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      Trump gets access to sealed documents on witness threats in Mar-a-Lago case

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      Special counsel prosecutors have produced to Donald Trump a sealed exhibit about threats to a potential trial witness after the federal judge overseeing his prosecution for retaining classified documents ordered the exhibit turned over despite the prosecutors’ objections, people familiar with the matter said.The exhibit was a point of contention because it detailed a series of threats made against a witness who could testify against the former president at trial, and the matter is the subject of a criminal investigation by a US attorney’s office. Prosecutors had wanted to withhold it from Trump’s lawyers.But the presiding US district judge Aileen Cannon ordered the exhibit that prosecutors in the office of special counsel, Jack Smith, had submitted “ex parte” – or without showing it to the defense – to be transmitted to Trump’s lawyers after reviewing its contents and deciding it did not warrant that protection.The prosecutors complied with the order before a Saturday deadline without seeking a challenge – though the justice department would typically be loath to disclose details of an ongoing investigation, especially as it relates to the primary defendant in this case, legal experts said.The justice department may have decided it was not appealing the order because the exhibit itself is part of a motion from prosecutors asking the judge to reconsider two earlier rulings that would have the effect of making public the identities of dozens of other witnesses who could testify against Trump.At issue is a complicated legal battle that started in January when Trump filed a motion to compel discovery, a request asking the judge to force prosecutors to turn over reams of additional information they believe could help them fight the charges.The motion to compel was partially redacted and submitted with 70 accompanying exhibits, many of which were sealed and redacted. But Trump’s lawyers asked that those sealed filings be made public because many of the names included in the exhibits were people already known to have worked on the documents investigation.Prosecutors asked the judge to deny Trump’s request to unseal his exhibits, using broad arguments that they would reveal the identity of potential witnesses, two sub-compartments of what is described as “Signals” intelligence, and details about a separate probe run by the FBI.The special counsel’s team also asked to submit their own set of sealed exhibits when they filed their formal response to Trump’s motion to compel. The government’s exhibits involved memos of interviews with witnesses and likely testimony from witnesses, according to the three-page filing.Cannon in February issued two rulings: one on Trump’s request and one on prosecutors’ request.With Trump, the judge found that personal identifying information of witnesses and the information about “Signals” intelligence should remain under seal, but everything else could be public. And with prosecutors, she granted their request to file their own exhibits under seal.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe twin rulings appear to have caught prosecutors by surprise. They have previously been successful in keeping materials that could reveal witness identities confidential, and they formally asked Cannon to reconsider those orders.A motion for reconsideration is significant because if Cannon denies the challenge, it could pave the way for prosecutors to seek an injunctive appeal at the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit using a writ of mandamus – essentially, an order commanding Cannon to reverse her decision.Cannon has previously drawn scrutiny from the 11th circuit. Before Trump was indicted, she upended the underlying criminal investigation by issuing a series of favorable rulings to Trump before the appeals court ruled she never had legitimate legal authority to intervene.As part of prosecutors’ motion for reconsideration, they asked to submit alongside their court filings a third set of exhibits under seal and ex parte. Cannon agreed, pending her personal review of their contents. On Friday, she ruled they should not be ex parte – and should be turned over to Trump, as well. More

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      A once or future king? Floridians ask if DeSantis is looking forward or back

