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      ‘All hat, no cattle’: Ron DeSantis, the ‘anti-woke’ Florida governor running for president

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      The official Florida governor’s website invites visitors to “Meet Governor DeSantis”. But anyone who clicks on that option is greeted with the message “Governor Ron DeSantis Biography – coming soon”, along with his photo and a big white space.DeSantis’s admirers project on to that blank page the ideal of a strong chief executive, “anti-woke” warrior and consistent election winner. His detractors fill the vacuum with warnings that the Florida governor represents “Trump 2.0”, “Trump with a brain” and “Trump without the circus”.Six months ago DeSantis was being hailed as the future of a Republican party tired of former US president Donald Trump’s losing streak. He had offered blueprints for beating Democrats in elections and for exporting a rightwing agenda nationwide: “Make America Florida.”But after filing papers with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday to seek the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, DeSantis still has everything to prove about his readiness for the ultimate stage.Florida political insiders suggest that he is undercooked and will fail the “likability test” – which candidate would you rather have a beer with?“I have been saying DeSantis was an overpriced political stock for a year and a half,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist who has been involved in more than 30 political campaigns in the state.“This guy is all hat and no cattle. He doesn’t have that natural verbal and political grace that you need to pull off a win against Trump, who is a powerful performer on stage.”DeSantis does have youth on his side. He was born 44 years ago in Jacksonville, Florida, and grew up in Dunedin, a suburb of Tampa, but writes in his book, The Courage to Be Free, that his upbringing reflected his parents’ midwestern working-class background: “This made me God-fearing, hard-working, and America-loving.”In a biographical detail as American as apple pie and sure to resonate in the heartland, the young DeSantis lived and breathed baseball. His team in Dunedin reached the Little League World Series in 1991. He served as captain of the varsity baseball team as an undergraduate at Yale University; his Yale jersey hangs in his office in Florida’s capitol building in Tallahassee.Christian Ziegler, chairman of the Florida Republican party, said: “Even to this day he knows baseball facts when people bring it up. It was interesting being at a stadium with him: someone started talking baseball and he immediately stopped whatever conversation he was having and started rattling off stories about various players.“He’s very passionate about sports and can have great conversations with people around sports as well.”After Yale, DeSantis taught at Darlington school, a private boarding school in Rome, Georgia, in the 2001-02 school year. One former student told the New York Times that he taught civil war history in a way that sounded to her like an attempt to justify slavery.Then, while at Harvard Law School, DeSantis was commissioned as an officer in the navy and, on graduation, joined the judge advocate general corps as an attorney. He was assigned to the military prison camp at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, where he oversaw the treatment of detainees. Later he was deployed to Iraq to advise a team of Navy Seals.In 2020 DeSantis married Casey Black, a TV reporter, at Disney World (which he now admits is “kind of ironic”, given his subsequent feud with the entertainment company). The couple have three children: Madison, Mason and Mamie. Casey, 42, remains his closest adviser.DeSantis worked briefly as an assistant US attorney in Florida before a successful bid for a House of Representatives seat in 2012. In Congress he helped create the hard-right Freedom Caucus focused on “small government” and implacable opposition to then president Barack Obama.After a short-lived attempt to become a senator, he ran for governor in 2018. He was endorsed by then president Trump, whom he praised on the campaign trail and in a TV advert, and ultimately won by a tight margin. Trump has since taken credit for DeSantis’s victory and accused his fellow Republican of being disloyal for challenging him for the White House.The new governor did not take the narrowness of his victory as a hint that he should seek consensus; instead he centralised power in the governor’s mansion, embraced a pugnacious CEO style and declared that he wants to take “all the meat off the bone”.He has shaped legislation, punished critics, sparred with journalists and filled the state’s courts, offices and boards with allies. Supporters say his no-nonsense, get-things-done style has made Florida boom. Opponents say he has authoritarian impulses and a mean streak a mile wide.The turning point in DeSantis’s political career was the coronavirus pandemic. He opposed many of the policies advocated by the federal government to prevent the spread of Covid. He resisted mask and vaccine mandates and was determined to keep Florida businesses and tourism destinations open during most of the pandemic.His defenders argue that his approach was driven by data and rooted in science because he had primarily been a policy wonk up to that point. But the media backlash helped him find his voice as a mini Trump: an antagonist of “liberal elites” and darling of Fox News but without the rough edges. He was more disciplined and intentional.Ziegler said: “During Covid, he started doing press conferences and the press started pushing back on him. And then he started punching them back – and then, all of a sudden, the public jumped on it, and they loved it that they had a fighter in there for them. I think he