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      Ron DeSantis Has a Secret Theory of Trump

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      Ron DeSantis has an enemies list, and you can probably guess who’s on it.There’s the “woke dumpster fire” of the Democratic Party and the “swamp Republicans” who neglect their own voters. There’s the news media, with modifiers like “legacy” or “corporate” adding a nefarious touch. There’s Big Tech, that “censorship arm of the political left,” and the powerful corporations that cave to the “leftist-rage mob.” There are universities like Harvard and Yale, which DeSantis attended but did not inhale. There’s the administrative state and its pandemic-era spinoff, the “biomedical security state.” These are the villains of DeSantis’s recently published book, “The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival,” and its author feels free to assail them with a fusillade of generically irate prose.There is one more antagonist — not an enemy, perhaps, but certainly a rival — whom DeSantis does not attack directly in his book, even as he looms over much of it. The far-too-early national polls for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination show a two-person contest with Donald Trump and DeSantis (who has yet to announce his potential candidacy) in the lead, and the Haleys, Pences and Pompeos of the world fighting for scraps. During his 2018 governor’s race, DeSantis aired an obsequious ad in which he built a cardboard border wall and read Trump’s “Art of the Deal” with his children, one of whom wore a MAGA onesie. Now DeSantis no longer bows before Trump. Instead, he dances around the former president; he is respectful but no longer deferential, critical but mainly by implication.Yes, there is a DeSantis case against Trump scattered throughout these pages. You just need to squint through a magnifying glass to find it.In the 250-plus pages of “The Courage to Be Free,” for instance, there is not a single mention of the events of Jan. 6, 2021. DeSantis cites Madison, Hamilton and the nation’s founding principles, but he does not pause to consider a frontal assault on America’s democratic institutions encouraged by a sitting president. The governor does not go so far as to defend Trump’s lies about the 2020 election; he just ignores them.However, DeSantis does write that an energetic executive should lead “within the confines of a constitutional system,” and he criticizes unnamed elected officials for whom “perpetuating themselves in office supersedes fulfilling any policy mission.” Might DeSantis ever direct such criticisms at a certain former president so willing to subvert the Constitution to remain in power? Perhaps. For the moment, though, such indignation exists at a safe distance from any discussion of Trump himself.When DeSantis explains how he chose top officials for his administration in Florida, he offers an unstated yet unsubtle contrast to Trump’s leadership. “I placed loyalty to the cause over loyalty to me,” DeSantis writes. “I had no desire to be flattered — I just wanted people who worked hard and believed in what we were trying to accomplish.” Demands for personal fealty have assumed canonical status in Trump presidential lore (who can forget his “I need loyalty” dinner with the soon-to-be-fired F.B.I. director James Comey?), and it is hard to recall another recent leader whose susceptibility to flattery so easily overpowered any possibility of political or ideological coherence.Where he describes his personal dealings with the former president, DeSantis jabs at Trump even as he praises him. In a meeting with Trump after Hurricane Michael struck Florida in late 2018, DeSantis asked for increased federal aid, particularly for northwestern Florida, telling the president that the region was “Trump country.” In the governor’s account, Trump responded with Pavlovian enthusiasm: “I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?” DeSantis recalls how, after the president agreed to reimburse a large portion of the state’s cleanup expenses, Mick Mulvaney, then the acting White House chief of staff, pulled the governor aside and urged him to wait before announcing the help, explaining that Trump “doesn’t even know what he agreed to in terms of a price tag.”Even as DeSantis appears to thank Trump for assistance to Florida, he is showcasing an easily manipulated president who does not grasp the basics of governing.DeSantis boasts of how Florida stood apart from other states’ lockdown policies and how Tallahassee dissented from the federal response. Though he criticizes Trump-era federal guidelines, particularly early in the crisis, he rarely blames the president directly. “By the time President Trump had to decide whether the shutdown guidance should be extended beyond the original 15 days, there were reasons to question the main model used by the task force to justify a shutdown,” DeSantis writes, in his most pointed — yet still quite polite — disapproval.Rather than question the former president’s