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      Two weeks have passed since Ron DeSantis crashed out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, but many in Florida are questioning if the rightwing governor is still auditioning.On his return to Tallahassee following his national humiliation there was no period of quiet contemplation, or pause to refocus on his day job. Instead, DeSantis got straight down to business, little of it having immediate consequence to Florida or its voters.This week, insisting that the US looked to Florida for “leadership”, he called for constitutional reforms in Washington, including term limits for elected officials. Days later, he announced he was sending the Florida state guard to Texas to “fortify” its battle with the Biden administration over border security.And anybody in his home state figuring DeSantis was ready to move on from his obsession with the culture war issues that helped bring down his White House run was quickly disabused. One month into the year, Florida Republicans’ priorities have included banning Pride flags and stopping transgender drivers from changing their sex on licenses.Prominent questions circulating in the state are, now he is back to serve his final three years as governor: what are DeSantis’s intentions? And what is his ultimate goal?There is no shortage of theories. Some suggest he is ostensibly still in the race for the 2024 nomination, running a shadow campaign that would leave him ready to step in if legal troubles or other factors force Donald Trump out of contention.Others think he’s plotting further ahead. “He’s still running for president, just changed the timeline from 2024 to 2028,” Bob Jarvis, a constitutional law professor at Nova University, told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.Another possibility is gaining traction among those who have studied DeSantis since he evolved from a nondescript and aloof US congressman to the helm of the third largest state: that he simply wants to be remembered for something when he’s termed out of office in January 2027.Such a hypothesis has plausibility if, as some observers believe, his future political career was mortally wounded by the implosion of a profligate presidential campaign that blew through $160m to garner barely 23,000 votes in Iowa, the only state he competed in.“My personal opinion is that he’s finished, that he’s going to go the way of Rick Perry in Texas, Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, all of these great governors who were going to be president, who were like shooting stars and then disappeared into the darkness,” said the political analyst Mac Stipanovich, a former Republican strategist.“If he were to resign today, he would have a legacy in Florida unlike almost any governor in my lifetime. It would be a legacy of anger, outrage and highly centralized top-down vitriol.“He can’t turn on a dime and sprint left because that would make him seem even more inauthentic than he normally does. But if he’s patient, if he takes time, he can move to the center and become, I shouldn’t say more likable, but likable at all since he has been a black hole of anti-charisma.”The “legacy” theory resonates with Susan MacManus, distinguished professor emeritus of political science at the University of Florida. “He’s still got a good while in office, and right now he’s carrying on with points he was making on the campaign trail, but this happens with governors that run and come back home after having not done well, governors are always thinking about their legacy,” she said.“Some want to be known as the education governor, the tax relief or tax reform governor, the environmental governor. There’s that possibility, but if he’s going to take that direction it is probably best to just get through this legislative session being consistent with what you’ve been on the campaign trail.“Maybe he’s comfortable with his legacy being the ‘anti-wokeism’ governor, we will see. Some Republicans say they see the environment as a possibility for him, making inroads and having a good legacy because he’s been fairly proactive spending a lot of money on water issues and so forth, but it looks right now there’s been no break in his commitment to anti-wokeism.”To that end, on Wednesday, DeSantis celebrated a ruling by a Trump-appointed district court judge dismissing Disney’s lawsuit against the state for “political retaliation”, the stripping of powers from Florida’s largest private employer for opposing his “don’t say gay” law banning classroom discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation.His backing of the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, by sending state and national guard personnel, and law enforcement officers paid by Florida taxpayers, to bolster his fellow Republican’s fight with federal authorities over immigration is to critics another example of DeSantis placing his political agenda above the needs of his own state.There’s also growing evidence it could backfire. A survey by Mi Vecino, a grassroots voter registration and advocacy group, found 58% of Republican respondents rated as “very poor”, and an additional 18% as “poor”, the effectiveness of Florida’s political leaders to handle issues that mattered most to them: in order, the cost of living, healthcare and gun violence.“People are feeling the squeeze. They are struggling with real world issues, and they feel like the governor and the legislature are spending their time on manufactured outrage, and not legislating or improving their lives in any tangible way,” said Alex Berrios, the group’s co-founder.“Ron DeSantis has created an engaged segment of the Republican party that will vote, is involved, and is also incredibly unhappy with him and the Republican legislature. They have become exhausted by this firehose of outrage and legislation and policy.” More

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      Florida’s new anti-gay bill aims to limit and punish protected free speech