took note of that.”DeSantis’s political signature is his foray into the US culture wars, summed up in his proclamation: “Florida is where woke goes to die!” He has led the Republican fightback against what he argues are extreme progressive polices favoured by educators and corporations. He imposed limits on how race, gender identity and sexuality can be taught in schools, forcing some teachers to remove books from their libraries. He banned transgender athletes from playing girls’ and women’s sports.Ziegler believes that DeSantis’s status as a father of young children helps explain his desire to fight for parents’ rights. “This is a guy that always loves being with his kids and his family. He’s either working as governor or he’s out at his kids’ T-ball games and Little League. You don’t hear that. You don’t see that. Frankly, I think he should broadcast that more.”Last year DeSantis won re-election by nearly 20 percentage points in Florida, a one-time battleground state. He has since signed laws banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, easing restrictions for people to carry concealed firearms and ending the state’s unanimous jury requirement for death penalty cases.But his battle with the Walt Disney Company over its Florida theme park has unnerved some donors. His mixed messaging on continued US support for Ukraine and reluctance to respond to Trump’s attacks have also called into question his political acumen. He has even been mocked over a report that he ate a chocolate pudding dessert not with a spoon but with three fingers.Now, with Trump surging ahead of him in the polls, other Republican candidates smell blood.DeSantis will be under pressure to make a compelling case as to why he wants to be president. To some, his motivations for entering politics remain nebulous. Ron Klein, a former Democratic congressman from Florida who is chair of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said: “I never heard the typical thing that I know I presented, and many other people present, about why you did this in the first place.“What was that single issue that drove you out there? What happened in your childhood or something your parents did or some influence around you that got you? I never heard that or saw it. I don’t remember some personal driving story about why he was running for office or why he wanted to be governor of Florida.” 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

      Ron DeSantis’s Presidential Campaign Is Not Dead Yet

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      It’s never a good sign when political analysts are writing “What Went Wrong?” stories about your presidential campaign before it’s announced.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has endured more than his share of pre-mortems as the conventional wisdom has turned decisively against his imminent campaign and his standing has dropped into the teens and low 20s in recent national polls of the Republican primaries from above 30 percent in March.Despite the increasingly loud chorus of doubters the last couple of months, though, the DeSantis bid still has the makings of a strong campaign. In the weeks ahead he could well change the narrative of the 2024 Republican nomination fight from “Trump is burying DeSantis” to “He’s still kicking despite Trump doing everything he can to bury him.”He’ll be lavishly funded; his favorable ratings remain quite high among Republicans; he can draw a crowd; he’ll finally actually be in the race; and perhaps most importantly, it seems he has the correct theory of how to try to topple Trump.We’ve gotten used to the idea of DeSantis running but it’s worth remembering how audacious his campaign is. He’s not in the same position as, say, Nikki Haley, who can duck Trump as much as possible, hope that lightning strikes for her and if it doesn’t, that maybe she’ll still be in Trump’s good graces if he’s the nominee.This evasion isn’t available to DeSantis, whom Trump is already accusing of grooming teenage girls and of maybe being gay. DeSantis is signing up for the possibility of getting his reputation tarnished and his political career forever blighted. A friendly rapprochement is very unlikely at the end. If they do come to terms after a Trump victory, it will surely be humiliating to DeSantis — think of a defeated foreign king being paraded as one of the props in an ancient Roman triumph.And he’s getting in when Trump is once again making his dominant position in the party unmistakable. Earlier this year, it looked as if the 800-pound gorilla had perhaps slimmed down to 400 or 500 pounds, but now he’s clearly back at his accustomed weight.If Trump is clearly the odds-on favorite, though, it’s too early to declare him inevitable, and there is a big element of the party that is still open to someone else, at least in theory. How DeSantis campaigns will matter.At the mechanical level, he’ll need to post a big fund-raising number out of the gate, continue to roll out endorsements by state officials (he’s had impressive hauls in Iowa and New Hampshire), and win the contest for the best talent among activists and organizers while building robust organizations in the early states.None of that is easy, but, with significant backing from Republican donors, it’s doable.More fundamentally, a presidential candidate needs a personal narrative that dovetails with his political message in a way that candidates for lesser offices simply don’t. Without one, they rarely succeed. Barack Obama was a groundbreaking African American candidate for a country that needed the audacity of hope. Donald Trump was the outsider billionaire for a country that needed to be made great again.What is DeSantis? He has spent the last several months talking about his record in Florida more than about himself, which is admirable in a way — but policies don’t tell a story. At the moment, the