actions on Covid, DeSantis goes after Anthony Fauci, “one of the most destructive bureaucrats in American history,” an official whose “intellectual bankruptcy and brazen partisanship” turned major U.S. cities into hollowed-out “Faucivilles.” Fauci is the supervillain of DeSantis’s book, the destroyer of jobs and freedoms, the architect of a “Faucian dystopia.” Trump, it seems, was not in charge during the early months of Covid, but Fauci wielded unstoppable and unaccountable power — until a courageous governor had finally had enough. “As the iron curtain of Faucism descended upon our continent,” DeSantis writes, “the State of Florida stood resolutely in the way.”In “The Courage to Be Free,” DeSantis displays only enough courage to reprimand Trump by proxy.In fact, DeSantis’s broadest attack against Trump is also his most oblique. In the governor’s various references to Trump, the former president emerges less as a political force in his own right than a symptom of pre-existing trends that Trump was lucky enough to harness. Trump’s nomination in 2016 flowed mainly from the failure of Republican elites to “effectively represent the values” of Republican voters, the governor writes. DeSantis even takes some credit for Trump’s ascent: The House Freedom Caucus, of which DeSantis was a member, “identified the shortcomings of the modern Republican establishment in a way that paved the way for an outsider presidential candidate who threatened the survival of the stale D.C. Republican Party orthodoxy.”Trump has argued, not without reason, that he enabled DeSantis’s election as governor with his endorsement in late 2017 — and now DeSantis is suggesting he helped clear the path for Trumpism. The governor even notes the “star power” that Trump brought to American politics, the kind of thing critics used to say when dismissing Barack Obama as a celebrity candidate.If Trump’s success was not unique to him, but flowed from larger cultural or economic forces that rendered him viable, presumably someone else could channel those same forces, perhaps more efficiently, if only Republican voters had the courage to be free of Trump. And who might that alternative be?DeSantis pitches himself as not only a culture warrior, but a competent culture warrior. The culture warrior who stood up for parents and stood against Disney (yes, the Magic Kingdom rates its own chapter here). The culture warrior with the real heartland vibe (DeSantis’s family’s roots in Ohio and Pennsylvania come up a lot). The culture warrior who is “God-fearing, hard-working and America-loving” in the face of enemies who are oppressive, unbelieving, unpatriotic. The culture warrior who takes “bold stands,” displays “courage under fire,” is willing to “lead with conviction,” “speak the truth” and “stand for what is right.”The Free State of Florida, as DeSantis likes to call it, is not just the national blueprint of his book’s subtitle. It is “a beachhead of sanity,” a “citadel of freedom in a world gone mad,” even “America’s West Berlin.” (I guess the rest of us still live behind the Iron Curtain of Faucism.) No wonder Trump, who now says he regrets endorsing DeSantis for governor, has begun denigrating his rival’s achievements in the state where they both live.The governor’s prose can be flat and clichéd: Throughout the book, cautions are thrown to winds, less-traveled roads are taken, hammers are dropped, new sheriffs show up in town, dust eventually settles and chips fall wherever they may. (When members of Congress attempt to “climb the ladder” of seniority, he writes, they “get neutered” by the time they reach the top. That is one painful metaphor — and ladder.) And DeSantis’s red meat tastes a bit over overcooked. “Clearly, our administration was substantively consequential,” DeSantis affirms in his epilogue. Still, DeSantis’s broad-based 2022 re-election victory suggests there the competent culture warrior may have an appeal that extends beyond the hard-core MAGA base, even if Make America Substantively Consequential Again doesn’t quite fit on a hat.At times, DeSantis’s culture-war armor slips, as with his awkward ambivalence about his Ivy League education. He experienced such “massive culture shock” when arriving at the “hyper-leftist” Yale, he writes, that after graduating he decided to go on to … Harvard Law School? “From a political perspective, Harvard was just as left-wing as Yale,” DeSantis complains. Yes, we know. DeSantis informs his readers that he graduated from law school with honors, even if “my heart was not into what I was being taught in class,” and he mentions (twice) that he could have made big bucks in the private sector with a Harvard Law degree but instead chose to serve in the Navy. “I am one of the very few people who went through both Yale and Harvard Law School and came out more conservative than when I went in,” he assured voters during his 2012 congressional campaign.DeSantis wants both the elite validation of his Ivy League credentials and the populist cred for trash-talking the schools. Pick