DeSantis, Ron

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      Eyeing DeSantis, Trump Readies for a Long Primary Battle

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      Donald Trump basked in affection from activists at CPAC on Saturday. But his campaign is preparing for an ugly, protracted primary fight for the nomination — and pledging even an indictment would not stop him.OXON HILL, Md. — Inside the MAGA-clad corridors of this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, the politics of the Republican Party seemed almost unchanged from the pinnacle of Donald J. Trump’s presidency. Sequin-wearing superfans jostled for selfies with whichever member of the Trump family happened to be nearby. Chants of “We love Trump!” rang out in the halls.But outside the confines of the friendly gathering, Mr. Trump and his campaign have begun adjusting to the new reality of 2024: The former president may be the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, but he is no longer the singular leader of his party.After a fitful start, the Trump operation is now actively preparing for the possibility of a drawn-out 2024 primary. That means laying the groundwork to compete in a potential fight over delegates that could extend deep into next year. And it means shadowboxing with his ascendant but not-yet-official challenger, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, over donors and endorsements from inside their shared home state and beyond.This is grunt work Mr. Trump was slow to undertake in his celebrity-powered, but scattershot, campaign in 2016. In 2020, he used his incumbency to scare off any serious challenges.On the third time around, the Trump campaign’s focus on the traditional nuts and bolts is an acknowledgment of the race’s expected competitiveness, despite his unmatched standing as a former president and an early edge in the polls. But the threat of indictment hanging over the former president is just one reason that 2024 could unfold in the most untraditional of ways.Mr. Trump said on Saturday that even indictments would not spur his exit from the race, as he maligned prosecutors eyeing him in Georgia and New York. His address to CPAC, the annual showcase of right-wing activists and energy, demonstrated one element of his continued political strength: the loyalty of vocal activists angry with the old guard of the party.“I am your warrior. I am your justice,” Mr. Trump said in a speech laced with grievances that stretched more than 90 minutes. “And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”The speech was just Mr. Trump’s fourth public event since his campaign began almost 16 weeks ago. But he is now ramping up his public schedule, with planning underway for his first major 2024 rally and two policy speeches this month, according to two people familiar with the planning.Notably, Mr. DeSantis, who is expected to run but has not declared his intentions yet, skipped CPAC, instead setting out on a multistate tour to promote his new book about his leadership in Florida as a national model. On Sunday, Mr. DeSantis will deliver a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California about his vision for the party.Both men have trips planned to Davenport, Iowa, in the next two weeks — visiting the state that begins the nominating process.Who’s Running for President in 2024?Card 1 of 6The race begins. More

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      A Battle Over Murals Depicting Slavery