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      By day two of Florida’s legislative session, which started last month, lawmakers had introduced nearly 20 anti-gay or anti-trans bills. One such bill, SB 1780, would make accusing someone of being homophobic, transphobic, racist or sexist, even if the accusation is true, equivalent to defamation, and punishable by a fine of at least $35,000. If passed, the bill would severely limit and punish constitutionally protected free speech in the state.Though SB 1780 is not likely to survive past higher courts, its introduction is indicative of a wider conservative strategy to stifle criticism of racist, sexist and homophobic behavior. The bill, critics argue, is being introduced to test the waters and see how far, legally, lawmakers can go until they are able to silence detractors.“That’s the pattern here in Florida,” said Sharon Austin, a professor of political science at the University of Florida. “They introduce a bill that many of us find to be really extreme. When we start to protest, eventually they take out some of the provisions and sort of water it down a little bit, but in the end it ends up getting passed.”Austin notes that similar bills, such as SB 266, which severely limits diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, and HB7, “the stop woke act”, which regulates how race and race issues can be taught in schools, were ultimately passed after lawmakers made the bills slightly less extreme.Understanding the landscape that legislators in the state are attempting to construct is crucial, said Howard Simon, the executive director of the ACLU of Florida. “This session is probably going to be known as the ‘gay bigotry legislative session’,” he said. “They’re on track to spend the [two-month legislative session] exercising their bigotry and hostility to the gay community in Florida.”During last year’s legislative session, multiple anti-gay bills were introduced, including the infamous “don’t say gay” bill, which has been challenged multiple times since it was signed into law. Florida taxpayers have footed the costs for a number of lawsuits in the last several years, totaling well into the millions.Simon and Austin both argue that by crafting bills that specifically target LGBTQ+ people, DEI efforts and free speech, conservative legislators are trying to push those who do not fit the mold of what they believe Florida should look like out of the state.“Whether you like it or not, if someone wants to accuse you of being racist or sexist or homophobic, they have a right to do that,” said Austin. “It’s protected speech. There are attempts to intimidate and bully educators and individuals by letting them know that if you say something that’s unpopular, that offends conservatives, then we will come after you, then we will punish you.”‘It’s a frightening time’The passage of SB 1780 would have sweeping implications for free speech, as the bill’s restrictions apply to everything from print and television to online social media posts. The bill would not only make it virtually impossible to prove accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia or transphobia, but it would also make it so that the victim of discriminatory statements is responsible for damages to the offender. If enough people were charged under the bill, Simon said, it would likely intimidate others from coming forward about discrimination, effectively silencing victims of hate crimes or other forms of bigotry. Austin likens the bill and others like it to McCarthyism.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“That’s the level of paranoia we’re coming to. It’s a frightening time,” she said. “It makes you wonder if we’re going back to … that type of society in which you’re almost afraid to say anything for fear of offending conservatives who are really trying to destroy you if you say something that they don’t like.”SB 1780 also would have implications for journalists: if passed, the bill would remove the ability for reporters to keep sources anonymous. Journalists who report on discrimination would be particularly vulnerable to lawsuits, as the bill stipulates that “a statement by an anonymous source is presumptively false for purposes of a defamation action”. Austin believes that this is a further attempt to control the media.A similar, more sweeping bill, HB 991, explicitly made it easier to sue journalists and passed the civil justice subcommittee last year. Though it died in the judiciary committee, SB 1780 is a second attempt to get the law through.“I have to hope that members of the Florida legislature will have enough sense not to pass this,” Simon said. “But, if it does, I don’t think the courts will have a hard time seeing the unconstitutional restrictions on free speech that are throughout.” More

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      Jimy Williams, A.L. Manager of the Year in Boston in ’99, Dies at 80

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      He led the Red Sox into the playoffs twice, had managing stints in Toronto and Houston, and won more than 900 games as a dugout skipper.Jimy Williams, the 1999 American League Manager of the Year for Boston who won 910 games over a dozen seasons that included stints with Toronto and Houston, died on Friday in Tarpon Springs, Fla. He was 80.The Red Sox said his death, in a hospital, came after a brief, unspecified illness. He lived in nearby Palm Harbor, on Florida’s west coast about 25 miles from Tampa.Williams was voted A.L. Manager of the Year after leading the Red Sox to their second straight playoff appearance. He had replaced Kevin Kennedy as Boston’s manager after the 1996 season.Williams at Boston’s spring training camp in Fort Myers, Fla., in 2000. The team won 85 games that year, and he was fired the next season. He went on to manage the Astros.Jim Mone/Associated PressThe Red Sox won 78 games in Williams’s first season and then more than 90 in each of the next two. In 1998, Boston made the playoffs as a wild card team but was defeated by Cleveland in the A.L. division series. The next year, down 0-2 in the division series, again against Cleveland, the Red Sox rallied to win it 3-2. (Boston lost to the New York Yankees, 4-1, in the A.L. Championship Series.)The Red Sox won 85 games in 2000, and Williams was fired in August 2001, with the team at 65-53. He was hired that fall by the Houston Astros, but after two winning seasons with them he was fired midseason in 2004 with the team at 44-44.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘We can lose more freedoms’: Florida braces for Ron DeSantis’s wrath after national rout