average Republican knows little or nothing about his Yale baseball career, his military service during the war on terrorism, his wife’s fight against breast cancer or his life as a very busy father of three young children. In a recent trip through Iowa, his wife, Casey, talked in a more personal mode about their life together; there will have to be more of that.Much has been made lately of DeSantis’s standoffishness. Even if this has been exaggerated, there’s no doubt that he isn’t a Bill Clinton-style politician who feeds off people. For him, retail politics is clearly work, and he needs to do it. His team now has him staying after events, to glad-hand. He’ll have to do it wherever he goes, without showing any boredom or irritation, lest he confirm the idea that he lacks a personal touch.He’ll need to plant his feet firmly on tricky issues in a Republican primary: What does he think of the legitimacy of the 2020 election? Where he is now on entitlement reform? Perhaps his worst moment in the pre-announcement phase was his backtracking on a poorly drafted statement calling the Ukraine war “a territorial dispute,” which dismayed both G.O.P. supporters and opponents of large-scale aid to Ukraine.Then, of course, there’s the big, looming question of how to respond to Trump’s attacks. Ignoring them, as DeSantis has mostly done this spring, seems weak; responding risks playing Trump’s game. No Republican has yet figured out this conundrum, with the exception of Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia.When Trump put a bounty on Kemp’s head for the offense of defying him after the 2020 election, the governor responded deftly. He said that Trump had a beef with him, not the other way around, and when responding to Trump’s claims about the election, did it dispassionately and factually. He survived Trump’s onslaught, but had the advantage of fighting a proxy war in a primary battle on his home turf, rather than running directly against Trump himself.DeSantis would do well to study the Kemp example; while it shows it’s possible to win against Trump, it also underlines that he has to be fought with care to avoid triggering a defensive reaction from his fans. DeSantis won’t and can’t make the totalist case against Trump as unfit to serve that “Never Trump” Republicans and the press might like to hear. But so it is.Much of his anti-Trump case will be based on electability. There’s no doubt that Trump blew a winnable race in 2020 — DeSantis will need to say he really did lose — and had a large hand in the Republican Party’s disappointing midterm last year. In all likelihood, DeSantis would have a much easier time beating Biden than Trump would, based on the generational contrast alone. But there are limits to this argument. Trump is competitive with Biden in polling, and an electability message doesn’t usually move the type of self-identified “very conservative” primary voters DeSantis needs to pry from Trump.The risk to DeSantis is that his candidacy takes on the feel of an establishment front-runner — lots of donor enthusiasm, an electability message — when he’s running from behind against an insurgent populist who happens to have once been president of the United States.To counter that, DeSantis is obviously going to have to retain his hard edge on cultural issues. The continued fight against Disney, which has become a morass, may actually help him: With other candidates effectively taking the side of Disney out of principle or to score points against DeSantis, he can portray himself as the most committed warrior against woke corporations.And he needs to attack Trump from the right, both on the former president’s past record (Anthony Fauci, criminal justice reform, not building the border wall) and on current disputes. Even though it causes agita among some of his big donors, the issue of abortion is a clear opening for DeSantis. Trump is foggy, while DeSantis just signed a six-week ban. He should make maximum use of this contrast, especially in Iowa where social-conservative voters are so important.For all the talk of how DeSantis has modeled his combative political style on Trump, he’s a vastly different politician and character. His approach as a speaker and campaigner is conventional, whereas Trump is outlandish. DeSantis is highly professional, whereas even after being president of the United States for four years, Trump reeks of amateurism. All indications are that DeSantis is a dutiful family man, whereas Trump has been, at best, a playboy and a boor.It may be that Republicans decide that they still want the show that only Trump can provide. If that’s the case, DeSantis and all the other non-Trump candidates will indeed be done. But he’s not dead yet.Rich Lowry is the editor in chief of National Review.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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      DeSantis envisions ‘quarter-century’ of far-right majority in the supreme court

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      In a speech to Christian media in Orlando, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, envisaged the creation of a “7-2 conservative majority that would last a quarter-century” on the US supreme court should he be elected president next year.Speaking to the National Religious Broadcasters Convention, DeSantis said: “I think if you look over the next two presidential terms, there is a good chance that you could be called upon to seek replacements for Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito and the issue with that is, you can’t really do better than those two.”Supreme court justices serve for life or until they choose to retire. Thomas, who has rejected calls to resign over his relationship with a Republican mega-donor, is 74. Alito is 73. Both are hard-right figures on a court tipped firmly right, 6-3.But DeSantis also alluded to a chance to replace Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal appointed by Barack Obama who is now 68, or perhaps Elena Kagan, another Obama appointee who is now 63, should he win the White House and serve two full terms.He said: “So it is possible that in those eight years, we have the opportunity to fortify justices … Alito and Thomas as well as actually make improvements with those others, and if you were able to do that, you would have a 7-2 conservative majority on the supreme court that would last a quarter-century.”According to the Washington Post, DeSantis’s comments were met with “raucous applause”.The governor also took a shot at John Roberts, the conservative chief justice who has sided with liberals on key decisions, including the one last year which eliminated federal abortion rights.