one, governor. Even Trump just straight-up brags about Wharton.Of course, whether DeSantis’s culture-war instincts are authentic or shtick matters less than the fact that he is waging those wars; the institutions, individuals and ideologies he targets are real regardless of his motives. But the blueprint of his subtitle implies a more systematic worldview than is present in this book. DeSantis’s professed reliance on “common sense” and “core” national values is another way of saying he draws on his own impulses and interpretations. It’s a very Trumpian approach.When DeSantis highlights his state’s renewed emphasis on civics education and a high-school civics exam modeled on the U.S. naturalization test — an idea that this naturalized citizen finds intriguing — it is a particularistic vision informed by the governor’s own political preferences. When DeSantis goes after Disney’s governance or tax status over its opposition to a Florida law over what can and cannot be taught in elementary schools, he is not making a statement of principle about business and politics; he just opposes the stance Disney has taken. When he brings up Russia more than two dozen times in his book, it never concerns Vladimir Putin’s challenges to America or war against Ukraine; it is always about DeSantis’s disdain for the “Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory.” (DeSantis’s subsequent dismissal of the war as a mere “territorial dispute” is therefore little surprise.) When he accuses the news media of pushing “partisan narratives,” he is not striking a blow for objective, independent coverage; he just prefers narratives that fit his own.DeSantis asserts that he has a “positive vision,” beyond just defeating his enemies on the left. But in “The Courage to Be Free,” defeating his enemies is the only thing the governor seems positive about. That may be enough to compete for the Republican nomination, but it’s not a blueprint for America. It’s not a substantive vision, even if it may prove a consequential one.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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      Pro-Trump Super PAC Files an Ethics Complaint Against DeSantis

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      The group, the MAGA Inc. super PAC, accused Gov. Ron DeSantis of violating Florida laws by operating a shadow presidential campaign. A DeSantis spokeswoman called it a politically motivated attack.Donald J. Trump spent much of the past year teasing a presidential campaign, telling New York magazine last summer that he had “already made that decision” on whether to run and promising his rally crowds for months that they would be “very happy” about his choice.Now, Mr. Trump’s allies are accusing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida of doing the same — but insisting that he has violated state law.MAGA Inc., a super PAC supporting Mr. Trump, filed a complaint with Florida officials on Wednesday, alleging that Mr. DeSantis — the former president’s chief potential rival for the Republican Party’s 2024 nomination — is operating a shadow presidential campaign.The super PAC said that Mr. DeSantis should be considered a presidential candidate because he has taken meetings with donors, raised money for a political committee and toured the country to sell books, while allies are reaching out to potential campaign aides.“Governor DeSantis’s failure to declare his candidacy is no mere oversight,” reads the MAGA Inc. complaint to the Florida Commission on Ethics. “It is a coordinated effort specifically designed for him to accept, as unethical gifts, illegal campaign contributions and certain personal benefits.”The pro-Trump super PAC, which sent the complaint via certified mail on Wednesday, is asking the state commission to impose “the most severe penalties” under Florida ethics law, which include, among other things, impeachment, removal from office, public censure and ballot disqualification. NBC News earlier reported on the complaint on Wednesday.A spokeswoman in the governor’s office, Taryn Fenske, said the complaint was part of a “list of frivolous and politically motivated attacks,” adding, “It’s inappropriate to use state ethics complaints for partisan purposes.”While Mr. DeSantis hasn’t formally declared a White House bid, he is checking all the boxes of a potential candidate. He published a book that could double as the outline of a 2024 campaign platform and has been promoting the book on a nationwide tour — including stops in states that are hosting the first three Republican primary contests. He has also laid out foreign policy positions this week on Fox News.The allegations from the pro-Trump group echo a similar complaint filed against Mr. Trump last year in March by a Democratic super PAC. In that complaint, the Democratic group, American Bridge, argued to the Federal Election Commission that Mr. Trump had been behaving like a 2024 presidential candidate while avoiding federal oversight by not filing a statement of candidacy.The group filed a lawsuit in July against the federal commission, seeking to force it to take action against Mr. Trump within 30 days. The lawsuit accused Mr. Trump of trying to disguise his run for the presidency in order to leave voters “in the dark about the contributions and expenditures he has received, which is information they are entitled to.”The F.E.C. did not take action against Mr. Trump. He eventually announced a formal presidential campaign four months later.Mr. Trump’s allies could face a similarly tough road in persuading the state ethics commission to act. Mr. DeSantis has appointed five of the nine members of the commission.Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis were once political allies, but have grown increasingly antagonistic toward each other.Mr. DeSantis, who has branded himself as one of his party’s most ruthless political brawlers, has so far declined to directly confront Mr. Trump. Instead, he has made thinly veiled contrasts with Mr. Trump, telling crowds that his administration in Tallahassee has been free of leaks and chaos — such as the kind that often plagued the Trump White House — and excoriating the leadership of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, one of Mr. Trump’s key public health advisers during the Covid-19 pandemic.Mr. Trump, on the other hand, has grown increasingly aggressive in his attacks on Mr. DeSantis.At an event in Davenport, Iowa, on Monday, Mr. Trump drew a mix of applause and groans from the crowd as he attacked Mr. DeSantis over attempts to cut ethanol production and said the Florida governor wanted to “decimate” Social Security and Medicare by supporting proposals that would have increased the age to receive benefits.Mr. Trump scheduled his event three days after Mr. DeSantis made his first introduction to Iowa voters in the same Mississippi River town. More

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      Ron DeSantis’s Ukraine Stance Angers G.O.P. Hawks

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      The Florida governor, who joined Donald Trump in declaring that defending Ukraine from Russia was not a vital interest, drew swift condemnations from establishment Republicans.Declaring this week that defending Ukraine against Russia’s invasion was not a vital interest for the United States, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida cemented a Republican shift away from hawkish foreign policy that has played out over the past decade and accelerated with Donald J. Trump’s political rise.Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis — whose combined support makes up more than 75 percent of Republican primary voters in the nascent 2024 presidential contest — are now largely aligned on Ukraine, signaling a sharp break from the interventionist approach that drove former President George W. Bush’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.Republican foreign policy hawks recoiled at Mr. DeSantis’s statement on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News on Monday night, in which the governor deviated from the position held by most of the Republican establishment on Capitol Hill, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader. Mr. McConnell and other top congressional Republicans have framed the invasion by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as a fight to defend the post-World War II international security framework.“DeSantis is wrong and seems to have forgotten the lessons of Ronald Reagan,” said former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who led the House select committee investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.“This is not ‘a territorial dispute,’” she said in a statement, echoing Mr. DeSantis’s phrasing. “The Ukrainian people are fighting for their freedom. Surrendering to Putin and refusing to defend freedom makes America less safe.”She went on: “Weakness is provocative and American officials who advocate this type of weakness are Putin’s greatest weapon. Abandoning Ukraine would make broader conflict, including with China and other American adversaries, more likely.”Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said in an interview on Tuesday morning that he “could not disagree more” with Mr. DeSantis’s characterization of the stakes attached to the defense of Ukraine.“The Neville Chamberlain approach to aggression never ends well,” said Mr. Graham, comparing Mr. DeSantis to the British prime minister who appeased Adolf Hitler. “This is an attempt by Putin to rewrite the map of Europe by force of arms.”Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also took issue with Mr. DeSantis’s comments — a significant rebuke from the senior Republican in Mr. DeSantis’s home state.