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      Ron DeSantis has fallen off the national stage and the US will not, after all, become Florida like he once envisaged. But back in his home state, opponents are bracing for the return of the Republican to serve the remainder of his final term as governor following the implosion of his presidential campaign.Florida is where DeSantis honed his extremist attacks on a wide range of targets from the transgender community to immigrants and Black voters. Although he will no longer be carrying them to the White House, critics here say there’s probably plenty more to come.“He’s gonna come home with a vengeance. He’s going to try to regain the mantle that he had after [his re-election in] November 2022. And he’s going to try to bring everybody back together and continue on this anti-woke, anti-democratic, anti-freedom platform,” Nikki Fried, chair of the Florida Democratic party, said.“The question will be: ‘What do the Republicans do?’ Rank-and-file Republicans in Florida, elected as well as grassroots, are not having any of it. But there are those in higher-up elected positions that still have to reckon with the fact that he’s going to be governor for the next few years and are going to have to play ball in order to get their priorities accomplished.”Fried was referencing the Republican supermajority in both houses of the Florida legislature, which acted as little more than a rubber stamp for DeSantis’s culture war policies that also included the near dismantling of the state’s higher education system and banning face mask and vaccine mandates as the Covid-19 pandemic still raged.Some analysts questioned if DeSantis would return to Tallahassee chastened by his national humiliation, weaker in the eyes of legislators and unable to replicate the swagger or command the same authority as he did following his 19-point re-election.Fried, who saw DeSantis in action first-hand when she served in his cabinet as agriculture commissioner, and the only statewide elected Democrat, from 2019 to 2023, has no such doubt.“We can lose more freedoms,” she said, noting that DeSantis will likely remain in office until he is termed out in January 2027.“I don’t know what his agenda is for this session, he didn’t lay that out in his state of the state address, which was entirely for Iowa, so we don’t have his legislative priorities. But if he continues to try to rule with an iron fist here in Florida, we’re going to have a lot more of these misogynistic, homophobic policies that are going to come out of this administration.“And unfortunately, Floridians are going to continue to feel the impact of his wrath and his extreme agenda. That doesn’t work across the country [but] he’s going to take no learning lessons from what he just experienced, that his agenda and his policies don’t work. But he’s going to try to prove otherwise.”Other senior Democrats share her concern.Val Demings, the former US congresswoman who lost to Republican incumbent Marco Rubio in the 2022 Senate election, warns the governor will remain “dangerous” with a free rein at home.“Ron DeSantis is out. All that damage to Florida through bizarre policies, for nothing. Ambition at any costs, with no guardrails, is dangerous,” she said in a tweet.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSo it falls to Florida’s Democratic party, written off by DeSantis a year ago as “a dead, rotten carcass”, to form the resistance, Fried says. Buoyed by a string of successes at the ballot box, including Donna Deegan’s victory in Jacksonville’s mayoral race last May, and new state congressman Tom Keen’s ousting of a Republican incumbent earlier this month, Democrats see a momentum shift fueled by anger at DeSantis they hope will carry through to November.“The balance is making sure we’re holding Republicans accountable for their votes for the policies that were, and are, rejected by Floridians, and by the same respect talking about what we are going to do when we get out of the super-minority and start picking up seats,” Fried said.“I mean not just in the legislature, but good Democrats elected all the way down to school boards, and city and county commission seats.“What policies are we looking to reverse or to move forward on? People are tired of the divisiveness. People are tired of the anger and they just want their government to get back to work.”Ultimately, Fried believes, Republican voters nationwide rejected DeSantis because they saw the same traits, she says, that have become familiar to Floridians.“There’s nothing there. There’s no soul. There’s no charisma. There’s no ability to connect to a voter or to show true empathy,” she said.“It turned voters off. They didn’t like his personality and then they didn’t like his policies, so combine the two of them and this is the result, a disaster of a presidential campaign and from all calculations, the most expensive presidential primary bid in American history.“Americans don’t want to be Florida. They see what’s happened here in our state. And so voters now are going to be walking away, especially independent voters, from a very authoritarian overreaching of Ron DeSantis and this Florida Republican party.” More