“If you replace a Clarence Thomas with somebody like a Roberts or somebody like that,” DeSantis said, “then you’re gonna actually see the court move to the left, and you can’t do that.”Under Roberts, the court has moved to the right.Last year, Alito wrote the opinion in Dobbs v Jackson, which removed abortion rights. Thomas wrote the opinion in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v Bruen, striking down a gun control law in place since 1911.DeSantis, 44, is expected to announce his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination this week.Donald Trump, 76, is the clear frontrunner to face President Joe Biden, who is 80 and beat Trump in 2020. On Monday, however, Fox News reported that 100 Trump White House alumni have formed a pro-DeSantis group called the Eight-Year Alliance.DeSantis is preparing to launch a campaign fueled by hard-right state legislation. Notable policies have included a crackdown on the teaching of LGBTQ+ issues and of race in US history, legislation targeting trans people in public life, a loosening of gun control laws and a six-week abortion ban.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMany observers say that record may prove too extreme for voters in a presidential election.On abortion rights, for example, public opinion is consistently against the kind of extreme bans recently passed in Republican states.In Orlando, the Post said, DeSantis “promoted the six-week abortion ban he helped enact this year … a divisive topic he tends to brush past, even with staunchly conservative audiences”.The governor’s comments were “brief”, the Post said. But when he said his ban was meant to “protect an unborn child that has a detectable heartbeat”, he was “drowned out by extended cheers”.Gynecologists say fetuses do not have heartbeats at six weeks, a stage at which many women do not know they are pregnant.In Orlando, DeSantis said his ban was “the right thing to do”. More

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      DeSantis’s $13.5m police program lures officers with violent records to Florida

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      Numerous police officers lured to new jobs in Florida with cash from Governor Ron DeSantis’s flagship law enforcement relocation program have histories of excessive violence or have been arrested for crimes including kidnapping and murder since signing up, a study of state documents has found.DeSantis, who is expected to launch his campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination this week, has spent more than $13.5m to date on the recruitment bonus program, which he touted in 2021 as an incentive to officers in other states frustrated by Covid-19 vaccination mandates.“This will go a long way to ensuring we can have the best and the brightest filling our law enforcement ranks,” Florida’s Republican attorney general, Ashley Moody, said in April last year as DeSantis announced one-time $5,000 bonuses for new recruits.However, among the almost 600 officers who moved to Florida and received the bonus – or were recruited in state – are a sizable number who either arrived with a range of complaints against them, or have since accrued criminal charges, the online media outlet Daily Dot has discovered.They include a former trainee deputy with the Escambia county sheriff’s office charged with murdering her husband; an officer with the Miramar police department fired for domestic battery and kidnapping; and a former member of the New York police department (NYPD) who was hired by the Palm Beach police department having once been accused of an improper sexual proposition.That officer, named by the Daily Dot as Daniel Meblin, was also part of a $160,000 settlement by the NYPD for violence at a 2020 protest against the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in which officers were accused of beating Black males without provocation.A Palm Beach police spokesperson told the Daily Dot that Meblin – who had complaints against him including abuse of authority and sexually propositioning a teenager – had disclosed his background during the hiring process, according to the NYPD watchdog 50-a.org.He has been an “exemplary” officer since he was hired in October 2022, the same month he left the NYPD, the spokesperson said, while denying a request to allow Meblin to be interviewed.The Daily Dot compiled its report from state records it obtained from the Florida department of economic opportunity through a Freedom of Information Act request. The undated document lists payments of more than $8.8m split between 1,310 newly hired officers, with most receiving $6,693.44 from the signing-on and additional bonuses.In a press release earlier this month, DeSantis announced the program had since grown to more than 2,000 officers, with a parallel rise in cost to more than $13.5m.