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      More from our inbox:Corporal Punishment in SchoolsWhat We Don’t Know About Ron DeSantisHelp for CaregiversCalifornia and the Colorado RiverGuns and CrimeThe murals in the Chase Community Center have been covered at Vermont Law and Graduate School in South Royalton, Vt.Richard Beaven for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Artist and School Spar Over Murals of Slavery” (front page, Feb. 22):The decision to cover these murals is totally outrageous. One doesn’t learn from the past by covering it over. You learn by studying, and that is what an educational institution should provide. You don’t erase, or cover over, the past because it is unpleasant or disturbing.Of course it is, and continues to be, disturbing, but when you literally come face to face with it as these murals make possible, you then must consider what that discomfort means in terms of both our history as a nation and our laws and actions today.The school should take down the panels, expose the murals and their history once again and provide context and the opportunity for discussion.Elaine Hirschl EllisNew YorkThe writer is the president of Arts and Crafts Tours, which hosts trips about 19th- and 20th-century art and architecture.To the Editor:The quote from a law student who was distressed by a visual depiction of slavery by a white artist — “The artist was depicting history, but it’s not his history to depict” — is most disturbing. The argument is not whether the artistic merits of the mural should be considered? Or that the mood of the piece may be too harsh for a student center?Those who think censoring painters or other artists by limiting their creative themes according to their race or ethnic identity are closed-minded, and will erode free artistic expression.Steve CohenNew YorkTo the Editor:The diverse reactions to the murals in the article can be attributed to a debate over the periods that influenced the artist’s painting style.The intent of the school and the artist to represent the state’s role in helping slaves escape via the Underground Railroad was admirable. Yet the figurative style still harkens back to the comedically formulaic and stereotypical blackened ones of minstrels’ stage entertainment prevalent in the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries.The spirit of mockery seen in the most famous minstrel, Jim Crow, persists today in the form of white supremacy, voter restriction and inequity. That style’s history would not be lost on many viewers.A discussion hosted by the school’s National Center for Restorative Justice about this issue could be a powerful learning tool for us all.Theresa McNicholCranbury, N.J.The writer is an art historian.Corporal Punishment in SchoolsCharles Lavine, the chairman of the New York State Assembly Judiciary Committee, is among the lawmakers who have filed bills to bar corporal punishment in private schools.Mark Lennihan/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Bills Push Corporal Punishment Ban in New York Private Schools” (news article, March 3):I was shocked to read that physical violence against children is still tolerated in some New York schools. I suffered the occasional whack from the nuns in parochial school, usually for “having a fresh mouth,” but that was many years ago. I thought that anachronistic practice had long since ended.I support the effort of Assemblyman Charles Lavine and his colleagues to protect students and bring all of our schools into line with the progressive values of a modern society.John E. StaffordRye, N.Y.What We Don’t Know About Ron DeSantis Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “My Fellow Liberals Are Exaggerating the Dangers of Ron DeSantis,” by Damon Linker (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Feb. 27):Mr. Linker misses the point of voters’ anxiety about Florida’s governor. The fear stems not from what we know about Ron DeSantis, but what we do not. We know that he shares Donald Trump’s penchant for bullying, bigotry, trolling and media manipulation.What we do not know is whether Mr. DeSantis shares Mr. Trump’s contempt for the presidential oath of office. Will Mr. DeSantis use the bully pulpit to undermine faith in our elections, as Mr. Trump did? Will he try to overturn the results of a free and fair election, as Mr. Trump did? We cannot know, because Mr. DeSantis refuses to enlighten us.Until he speaks forthrightly to these questions, voters (not just “liberals”) have a right to view Mr. DeSantis as more dangerous than Donald Trump.Indeed, all Republican candidates should be expected to repudiate Mr. Trump’s malfeasance. Trust has been violated, and must be restored if we are to move forward together again as one nation.Andrew MeyerMiddletown, N.J.Help for CaregiversPresident Biden at an Intel facility under construction in New Albany, Ohio, in September. Pete Marovich for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Funds to Bolster U.S. Chip-Making Come With Catch” (front page, Feb. 28):The Biden administration’s efforts to leverage its investments in semiconductor infrastructure to expand child care are laudable and much needed, but the policy falls short of supporting millions of Americans caring for aging or disabled loved ones who also need support to stay and succeed in the work force.The 32 million working caregivers at this end of the spectrum continue to be left out of administrative and federal action to support working families. For example, working caregivers of older adults, people with disabilities and people living with serious medical conditions were excluded from the expansion of paid leave for federal workers and from the emergency paid leave provisions of Covid response legislation. As a result, these caregivers are more likely to report negative impacts at work because of caregiving responsibilities.Using administrative authority to help caregivers balance care and work is urgently needed given stalled efforts in Congress to pass policies like paid family and medical leave, affordable child care, and strengthened aging and disability care. But without a comprehensive approach, millions of family caregivers will continue to be left behind.Jason ResendezWashingtonThe writer is the president and C.E.O. of the National Alliance for Caregiving.California and the Colorado RiverA broken boat, which used to be underwater in Lake Mead now sits above the lake’s water line because of a decades-long megadrought, outside Boulder City, Nev., Feb. 2.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “California Wants to Keep (Most of) the Colorado River for Itself,” by John Fleck (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Feb. 23):The essay does not acknowledge that only California has voluntarily offered to significantly cut its use of Colorado River water in the near term under a proposal that also ensures that cities in Arizona, Nevada and across the Southwest have the water they need for their residents.California’s proposal strikes a balance between respecting longstanding law and recognizing that every city and farm that relies on the river must reduce its water use — precisely the sense of fairness and shared sacrifice that Mr. Fleck lauds.The six-state proposal took the presumptuous approach of assigning the vast majority of cuts to water users that didn’t sign on: California, Native American tribes and Mexico. Ignoring existing laws will likely land us in court, costing time we don’t have.We have to work together to keep the Colorado River system from crashing and protect all those who rely on it. We can do this through developing true consensus through collaboration — not by bashing one state or community.J.B. HambyEl Centro, Calif.The writer is chairman of the Colorado River Board of California and the state’s Colorado River commissioner.Guns and CrimeTo the Editor:Re “Chicago Reflects Democratic Split on Public Safety” (front page, March 2):As Republicans look to exploit crime — gun violence in particular — as a campaign issue, Democrats would do well to point out the G.O.P.’s unwillingness to prevent illegal guns from spilling across state borders early and often.Bruce EllersteinNew York More

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      Ron DeSantis Usually Avoids the Press. For Murdoch, He’ll Make an Exception.