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      Ron DeSantis put nearly all his eggs in the basket of a ‘war on woke’

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      It began in a glitch-filled disaster on Twitter. It ended with a misattributed quotation on X. Just like Elon Musk’s social media platform, efforts to rebrand Ron DeSantis’s US presidential election campaign could not mask its fundamental flaws.When in May the Florida governor announced his run during a chat with Musk on Twitter Spaces, the platform’s audio streaming feature, there were technical breakdowns that drew comparisons with one of Musk’s space rockets blowing up on the launchpad.Eight months, dozens of staff departures, tens of millions of dollars and one crushing defeat in Iowa later, DeSantis announced he was dropping out in a video posted on the renamed X that quoted Winston Churchill as saying: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal – it is the courage to continue that counts.” According to the International Churchill Society, the British wartime prime minister never said that.Two days before the New Hampshire primary election, DeSantis’s humiliation was complete. “This is probably the biggest collapse of a presidential campaign in modern American history, if not all American history,” David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida, told the MSNBC network on Sunday. “Ron DeSantis had everything going for him.”A year ago, DeSantis had stormed to re-election as governor of Florida by nearly 20 percentage points in what not so long ago was a swing state. He was beating Donald Trump in some opinion polls. He was drawing attention, donor money and headlines such as “DeFuture” in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post newspaper.The argument seemed compelling: DeSantis could offer the former president’s Maga (“Make America great again”) politics in purer, perfected form, unencumbered by Trump’s age, chaos or court cases. Some said he was therefore more dangerous than Trump. Comedian Trevor Noah suggested that, if Trump was the original Terminator, DeSantis was the T-1000, a smarter and slicker upgrade.DeSantis was billed as Trump without the baggage. He turned out to be Trump without the votes.The governor made a series of bad gambles. He bet big on May and Twitter Spaces as the right time and place to start. He bet big on a moral crusade against wokeness. He bet big on outsourcing central parts of his campaign to a Super Pac (whose boss spent significant time during the last days in Iowa working on a jigsaw puzzle). He bet big on Trump’s candidacy imploding under legal pressures. He bet big on the Iowa caucuses. None of them paid off.Longtime political observers in Florida had doubts from the start. They knew that DeSantis had conquered the heavily populated Sunshine state with heavy TV advertising and an unusually weak Democratic opponent. They suspected that the retail politics of Iowa – shaking hands, kissing babies, holding long conversations in diners about ethanol – would expose his lack of people skills. They were right.Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican operative and cofounder of the Lincoln Project, says: “This guy was politically overpriced stock from the very beginning. He represented Diet Trump but no Trump voter wants the low sugar, low fat, no caffeine version of Trump. They want the real thing.”But while much has been written about DeSantis’s joyless, low charisma campaign, this was a failure not only of style but of substance. The governor ran to the right of Trump on many issues and put nearly all his eggs in the basket of a “war on woke”.His timing was off. Culture war issues had been all the rage during the coronavirus pandemic – masks, vaccines, school closures – then morphed into a parents’ rights movement around book bans, critical race theory and transgender children’s access to bathrooms and sports. If it worked for Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, why not DeSantis in the US?But by the time the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary came around, the pandemic had faded and masks were rarely seen. DeSantis’s accusations that Trump palled around with Dr Anthony Fauci and forced national lockdowns, while Florida stayed open had lost their resonance.The limitations of anti-wokeness were also exposed. Groups such as Moms for Liberty, which aim to keep race and LGBTQ issues out of school curricular, underperformed in last year’s elections in states such as Virginia, where Youngkin seemed to have lost his touch.Polls show that DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban is unpopular in Florida and nationwide. His actions against the Walt Disney Co after the company spoke out against Florida legislation that limited discussion of gender and sexuality in classrooms went down badly among pro-business Republicans.Aware of such trends, Trump is trying to be vague on abortion and talk less about culture war issues these days. At a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire on Saturday, it took him an hour and 15 minutes to promise a crackdown on schools “pushing” critical race theory and transgender content as well as vaccine mandates. The crowd cheered heartily, suggesting that these topics have not lost all their potency, but Trump quickly moved on.Wilson comments: “Trump may not be smart, but he’s got a kind of feral cunning and he recognises that the culture war stuff has run out too far. That’s why he said, oh, you have to have a few exceptions [for abortion].“A guy like DeSantis was on the very bleeding edge of six-week abortion bans and the most punitive approaches to all the culture war things – book banning and everything else – and he thought that was going to get him over the finish line. But when Trump is in the race, he still could never put it together.DeSantis is still just 45 and aware that other candidates – Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden included – have lost primaries only to try again and win the presidency. He recently claimed that Trump voters in Iowa told him they will back him in four years’ time, telling reporters: “They were coming up to me saying: ‘We want you in 2028, we love you, man.”The timing of his withdrawal and endorsement of Trump, which frees the former’s president voters to back him against Haley in New Hampshire in South Carolina, will earn him a few points in Trump World.Florida congressman Matt Gaetz said on Sunday: “Welcome home Ron, welcome back to the Maga movement where you’ve always belonged.” More