“I don’t know what he’s trying to do or what the goal is,” Mr. Rubio, a former presidential candidate, told the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.And Senator John Cornyn of Texas told Politico he was “disturbed” by Mr. DeSantis’s comments.Mr. Trump has long made his views on foreign intervention clear, railing against the Iraq war in his 2016 campaign, but Mr. DeSantis had sought to avoid being pinned down on one of the most important foreign policy questions facing the prospective Republican presidential field.His choice of words, describing the conflict as a “territorial dispute,” was telling. By referring to Russia’s unprovoked invasion that way, he dismissed the argument that Mr. Putin’s aggression threatened the postwar international order. Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump have unequivocally rejected the idea that the conflict is a war to defend “freedom,” a position espoused by two of their potential rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, former Vice President Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador.Mr. DeSantis left himself some wiggle room in his statement, which came in response to a questionnaire that Mr. Carlson had sent to all of the major prospective Republican presidential candidates. The governor did not promise to end all U.S. aid to Ukraine — an omission noticed by some hard-line opponents of support for Ukraine, who criticized Mr. DeSantis for leaving open the possibility that he would keep up the flow of American assistance.Leading congressional Republicans have framed the Russian invasion as a fight to defend the post-World War II international security framework.Daniel Berehulak/The New York TimesYet by downplaying the stakes of the conflict to the extent he did, Mr. DeSantis angered many Republicans in the foreign policy establishment who said he had talked himself into a corner. Even if he were to change his mind about Ukraine, how would a President DeSantis rally the public and Congress to send billions of dollars and high-tech weapons for a mere “territorial dispute” of no vital interest to America?Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, said that the remarks were “a naïve and complete misunderstanding of the historical context of what’s going on,” and that authoritarians would fill the void if the U.S. retreated from global leadership.Charles Kupperman, who served under John R. Bolton as a deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration, said Mr. DeSantis had shown “a very poor understanding of our national security interests,” adding, “I’m surprised he’s gone so far so fast.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.It was unclear who, if anyone, helped Mr. DeSantis write the statement.Ms. Haley, one of the three major Republicans who have announced a 2024 campaign, released her response to Mr. Carlson on Tuesday, offering an unequivocal “yes” to the question of whether stopping Russia was of vital interest to the U.S.“America is far better off with a Ukrainian victory than a Russian victory, including avoiding a wider war,” she said. “If Russia wins, there is no reason to believe it will stop at Ukraine.”“History has shown us that telling the enemy what you won’t do leads to more aggression, not less,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said in an interview on Tuesday. Julia Nikhinson for The New York TimesConservatives who want the United States to shift its focus away from Europe to focus on combating China were delighted by Mr. DeSantis’s statement.“Americans desperately need a foreign policy that understands what’s really in their interests and pursues those interests strategically and realistically in a dangerous world,” said Elbridge Colby, a former senior official at the Defense Department who recently briefed Senate Republicans on China policy.“That’s clearly the approach Governor DeSantis laid out in his response to Tucker Carlson,” Mr. Colby added. “He prioritized the top threats to America, such as China and narcotics streaming over the border, rightly seeing Ukraine as a distraction from these top challenges, while also rejecting the Wilsonian radicalism that has led us to disaster before and would be catastrophic if pursued today.”And there is a sharp divide between elite Republican opinion and the views of party voters. While many top Republicans were outraged by Mr. DeSantis’s statement, he and Mr. Trump stand closer to the average G.O.P. voter than Republicans like Mr. McConnell who are urging Mr. Biden to do more to support Ukraine.A January poll from the Pew Research Center showed that 40 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters thought the U.S. was giving too much support to Ukraine. Only 17 percent thought the U.S. was not doing enough.Conservative interventionists had held out hope that Mr. DeSantis would split with Mr. Trump on Ukraine policy. Mr. DeSantis spooked them late last month when he suggested on Fox News that he was not committed to defending Ukraine.But Mr. DeSantis’s comments in that interview were brief and vague enough for these conservatives to stay hopeful that he would end up on their side. They searched for positive signs, finding solace in Mr. DeSantis’s record in Congress. In 2014 and 2015, after Mr. Putin annexed Crimea from Ukraine, Mr. DeSantis criticized President Barack Obama as not doing enough to support Ukraine. In Florida, Mr. DeSantis recently hosted the historian William Inboden, the author of a recent book about President Ronald Reagan’s efforts during the Cold War, to exchange thoughts about foreign policy, according to two people familiar with the meeting.Dr. Inboden and an associate did not respond to emails seeking comment. An aide to Mr. DeSantis did not respond to a request for comment.Several hawks went into overdrive as they tried to lobby Mr. DeSantis. Kimberley A. Strassel, the Wall Street Journal columnist, urged him not to join what she called Mr. Trump’s “G.O.P. surrender caucus.”