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      The Florida governor granted a rare interview to The Times of London, one of several Murdoch media properties he’s spoken with as he prepares a possible presidential bid.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a sulfurous critic of the news media, has all but shunned one-on-one interviews with mainstream political reporters, speaking almost exclusively in recent months with friendly conservative pundits.But he has finally granted an interview to a major establishment newspaper — just not one in the United States.Mr. DeSantis’s face is on the cover of Thursday’s edition of The Times of London, whose American correspondent recently conducted an extensive interview with the governor at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Tallahassee. “The Man Who Might be President,” reads the headline.Presumably, few Republican primary voters reside in Britain. But The Times of London, one of England’s oldest and most respected papers, is controlled by Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire has already thrown its considerable influence behind the prospect of a DeSantis presidential bid.The governor appears to be returning the favor.As he kicks off a promotional tour for his new memoir (published by Mr. Murdoch’s HarperCollins), Mr. DeSantis took Salena Zito, a conservative columnist at The New York Post (owned by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp), on a tour of his hometown in Florida, and he appeared on Fox News (owned by Mr. Murdoch’s Fox Corp) for interviews with Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, Jesse Watters and the co-hosts of “Fox & Friends.” Excerpts from his memoir appeared in The Post and on FoxNews.com.Mr. DeSantis, left, appearing on “Fox & Friends” as he kicked off a promotional tour for his new memoir. Fox NewsBy contrast, Mr. DeSantis’s press secretary recently said the governor would not engage at all with journalists at NBC News or MSNBC. The DeSantis camp cited its frustration with an imprecise question asked by the NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell about Mr. DeSantis’s restrictions on how racism is taught in Florida public schools. (Ms. Mitchell later offered a clarification.)Gov. Ron DeSantis and His AdministrationReshaping Florida: Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has turned the swing state into a right-wing laboratory by leaning into cultural battles.Challenging Trump: As former President Donald J. Trump lobs insults, Mr. DeSantis is carefully avoiding conflict. But if he runs for president in 2024 as expected, a clash is inevitable.Rift with Disney: In the latest development in a battle between the governor and Disney, Mr. DeSantis has gained control of the board that oversees development at Walt Disney World, a move that restricts the autonomy of Disney over its theme-park complex.Education: Mr. DeSantis, an increasingly vocal culture warrior, is taking an aggressive swing at the education establishment, announcing a proposed overhaul of the state’s higher education system.Mr. DeSantis, however, has not given carte blanche to employees of Mr. Murdoch. While the governor is willing to appear with Fox News’s conservative hosts, he has not been interviewed recently by Bret Baier, Fox News’s chief political anchor, or Shannon Bream, host of “Fox News Sunday,” anchors who would be more inclined to ask him tough questions.Mr. DeSantis’s presence in Murdoch-controlled news outlets comes as his prospective rival for the Republican nomination, former President Donald J. Trump, has seemed to vanish from the same media properties. Mr. Trump has not appeared on a Fox News broadcast since declaring his candidacy in November, although Fox News’s website has published interviews with him.The Post, whose coverage is often viewed as a distillation of Mr. Murdoch’s id, took direct aim at Mr. Trump when he announced his presidential run, relegating the news to the mocking headline “Florida Man Makes Announcement.” And after last year’s midterm elections, The Post featured Mr. DeSantis on its front page with the admiring headline “DeFUTURE.”Mr. Trump has expressed displeasure with the situation, deriding Ms. Zito’s interview with Mr. DeSantis as a “puff piece” and calling The Post a “dying” publication, a far cry from his warm attitude toward the tabloid in the past. In a post on Truth Social, his right-wing social network, Mr. Trump combined three Murdoch media properties into a single insult: “I don’t read the New York Post anymore. It has become Fake News, just like Fox & WSJ!”Mr. DeSantis’s interview in The Times of London was conducted by David Charter, the newspaper’s U.S. editor, a veteran foreign correspondent who is viewed as a straight-ahead journalist and not an opinionated pundit.Mr. DeSantis’s face is on the cover of Thursday’s edition of The Times of London, whose American correspondent recently conducted an extensive interview with the governor at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Tallahassee.The Times of LondonThe two-page spread appears under a splashy quote rendered in British spelling: “Ron DeSantis: ‘Don’t we need a little more vigour and punch?’”The article is presented as a feature, observing at one point that Mr. DeSantis has “a firm handshake and a neat crop of chestnut hair.” In the interview, Mr. DeSantis muses about a golf vacation with his wife to Scotland and Northern Ireland. He calls himself a “big supporter” of Brexit, although he offered a light critique of Britain’s pro-Brexit Conservative Party, saying the party “hasn’t been as aggressive at fulfilling that vision as they should have been.”Asked if he had written his memoir because he wanted to be president, Mr. DeSantis demurred: “What I would say is, I was well known. I was, you know, kind of a hot commodity. And I thought that the book would do well, I think it is doing well. I think you’re gonna see it’s going to do very well. We’ve had a great, great response.”Despite the seemingly cordial tone of the interview, Mr. DeSantis at one point became irritated with his interlocutor.Mr. Charter writes that when he asked Mr. DeSantis how he would handle American relations with Ukraine, the governor referred “to Biden being ‘weak on the world stage’ and failing at deterrence.”Mr. Charter pressed for more detail: How would a President DeSantis handle the conflict in Ukraine?“Perhaps you should cover some other ground?” the governor replied. “I think I’ve said enough.” More