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      Ron DeSantis drops out of Republican presidential race

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      Ron DeSantis, the hard-right governor of Florida, has ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and endorsed Donald Trump.“It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance,” he said in a statement posted on X. “He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear, a repackaged form of warmed over corporatism that Nikki Haley represents.”DeSantis’s withdrawal in the days ahead of the New Hampshire primary follows a disappointing result in the Iowa caucus, where he finished second place but trailed Donald Trump by a large margin. In New Hampshire, his numbers were far behind former South Carolina governor Haley and Trump.“He’s been a good governor and I wish him well,” Haley said at a campaign event on Sunday. “Having said that, it’s now one fella and one lady left.”DeSantis’ news was the culmination of a long, agonising decline.As recently as spring 2023, the former navy lawyer and rightwing congressman was widely seen as the Republican most likely to stop Trump becoming the nominee for a third election running, in large part by attempting to offer harsh Trumpist policies without the attendant drama.In November 2022, DeSantis cruised past the Democrat Charlie Crist to win a second term in Tallahassee. In his victory speech, he crowed: “We have embraced freedom. We have maintained law and order. We have protected the rights of parents. We have respected our taxpayers and we reject ‘woke’ ideology.”Referencing Winston Churchill, a near-mythic figure on the American right, he went on: “We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools, we fight the woke in the corporations. We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”He received a rapturous reception, supporters with an eye on 2024 chanting “two more years” and the New York Post branding him “DeFuture”, as speculation abounded that Rupert Murdoch was finally set to move on from Trump.But despite formidable fundraising, a seemingly strong campaign structure, strong polling and a rising Republican star in his wife, Casey DeSantis, after a long run-in to a formal campaign declaration, little went right.DeSantis’s hard-right agenda ran into trouble as he chose to take on Disney, a dominant employer in Florida, over its opposition to his “don’t say gay” policy regarding LGBTQ+ issues in schools. Generating a string of stories, scandals and lawsuits over book bans in school libraries, the subject continued to dog the campaign.In May the launch of that campaign, a Twitter Spaces session with Elon Musk, descended into farce as the platform glitched and buckled. The event host, the donor David Sacks, claimed: “We got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign.” Few observers agreed.On the campaign trail in the months that followed, the governor came across as stilted and awkward. For a campaign focused on social media and the influencers who lurk there, the resultant string of mocking memes and threads could not have been in the plan.Nor could a summer fiasco over bizarre campaign videos, posted to social media and featuring far-right, white supremacist, Nazi and arguably homoerotic imagery. A firing followed but the campaign’s image had taken another big blow, reports of fundraising problems appearing.There was a scandal over an attempt to change history teaching in state schools, regarding the place of slavery in Florida’s past. There were attempts to troll Democrats on immigration, including sending undocumented migrants to Democratic-run states by bus or plane. That policy ended up in the courts as well.As the polling gap to Trump grew, and as the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley steadily moved through the field, DeSantis sought ways to fight back.In November he took the unexpected step of debating a Democrat