“To date, 595 law enforcement recruits from 49 states and US territories have relocated to Florida, including more than 215 recruits from California, Texas, New York, and Pennsylvania,” the statement said.For its report, the Daily Dot matched information from the 50-a and NYPD databases, as well as published media reports, to officers’ names listed by the state.It says it uncovered “an exodus” of officers to Florida law enforcement agencies from the NYPD in the wake of a backlash against the department for its brutal handling of racial justice protests in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.Among them were at least two dozen officers whose names matched those on the NYPD’s civilian complaint review board database, including some who, according to those complaints, “unlawfully pepper sprayed, assaulted, and pointed their firearms at suspects, as well as used chokeholds and offensive language regarding race and ethnicity”.A civil rights lawsuit filed in 2018 against former NYPD sergeant Haitham Hussameldin alleged the officer used physical violence against a teenager on her way to school. Hussameldin, now employed by Florida’s Manapalan police department, accrued six formal complaints, including “multiple allegations of abuse of authority and overuse of physical force” in New York, the Daily Dot said. All the complaints were withdrawn or unsubstantiated.Another former New York officer now employed in Florida was involved in two deaths, one of which led to a $100,000 civil settlement, the Daily Dot reported. And in October 2022, the Apopka police department hired as an officer Justin Burgos, 19, the son of a retired NYPD deputy inspector, who a year earlier was charged with reckless endangerment, reckless driving and obstruction of governmental administration for driving his car into protesters in Manhattan calling for the firing of an officer accused of beating a Black suspect.None of the police agencies contacted for comment responded, other than the Palm Beach department, the Daily Dot reported. DeSantis’s office did not return a request for comment from the Guardian. More

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      NAACP says Florida is ‘actively hostile’ to minorities and issues travel warning

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      The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has issued a travel advisory for the state of Florida, calling the state “actively hostile” to minorities as Florida’s conservative government limits diversity efforts in schools.In a Saturday press release, the civil rights organization better known as the NAACP said the travel warning comes as Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, “attempts to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Florida schools”.“Before traveling to Florida, please understand that the state of Florida devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color,” the advisory said.Under DeSantis, Florida’s department of education has restricted classroom material covering race, gender, sexuality and other identities. The state’s education department has also prohibited mathematics textbooks and other material for a range of reasons, including alleged inclusion of critical race theory.DeSantis last week signed legislation banning diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in public colleges and universities.In January, Florida rejected an advanced placement (AP) course in African American studies by the College Board, the company that oversees AP classes that can be used for college credit and standardized testing in the US. DeSantis said the proposed course violated Florida’s ban on “critical race theory”, signed by DeSantis last year, and “lacked educational value”.Critics say that such laws supported by DeSantis are discriminatory and a threat to democracy.“Let me be clear – failing to teach an accurate representation of the horrors and inequalities that Black Americans have faced and continue to face is a disservice to students and a dereliction of duty to all,” the NAACP’s president, Derrick Johnson, said in the advisory.Prof Kimberlé Crenshaw is a leading voice and scholar of critical race theory, which explores systemic racism within US legal institutions. Crenshaw was one of several authors and academics edited out of the College Board’s AP African American studies course amid Florida’s rejection of the course.Crenshaw told the Guardian in a March interview that laws against Black history in Florida and elsewhere were the “tip of the iceberg” of conservative efforts to roll back progressivism and push the US towards authoritarianism.“Are [schools] on the side of the neo-segregationist faction? Or are [they] going to stick with the commitments that we’ve all celebrated for the last 50, 60 years?” asked Crenshaw, referring to progress made on equal opportunities since the 1960s.“The College Board fiasco, I think, is just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of interests that have to make this decision,” she said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOther groups have also warned against travel to Florida. Equality Florida, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, issued a travel advisory in April because of laws targeting LGBTQ+ rights, the Washington Post reported.In a separate advisory, the Florida Immigrant Coalition said “traveling to Florida is dangerous”, warning that people of color, international travelers and those with an accent faced a higher risk of racial profiling and harassment.The NAACP previously issued travel warnings in 2017 for Missouri over the death of a Black man in a jail and racist threats going unchecked on college campuses in that state, Time reported. Black drivers in Missouri were also stopped 75% more than white drivers, according to a 2016 report from the state attorney general’s office that the advisory referenced.The Guardian could not reach a DeSantis spokesperson for immediate comment.But DeSantis’s press secretary, Jeremy Redfern, responded to the NAACP travel advisory announcement on Twitter, the Post reported.Redfern replied to the announcement with a gif of DeSantis saying: “This is a stunt. If you want to waste your time on a stunt, that’s fine. But I’m not wasting my time on your stunts. OK?” More