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      This Is Trump’s ‘Magic Trick’

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      In his effort to outflank Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida — his most potent challenger-in-waiting for the Republican presidential nomination — Donald Trump goes only in one direction: hard right.At the start of this year, Trump announced his education agenda, declaring that he would issue mandates to “keep men out of women’s sports,” end teacher tenure and cut federal aid to any school system that teaches “critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children.”“As the saying goes,” Trump declared, “personnel is policy and at the end of the day if we have pink-haired communists teaching our kids we have a major problem.”Later in January, Trump revealed his “Plan to Protect Children from Left-Wing Gender Insanity,” in which he promised to bring a halt to “gender-affirming care,” to punish doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors and to pass legislation declaring that “the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female and they are assigned at birth.”“No serious country should be telling its children that they were born with the wrong gender,” Trump declared. “Under my leadership, this madness will end.”At one level, these pronouncements reflect Trump’s determination to prevent DeSantis from outflanking him. On a larger scale, they reveal a predicament facing not only the former president as he seeks renomination in 2024, but the conservative movement in general, including white evangelicals, the Republican Party and Fox News.Trump’s strategy requires him to continue his equivocation on white supremacism and his antisemitic supporters and to adopt increasingly extreme positions, including the “termination” of the Constitution in order to retroactively award him victory in the 2020 election. The more he attempts to enrage and invigorate his MAGA base in the Republican primaries, the more he forces his fellow partisans and conservatives to follow suit, threatening Republican prospects in the coming general election, as demonstrated by the poor showing of Trump clones in the 2022 midterm contests.Questions about the pandemicCard 1 of 4When will the pandemic end? More

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      For Republicans’ Rising Stars, CPAC Is Losing Its Pull

