, none of the potential moderate alternatives to him have gained a foothold in the race. If they did, it would deny him the moderate and neoconservative voters who supported the likes of John Kasich and Marco Rubio in the last primary. He would essentially become another Ted Cruz.But for now, Mr. DeSantis is the only viable not-Trump candidate in town. As long as that’s true, he will have every chance to rebound among the voters who would prefer someone other than Mr. Trump — if there is a market for someone other than Mr. Trump.In the end, whether there’s sufficient demand for a Trump alternative may be the bigger question than whether Mr. DeSantis can resuscitate his campaign. With Mr. Trump already holding more than 50 percent support in the polls, actually defeating Mr. Trump might require some breaks, like the possibility that his legal challenges are worse than we might assume. It might also require a DeSantis win in Iowa to break Mr. Trump’s grip on a crucial segment of the party, much as the midterms seemed to temporarily crack Mr. Trump’s base last winter.But even if Mr. Trump is a clear favorite, it’s easy to see how Mr. DeSantis can at least make this a competitive race again. When he’s able to focus on his own issues, he has a distinctive political brand with rare appeal throughout a divided Republican Party. With expectations so low, the groundwork for a recovery might even be in place. It’s happened before. More