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      DeSantis Avoids Talk of Abortion Ban on the Trail

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      The Florida governor is reluctant to talk about the restrictive law he signed as he seeks to attract support from across the Republican Party.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida could not have asked for a friendlier venue to highlight the sweeping six-week abortion ban he signed last month: an annual gala hosted by a deeply conservative Christian group that welcomed him with a sustained standing ovation and provided a bagpiper in full Highland regalia playing “Amazing Grace.”But instead of taking a victory lap on Saturday, Mr. DeSantis breezed through his remarks on Florida’s abortion law, one of the most restrictive in the nation. His rhetoric was far less soaring than that of other speakers, including one who compared abortion to slavery, suggesting it was an evil that should be totally eliminated.“We believe that everybody counts, everybody is special, and our Heartbeat Protection Act shows that we say what we mean and we mean what we say,” said Mr. DeSantis, referring to the law, which he was initially slow to back.He then pivoted to familiar talking points, including his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, his opposition to defunding the police and his signing of a law prohibiting gender-transition care for minors.During the primary, Mr. DeSantis will need to court conservative voters without alienating centrists — all while fending off allegations from Republican rivals who could argue he is too extreme on abortion. Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. DeSantis’s brief comments on abortion underscore his general hesitancy to speak about the issue in visits to key states ahead of his upcoming presidential run. On the trail, his remarks about the ban are usually limited to a single line in his roughly 45-minute stump speech, placed alongside a laundry list of his other legislative accomplishments.The reluctance to highlight abortion — even when speaking on his home turf to grateful Christian conservatives — reflects a careful calibration that could be crucial to his campaign for the Republican nomination.Although many evangelicals and hard-core party activists favor abortion bans like the one he signed in Florida, moderate Republicans are less inclined to support them. During the primary, Mr. DeSantis will need to court those conservative voters without alienating centrists — all while fending off allegations from Republican rivals who could argue he is too extreme on abortion. He will also need to avoid delivering any sound bites to Democrats that could become fodder for attack ads in a general election. Other Republican contenders for president, including Nikki Haley and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, have offered less strident views on abortion. Ms. Haley has declined to support a federal abortion ban at a specific number of weeks of pregnancy. And Mr. Scott, who is expected to declare his candidacy on Monday, has said he would back a 20-week federal ban. Former President Donald J. Trump, who is fighting to retain the backing of the anti-abortion movement, has criticized Florida’s six-week law without saying what restrictions he might support, leading Mr. DeSantis to punch back over his reluctance to take a position. The comments, one of his most direct public challenges to the former president so far, demonstrated how Mr. DeSantis could use his record, which anti-abortion activists praise, to distinguish himself.“He’s giving us action, and that’s what I’m interested in,” said John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy Council, the nonprofit group that hosted Mr. DeSantis’s speech on Saturday. “He’s been stellar and historic.”Democrats ran heavily on abortion rights in last year’s midterms with unexpected success. That has left some Republicans unsure of how to address the issue in 2024.As Mr. DeSantis is hitting the trail and visiting early nominating states, he is talking little about his abortion legislation. When he does, he does not explicitly tell audiences that the law prohibits the procedure after six weeks.“We enacted the Heartbeat Protection Act to promote life,” Mr. DeSantis said without elaborating as he addressed a crowd of voters in Iowa earlier this month. He sandwiched his comment between brief statements on his tax relief efforts and a law that allows Floridians to carry concealed weapons without training or permits. Speaking at Liberty University, another friendly setting, the day after he signed the ban, Mr. DeSantis almost entirely avoided the subject.And during a discussion with state lawmakers in New Hampshire on Friday, the governor did not mention abortion at all. Privately, lawmakers from the moderate state, which limits abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy, said they thought Mr. DeSantis’s abortion law was too extreme for voters in New Hampshire. Many women do not realize they are pregnant at six weeks.Last spring, Mr. DeSantis and Republican lawmakers in Florida limited access to the procedure after 15 weeks, with exceptions for fatal fetal abnormalities or to save the life of the woman. That legislation is being challenged in front of the Florida Supreme Court.The six-week ban, which includes additional exceptions for rape and incest, is not yet in effect and will hinge, in part, on the court’s decision over the existing law. Women in Florida have suffered serious complications from dangerous pregnancies since the 15-week ban was passed, according to news reports. The state previously prohibited abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy.For many conservatives, the governor is fulfilling a mandate from voters after a nearly 20-point re-election in November.“His leadership helped push that through,” Chris Jessee, a Florida pastor who came to Orlando to hear Mr. DeSantis address the Florida Family Policy Council, said of the six-week ban.Still, Mr. Jessee noticed that the governor did not seem to adjust his usual script much for the event, even though the group’s annual gala was its first since Roe v. Wade was overturned.“I really felt like I’d heard that speech before,” he said.Bret Hayworth contributed reporting from Sioux Center, Iowa. More