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      At the annual conference this week, conservative celebrities like Mike Lindell and Kari Lake will attend, as will Donald Trump, but many possible 2024 rivals are skipping it.For decades, the Conservative Political Action Conference occupied a center ring in Republican politics.In 1974, Ronald Reagan used the inaugural event to unveil his brand of optimistic conservatism, describing a “city on the hill” to the conservative activists. In 2010, libertarian supporters of Ron Paul lifted their candidate to victory at the event’s presidential straw poll, an early harbinger of the Tea Party upheaval that would soon shake the party. And in 2011, a Manhattan businessman walked onto the stage to the tune of “For the Love of Money,” declared himself an opponent of abortion and began a yearslong takeover of the Republican Party.That businessman, Donald J. Trump, will be back at the four-day conservative gathering known as CPAC this week near Washington. He’ll be joined by a long list of right-wing media provocateurs, culture-war activists and a smattering of senators. Missing from the agenda: many of the Republicans seen as the future of the party.When Mr. Trump became leader of the Republican Party, he remade the conference in his political image. Now, as the party’s voters, donors and officials consider a future that may not include Mr. Trump as their leader, some Republicans say the decades-old CPAC gathering has increasingly become more like a sideshow than a featured act, one that seems made almost exclusively for conservative media.“It’s a content machine for the right-wing media ecosystem,” said David Kochel, a strategist on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, who noted that many of the catchiest lines from speeches will be replayed on Breitbart, Newsmax and the radio show hosted by Stephen K. Bannon. “But I don’t think it makes any difference in the 2024 run-up to the primary. You’ve got a couple people who aren’t going and a couple people who will go. It has faded in its importance.”Some of that fade, Mr. Kochel said, is directly linked to the allegations against Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, which runs the conference. He was accused of groping an aide to Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign last year. Mr. Schlapp has denied the accusations. The campaign aide filed a lawsuit against Mr. Schlapp in January.Those accusations were cited by some Republicans as one of the reasons they were steering clear of the conference, including Mike Pence, the former vice president who is considering a run for the White House. He passed on accepting an invitation, according to a person briefed on his decision. Instead, Mr. Pence is spending his week being hosted by other conservatives, including at a Club for Growth donor retreat to which Mr. Trump was not invited.Who’s Running for President in 2024?Card 1 of 6The race begins. More

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      My Fellow Liberals Are Exaggerating the Dangers of Ron DeSantis

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      To judge by several early polls, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has a decent shot of beating former President Donald Trump in the race to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Some liberals have pronounced this terrible news — because, they say, a DeSantis presidency would be just as awful as, and perhaps even worse than, a second Trump term.This is wrong. A DeSantis presidency would be bad in many ways, and my fellow liberals should fight with all they have to prevent it. But Mr. DeSantis almost certainly would not be worse than Mr. Trump.Exaggerating the threat posed by the Florida governor could inadvertently increase Mr. Trump’s prospects in the Republican primaries. And if Mr. DeSantis does get the nomination, progressive overreaction toward him in the primary contest could ultimately undermine the case against him in the general election.The case against Mr. DeSantis is rooted in his policy commitments. During his time as Florida’s chief executive, he has governed from the hard right, taking aggressive aim at voting rights, pursuing politicized prosecutions, restricting what can be taught in public schools and universities, strong-arming private businesses, using refugees as human props to score political points and engaging in flagrant demagogy about vaccines. Before that, as a congressman, he supported cuts to Social Security and Medicare and voted for a bill that would have severely weakened Obamacare. All of that provides ample reason to rally