other than Joe Biden. The Fox News-hosted contest with Gavin Newsom, the California governor, proved little more than a sideshow. Brandishing a map he said showed the spread of “human faeces” on the streets of San Francisco, DeSantis succeeded only in feeding more “poop map” memes.DeSantis and Haley became more willing to attack Trump as the first vote neared, if still with the gloves kept on, even Trump’s lie about a stolen election in 2020 proving hard to simply disown. In Iowa, DeSantis picked up key nominations from the governor, Kim Reynolds, and evangelical leaders and eventually finished in second. But that still didn’t catapult his campaign into safe New Hampshire territory, and he dropped out before the numbers could prove just how far behind he might be. stuck fending off speculation about whether he wore lifts in his shoes.Democrats celebrated the news on Sunday.“As Democrats, we’ve been shouting from the rooftops that his strategy of waging culture wars on the backs of hardworking Floridians just to further his own ambitions was wrong for the state & would be disastrous for the nation,” said Fentrice Driskell, the lead Democrat in the Florida state legislature on Twitter/X.Sarafina Chitika, spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, said: “Just like Trump, DeSantis ran a campaign pledging to ban abortion nationwide, rip away access to health care, and gut Social Security and Medicare, while embracing election deniers and whitewashing January 6. Whichever candidate wins the race for the Maga base will be left running on the same dangerous and unpopular anti-freedom agenda that voters will reject in November.”For its part, the New Hampshire electorate did not seem too shaken by his last-minute announcement.Two hours before an event he had planned in New Hampshire, there were no signs of the DeSantis campaign or his fans at The Farm Bar and Grille. A member of staff said they had found out from news reports that DeSantis wouldn’t be coming and said he had not yet pre-paid for the space.“Nope, I’m about to charge him right now.”
      Adam Gabbatt contributed reporting from New Hampshire More

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      Why Wasn’t DeSantis the Guy?

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      Right before the blizzard conditions hit Iowa ahead of the caucus, in a barbecue place with arcade games and waiters in red T-shirts weaving through reporters with beers and baskets of fried food, Ron DeSantis came onstage, as he does, to Poison’s “Nothin’ but a Good Time.”This is a fratty song, and the vibe of the place was retro, much like a T-shirt I saw a guy wearing at a DeSantis event in 2022. The back read “Can’t Miss DeSantis” and featured a cartoon drawing of Mr. DeSantis, flanked by palm trees, playing beer pong.The existence of the T-shirt suggests that it once seemed possible, to someone anyway, to adopt the MAGA intellectual ethos of using the state to rebalance society and smash ideological enemies, and also be relaxed, normal, above it. Or maybe the intellectual part was never involved: There was a kind of conservative who liked the idea of a young governor making the libs cry from time to time, but whose fundamental premise was “the Free State of Florida” where a person could get back to living their lives, unbothered. And that’s where you’d find the theoretical Mr. DeSantis, ironically playing beer pong at a Bucs tailgate after church and a Home Depot run.This is reading a lot into a T-shirt, but ideas and realities about who candidates are, and what voters really want, seem central to understanding the last few years in politics. And even in 2022 that T-shirt stood out for the way its relaxed, fun bro diverged from the harder, more lawyerly governor who promised an updated, aggressive social conservatism that would use most tools of the state to battle academics and bureaucrats.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More