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      Ron DeSantis’s Use of Private Jets From Wealthy, Sometimes Secret Donors

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      As the Florida governor hopscotched the country preparing to run for president, a Michigan nonprofit paid the bills. It won’t say where it got the money.For Ron DeSantis, Sunday, Feb. 19, was the start of another busy week of not officially running for president.That night, he left Tallahassee on a Florida hotelier’s private jet, heading to Newark before a meet-and-greet with police officers on Staten Island on Monday morning. Next, he boarded a twin-jet Bombardier to get to a speech in the Philadelphia suburbs, before flying to a Knights of Columbus hall outside Chicago, and then home to his day job as governor of Florida.The tour and others like it were made possible by the convenience of private air travel — and by the largess of wealthy and in some cases secret donors footing the bill.Ahead of an expected White House bid, Mr. DeSantis has relied heavily on his rich allies to ferry him around the country to test his message and raise his profile. Many of these donors are familiar boosters from Florida, some with business interests before the state, according to a New York Times review of Mr. DeSantis’s travel. Others have been shielded from the public by a new nonprofit, The Times found, in an arrangement that drew criticism from ethics experts.Mr. DeSantis, who is expected to formally announce his candidacy next week, is hardly the first politician to take advantage of the speed and comfort of a Gulfstream jet. Candidates and officeholders in both parties have long accepted the benefits of a donor’s plane as worth the political risk of appearing indebted to special interests or out of touch with voters.But ethics experts said the travel — and specifically the role of the nonprofit — shows how Mr. DeSantis’s prolonged candidate-in-limbo status has allowed him to work around rules intended to keep donors from wielding secret influence. As a declared federal candidate, he would face far stricter requirements for accepting and reporting such donations.Mr. DeSantis has been traveling the country testing his message. He and his wife, Casey DeSantis, met this month with local Republicans in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times“Voters deserve this information because they have a right to know who is trying to influence their elected officials and whether their leaders are prioritizing public good over the interests of their big-money benefactors,” said Trevor Potter, the president of Campaign Legal Center and a Republican who led the Federal Election Commission. “Governor DeSantis, whether he intends to run for president or not, should be clearly and fully disclosing who is providing support to his political efforts.”Representatives for the governor’s office and for Mr. DeSantis’s political operation declined to comment or provide details about who has arranged and paid for his flights.Mr. DeSantis has aggressively navigated his state’s ethics and campaign finance laws to avoid flying commercial. And he has gone to new lengths to prevent transparency: Last week, he signed a bill making travel records held by law enforcement, dating back to the beginning of his term, exempt from public records requests.Mr. DeSantis is still required to report contributions and expenses in his campaign finance records, but the new law probably prevents law enforcement agencies from releasing more details, such as itineraries, flight information or even lists of visitors to the governor’s mansion. (Mr. DeSantis says he is trying to address a security concern.)In February, Mr. DeSantis traveled to Newark on a jet owned by Jeffrey Soffer, a prominent hotel owner who, according to several lawmakers and lobbyists, has sought a change in state law that would allow him to expand gambling to his Miami Beach resort.The February trip and others were arranged by And To The Republic, a Michigan-based nonprofit, according to Tori Sachs, its executive director. The nonprofit formed in late January as Mr. DeSantis was beginning to test the national waters and quickly became a critical part of his warm-up campaign. It organized nearly a dozen speaking events featuring the governor in at least eight states.Ms. Sachs would not say how much was spent on the flights or who paid for them.Navigating the LoopholesIt is unclear how Mr. DeSantis will account for the trips arranged by the nonprofit without running afoul of state ethics laws. Florida generally bars officeholders from accepting gifts from lobbyists or people, like Mr. Soffer, whose companies employ lobbyists — unless those gifts are considered political contributions.But both Ms. Sachs and a person involved in Mr. DeSantis’s recent travel said they did not consider the trips political contributions or gifts. The person was not authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity. The group’s practice “is to provide transportation for special guests,” Ms. Sachs said, “in full compliance with the law.”Florida ethics rules, however, give politicians plenty of loopholes. In