against him should he end up as the Republican nominee in 2024.But none of it makes Mr. DeSantis worse than Mr. Trump, who also did and sought to do bad things in office: the Muslim travel ban, forcibly separating migrants from their children, and much else.Could the Trump era have been worse? Absolutely, and here liberals have a point when they suggest Mr. Trump’s ability to wreak havoc was limited by his ineptness. Based on what we’ve seen of Mr. DeSantis’s performance as governor of Florida, a DeSantis administration would likely display much greater discipline and competence than what the country endured under Mr. Trump.Yet it’s also the case that people in the Trump orbit recognize this problem and plan to ensure things work out differently next time. That includes ideas for bolder action on policy and much tighter and more focused management of the president, with an eye toward running an administration capable of acting much more shrewdly and ruthlessly than the last time.So let’s stipulate that Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis would both try to do bad things in office. Mr. Trump still brings something distinctive and much more dangerous to the contest — or rather, several things. He’s flagrantly corrupt. He lies constantly. He’s impulsive and capricious. And he displays a lust for power combined with complete indifference to democratic laws and norms that constrain presidential power.The way to summarize these various personal defects is to say that Mr. Trump is temperamentally unfit to be president. That was obvious to many of us before his surprise victory in 2016. It was confirmed on a daily (and sometimes hourly) basis throughout his presidency. And it became indisputable when he refused to accept the results of the 2020 election and helped spur efforts to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.That makes Mr. Trump categorically more dangerous than anyone else running or likely to run for president in 2024 — including Mr. DeSantis.Those who suggest Mr. DeSantis would be worse than Mr. Trump often make the additional point that Mr. Trump was quite unpopular and outrightly repulsive to many, whereas Mr. DeSantis has proved himself capable of winning over mainstream voters in his home state. That makes Mr. DeSantis potentially a more popular candidate and president than Mr. Trump was or is likely to be. And that could empower Mr. DeSantis to enact more sweeping policy changes were he elected.There are other things to worry about. Mr. Trump’s lack of popularity added to his dangerousness because it made his administration appear illegitimate. He was a president with an anti-mandate — he lost to Hillary Clinton by 2.9 million votes in 2016 and suffered persistently low approval ratings — who nonetheless pressed on with enacting extreme shifts in policy. That made the Trump years uniquely polarizing and unstable.Policies can be reversed. A shredded civic fabric is much more difficult to mend.Liberals have a long history of hyping fears of Republican presidential candidates, from Lyndon Johnson’s “daisy” ad (about Barry Goldwater and a potential threat of nuclear war) to sometimes hysterical warnings about various dire threats posed by John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.We heard similarly terrible things about Donald Trump in 2016 — but this time they were true. As with the story of the boy who cried wolf, a real wolf had finally arrived.It’s crucially important that liberals make what should be a cogent case against Mr. DeSantis without resorting to exaggeration that will undermine their own credibility, particularly with persuadable voters. The most effective approach will be to build a case tailored to the distinctive defects of whichever candidate makes it to the general election. Stick to the facts: Mr. DeSantis is a bully who’s ready and willing to trample freedom of speech and expression, voting rights and common decency to win the applause of the Republican base so he can win office and advance the G.O.P. dream of gutting the social safety net in return for tax cuts that benefit wealthy right-wing donors.To make the unconvincing claim that a DeSantis presidency would be even worse than another four years of Mr. Trump isn’t necessary and could even undercut the liberal argument.Calling Mr. DeSantis bad should be good enough.Damon Linker, a former columnist at The Week, writes the newsletter “Eyes on the Right” and is a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.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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      Ron DeSantis ‘The Courage to Be Free’: Review

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      In his new book, “The Courage to Be Free,” the Florida governor and potential Republican presidential candidate offers a template for governing based on an expansive vision of executive power.THE COURAGE TO BE FREE: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, by Ron DeSantisAs governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis has been casting himself as a Trump-like pugilist. But the overall sense you get from reading his new memoir is that of the mechanical try-hard — someone who has expended a lot of effort studying which way the wind is blowing in the Republican Party and is learning how to comport himself accordingly.Not that he admits any of this, peppering “The Courage to Be Free” with frequent eruptions about “the legacy media” and “runaway wokeness.” But all the culture war Mad Libs can’t distract from the dull coldness at this book’s core. A former military prosecutor, DeSantis is undeniably diligent and disciplined. “The Courage to Be Free” resounds with evidence of his “hard work” (a favorite mantra), showing him poring over Florida’s laws and constitution in order to understand “the various pressure points in the system” and “how to leverage my authority to advance our agenda through that system.” Even the title, with its awkward feint at boldness while clinging to the safety of cliché, suggests the anxiety of an ambitious politician who really, really wants to run for president in 2024 and knows he needs the grievance vote, but is also trying his best to tiptoe around the Trump dragon.“The Courage to Be Free” resounds with evidence of DeSantis’s “hard work” (a favorite mantra).What a difference a dozen years make. Back in 2011, a year before DeSantis first ran for Congress, he published “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers” — an obvious dig at Barack Obama, whom DeSantis lambasted for his “thin résumé” and “egotism” and “immense self-regard.” It was a curious book, full of high-toned musings about “the Framers’ wisdom” and “the Madisonian-designed political apparatus.”His new book will leave some supporters, who have encouraged DeSantis to “humanize himself” for a national audience, sorely disappointed. In his acknowledgments, he thanks “a hardworking team of literary professionals who were critical to telling the Florida story,” but presumably those professionals could only do so much with the material they were given. For the most part, “The Courage to Be Free” is courageously free of anything that resembles charisma, or a discernible sense of humor. While his first book was weird and esoteric enough to have obviously been written by a human, this one reads like a politician’s memoir churned out by ChatGPT.DeSantis’s attempts at soaring rhetoric are mostly too leaden to get off the ground. “During times of turmoil,” he intones, “people want leaders who are willing to speak the truth, stand for what is right and demonstrate the courage necessary to lead.” Of his childhood baseball team making the Little League World Series, he says: “What I came to understand about the experience was less about baseball than it was about life. It was proof that hard work can pay off, and that achieving big goals was possible.” You have to imagine that DeSantis, a double-barreled Ivy Leaguer (Yale and Harvard Law School), put a bit more verve into his admissions essays. At around 250 pages, this isn’t a particularly long book, but it’s padded with such banalities.Much of it is given over to laying out what he calls “Florida’s blueprint for America’s revival,” or, as he puts it in his generic summary: “Be willing to lead, have the courage of your convictions, deliver for your constituents and reap the political rewards.” What this has meant in practice looks an awful lot like thought policing: outlawing classroom discussion of sexual orientation through the third grade; rejecting math textbooks that run afoul of Florida’s opaque review process; forbidding teachers and companies to discuss race and gender in a way that might make anyone feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress.” Florida also has a ban on abortion after 15 weeks — which DeSantis has indicated he would be willing to tighten to six weeks — with no exceptions for rape and incest.In this regard, all the bland platitudes do serve a purpose. DeSantis’s blunt-force wielding of executive power might sound like a good time for hard-core social conservatives, but if part of the point of this book is to float a trial balloon for a presidential run, you can see the gears turning as he tries to make his message palatable for the national stage. Take out the gauzy abstraction, the heartwarming clichés, and much of what DeSantis is describing in “The Courage to Be Free” is chilling — unfree and scary.Much of what DeSantis is describing in “The Courage to Be Free” is chilling — unfree and scary.Of course, DeSantis insists that he’s simply doing his bit to fight “political factionalism” and “indoctrination.” He removed Tampa’s democratically elected prosecutor from office in large part for pledging not to prosecute abortion providers — explaining in the book that he, DeSantis, was just using the powers vested in him by Florida’s state constitution to suspend a “Soros-backed attorney” for “a clear case of incompetence and neglect of duty.” (Last month, a federal judge ruled that DeSantis was in violation of state law.) DeSantis boasts about big-footing companies and local municipalities when he prohibited vaccine mandates and lifted lockdowns. In April 2020, when the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship expressed annoyance at the possibility of dealing with some “jackass mayor,” DeSantis told him not to worry: “I will overrule any mayor that gives you guys a hard time.”It’s unclear what happened to the DeSantis of a decade ago, a boilerplate libertarian and founding member of the House Freedom Caucus who was mainly preoccupied with fiscal austerity and privatizing Medicare and Social Security. His 2011 book contained numerous tributes to “limited government.” Now, he says, in his typically windy way, anything he does that looks suspiciously intrusive is in fact a cleansing measure, purging public life of excess politicization: “For years, the default conservative posture has been to limit government and then get out of the way. There is, no doubt, much to recommend to this posture — when the institutions in society are healthy. But we have seen institution after institution become thoroughly politicized.”Fewer than 20 pages later, DeSantis proposes making about 50,000 federal employees — currently apolitical civil servants — into “at-will employees who serve at the pleasure of the president.” By any measure, this would amount to politicization on steroids.But despite all the dutiful servings of red meat, DeSantis looks so far to be the favored son of the donor class — which is probably the main audience for this book. The message to them seems to be twofold. First, don’t normalize “the woke impulse”: When Disney’s chief executive criticized Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law (officially titled “Parental Rights in Education”), DeSantis cracked down accordingly. Second, Republican donors can take assurance from “the Sunshine State’s favorable economic climate” that, when it comes to what truly matters to them, it will be business as usual.Any criticism of his policies gets dismissed as “woke” nonsense cooked up by the “corporate media.”Reading books, even bad ones, can be a goad to thinking, but what DeSantis seems to be doing in “The Courage to Be Free” is to insist that Americans should just stop worrying and let him do all the thinking for them. Any criticism of his policies gets dismissed as “woke” nonsense cooked up by the “corporate media.” (Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation and News Corp, which owns the publisher of this book, doubtless don’t count.) “I could withstand seven years of indoctrination in the Ivy League,” DeSantis says, only half in jest.The bullying sense of superiority is unmistakable, even when he tries to gussy it up in a mantle of freedom. DeSantis is not taking any chances: He may have been able to “withstand” the “indoctrination” of being exposed to ideas he didn’t like, but he doesn’t seem to believe the same could be said for anyone else.THE COURAGE TO BE FREE: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival | By Ron DeSantis | 256 pp. | Broadside Books | $35 More