some circumstances, for example, officeholders can accept paid travel to give speeches as part of their official duties. The state ethics commission has also allowed officeholders to accept gifts from lobbyists if they are channeled through third-party groups.Since taking office in 2019, Mr. DeSantis, who has worked in public service his entire career and reported a net worth of $319,000 last year, has steadily leaned on others to pick up the tab for private flights.His political committee has accepted private air travel from roughly 55 wealthy, mostly Florida-based contributors and companies associated with them, including the heads of oil and gas companies, developers and homebuilders, and health care and insurance executives, a Times analysis of campaign finance records shows.Additional travel donations were routed to the Republican Party of Florida, which Mr. DeSantis often used as a third-party pass-through.A half dozen lobbyists and donors who spoke with The Times said they became accustomed to calls from the governor’s political aides asking for planes — in at least one case, for a last-minute trip home from out of state and, more recently, for a flight to Japan.The Japan trip, which was part of an overseas tour that gave Mr. DeSantis a chance to show off his foreign policy chops, was considered part of the governor’s official duties and was organized in part by Enterprise Florida, a public-private business development group. But Mr. DeSantis’s office would not disclose how it was paid for or how he traveled. Enterprise Florida did not respond to requests for comment.DeSantis supporters at his election-night event last year, as he coasted to re-election.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesMr. DeSantis’s office rarely releases information about nonofficial events. (In February, when he traveled to four states in one day, his public schedule simply read, “No scheduled events.”) And Mr. DeSantis has brushed off past criticism of his travel. In 2019, The South Florida Sun Sentinel revealed a previous flight to New York on a plane owned by Mr. Soffer. Mr. DeSantis said he had followed proper procedures.“It’s all legal, ethical, no issues there,” he told reporters.A spokeswoman for Mr. Soffer declined to comment.The Warm-Up CampaignSoon after winning re-election in November, the governor turned to building his national profile. He began traveling the country to visit with Republican activists, dine with donors, speak at events and promote a new book, “The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival.”Some of his travel was paid for by Friends of Ron DeSantis, a Florida political committee that supported his campaign for governor and reports its donors. The committee had more than $80 million on hand as recently as last month — money that is expected to be transferred to a federal super PAC supporting his presidential run.Since November, that committee has received 17 contributions for political travel from nine donors. They include Maximo Alvarez, an oil and gas distributor, and Morteza Hosseini, a Florida homebuilder who has frequently lent his plane to the governor and has become a close ally.But trips paid for by the nonprofit group, And To The Republic, do not appear in state records.The group is registered as a social welfare organization under Section 501(c)(4) of the federal tax code, meaning its primary activity cannot be related to political campaigns. Other prospective and official presidential candidates also have relationships to similar organizations, often called dark money groups because they are not required to disclose their donors.The nonprofit’s founder, Ms. Sachs, said it was formed to promote “state policy solutions that are setting the agenda for the country” and described Mr. DeSantis as one of the first elected officials to “partner” with the group. Another of those officials, Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, has appeared at the group’s events in her home state — alongside Mr. DeSantis.And To The Republic has hosted Mr. DeSantis at events in South Carolina, Nevada and Iowa, all key early primary states. Some of those events were promoted as “The Florida Blueprint,” borrowing from Mr. DeSantis’s book title.The arrangement has made tracking Mr. DeSantis’s travel — and its costs — difficult. The Times and other news outlets used public flight trackers to verify the governor’s use of Mr. Soffer’s plane, which was first reported by Politico.Other trips arranged by the group include the Feb. 20 stops outside Philadelphia and Chicago and the return trip to Tallahassee, on which Mr. DeSantis flew on a plane registered to a company run by Charles Whittall, an Orlando developer. Mr. Whittall, who gave $25,000 to Mr. DeSantis’s political committee in 2021, said that he uses a leasing company to rent out his aircraft, and that he did not provide it as a political contribution.In March, he traveled to Cobb County, Ga., on a plane owned by an entity connected to Waffle House, the Georgia-based restaurant chain. The company did not respond to a request for comment.Other potential DeSantis rivals have made headlines for their use of private jets. Both as South Carolina governor and as ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley faced criticism for flying on private planes owned by wealthy South Carolinians.In 2020, The Associated Press reported that donors gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in private air travel to Donald J. Trump’s fund-raising committee. The donors included Ben Pogue, a Texas businessman whose father later received a presidential pardon.Still, Mr. Trump — who owns his own plane — has repeatedly sought to draw attention to Mr. DeSantis’s travel, claiming the private planes were effectively campaign contributions and “Ron DeSantis is a full-time candidate for president.”Shane Goldmacher More