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      in Elections

      Let’s All Do the DeSantis Shimmy!

      by

      I suppose all contemporary young politicians dream of meeting their moment. At the enthusiastic dawn of their politico careers, they entertain a fantasy that some day, as a great historical challenge looms into view, their future selves will rise to the occasion — and masterfully dodge it!They envision themselves bobbing and weaving, triangulating and feinting — filling the air with meaningless clichés so that no one knows where they stand and no one can hold them accountable. Their political career sails on, soaring upward, their electoral viability unbruised and glorious!Ron DeSantis is now trying to live out that dream.There are two dominant views on Ukraine within the Republican Party. The first one, embraced by, say, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, holds that Russia’s assault on Ukraine threatens the liberal world order. Helping the Ukrainians push back is in America’s vital national interest.The second view, embraced by the populist wing, is that the United States has no vital national interests in Ukraine. Tucker Carlson has said he doesn’t really care what Vladimir Putin does in Ukraine. Donald Trump has suggested that the war will last longer if the United States continues to send aid.DeSantis has magically cast himself in between these two positions. In the past, DeSantis was tougher on Russia than Trump. In 2017, he noted that Putin “wants to reconstitute the Russian Empire,” and chided Trump for being too soft on Putin, saying that “you’re better off dealing with Putin by being strong.” If Putin thinks he can gain an inch, DeSantis argued, “he’s apt to take a mile.”But this week DeSantis went on “Fox & Friends,” where great statesmen have always gone to unfurl their foreign policy doctrines, and he feinted in a Trump-like direction.He said the war wouldn’t have happened if Joe Biden weren’t so weak. He said he didn’t want to give the Ukrainians a “blank check” (as if anyone does). He said Biden should be more concerned with securing the border at home and less concerned with borders far away. He minimized the threat Putin poses to the West, adding, “I don’t think it’s in our interests to be getting into a proxy war with China, getting involved over things like the borderlands or over Crimea.”It was like that Richard Gere character in the musical “Chicago” — giving them the old razzle-dazzle, even if his dance steps are more plodding. It’s not clear if DeSantis is for more Ukraine aid or not. No one can quite pin him down. Tippity tap. Tappity tip.This has been DeSantis’s general approach to Trump. He doesn’t want to take on Trump directly, so he shimmies. This month, Trump insinuated that DeSantis behaved inappropriately with high school girls while he was a teacher. Instead of slamming Trump, DeSantis shimmied. Trump calls DeSantis “Ron DeSanctimonious” and “Meatball Ron.” DeSantis glides blithely by.The problem with running a campaign in which you are trying to be Trumpy-but-not-Trump is that you’re never your own man. You have to compete with the king without crossing him. You’re always trying to find that magic sweet spot between just-MAGA and plain-crazy.If he were more of a strategic thinker and less a tactician, I think DeSantis would realize that he’s either going to have to fight Trump directly on some issue or copy him right down the line. And I think he’d realize that he’s already locked himself into a position in which he’s going to have to copy him.On Ukraine policy, for example, I suspect that DeSantis will soon be enthusiastically parroting the Trump position. I say that for two interrelated reasons.First, DeSantis, for better or worse, has hitched his wagon to the populist movement. This movement is now broad and deep in the Republican Party and has deep roots running back through American history. This movement has long been opposed to the cosmopolitan East Coast elites, has long adopted the posture that we need to pull inward and take care of our own, and is now allergic to talk about America being actively involved in preserving a liberal world order. This is where populist voters are, and this is where DeSantis, running as a populist, needs to be.Then there is Tucker Carlson. The DeSantis campaign won’t be able to survive if Carlson and the rest of the right-wing media sphere start blasting him for being a “globalist,” the way Trump already is.“Globalist” is to foreign policy what “C.R.T.” is to education. No one knows precisely what it means but everybody in MAGA-world knows it’s really bad. DeSantis has to take whatever position will get that label off his back.This week’s dancing makes me realize DeSantis is in a weaker position than I thought. The G.O.P. is evenly split on foreign policy and significantly split on whether the party should be fiery populist or more conventionally conservative. According to a Pew survey, 40 percent of Republicans think the United States is giving too much aid to Ukraine, while 41 percent believe America is giving Ukraine the right amount of aid or not enough. This data illustrates something also evident in the 2022 election results — that while there are a lot of populists in the party, there are still a lot of normie Republicans who are not.As the campaign wears on, and the debate on Ukraine continues, DeSantis will be condemned to playing Mini-Me to Trump in trying to win that populist 40 percent. Meanwhile, he’ll be cutting ties to many in the nonpopulist 41 percent. That will leave room for some normie Republican in the Brian Kemp/Tim Scott mold to rise.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