“The governor has an opportunity to contrast a bold, well-thought-out foreign policy with Mr. Trump’s opaque retreatism,” Ms. Strassel wrote.But pro-Ukraine Republicans who had observed Mr. DeSantis closely had more reasons to be alarmed. They were unsettled by his ties to the Claremont Institute, an influential conservative think tank that promotes foreign policy views broadly aligned with Mr. Trump’s. On Monday night, only the most optimistic interventionists could have still been hopeful that Mr. DeSantis would end up on their side. More

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      Inside Ron DeSantis’s Politicized Removal of an Elected Prosecutor

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      The Florida governor accused the Democratic prosecutor of undermining public safety. But a close examination of the episode reveals just how fueled it was by Mr. DeSantis’s political aims.When Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida announced last summer that he had taken the extraordinary step of removing a local prosecutor from his job, he cast his decision as a bold move to protect Floridians.The prosecutor, Andrew H. Warren, a twice-elected state attorney for Hillsborough County and a Democrat, had signed a public pledge not to prosecute those who seek or provide abortions. Moreover, he was among a group of progressive prosecutors around the country who, in Mr. DeSantis’s words, think “they get to pick and choose which laws that they are enforcing,” the governor told reporters and handpicked supporters at a news conference.Those left-leaning prosecutors, he said, had “undermined public safety” and been “devastating to the rule of law.”Left unsaid, however, was that Mr. DeSantis and his advisers had failed to find a connection between Mr. Warren’s policies and public safety in his community.In fact, just the day before, writing in blue pen on a draft of an executive order, the governor had personally removed any mention of crime statistics justifying Mr. Warren’s suspension, after Mr. DeSantis’s lawyers lamented that they could find nothing in them to support the idea that Mr. Warren’s policies had done harm, according to internal documents and testimony.As he travels the country promoting a new book and his expected presidential campaign, Mr. DeSantis repeatedly points to his ouster of Mr. Warren as an example of the muscular and decisive way he has transformed Florida — and could transform the nation. He casts Mr. Warren as a rogue ideologue whose refusal to enforce the law demanded action.But a close examination of the episode, including interviews, emails, text messages and thousands of pages of government records, trial testimony, depositions and other court records, reveals a sharply different picture: a governor’s office that seemed driven by a preconceived political narrative, bent on a predetermined outcome, content with a flimsy investigation and focused on maximizing media attention for Mr. DeSantis.Andrew H. Warren, a Democrat who served as the state attorney for Hillsborough County, had signed a public pledge not to prosecute those who seek or provide abortions. Chasity Maynard/Tallahassee Democrat, via Associated PressTwo weeks after his removal, Mr. Warren sued the governor in federal court seeking his reinstatement. The lawsuit, which Mr. Warren appealed after it was dismissed in January, produced a significant quantity of discovery, which The New York Times reviewed in detail.Months before suspending Mr. Warren, Mr. DeSantis had ordered his staff to find progressive prosecutors who were letting criminals walk free. Under oath, his aides later acknowledged that they had deliberately avoided investigating Mr. Warren too closely, so that they would not tip him off and prompt him to reverse his policies — thwarting the goal of making an example of him. When contrary information did materialize, Mr. DeSantis and his lawyers dismissed or ignored it, the records show.Only after Mr. Warren was removed did the governor’s aides seek records from Mr. Warren’s office that might help justify Mr. DeSantis’s action.If the investigation into Mr. Warren was cursory at best, the preparation to remove him while simultaneously publicizing that ouster involved greater planning. And those plans were executed with military precision. The governor’s aides gave special attention to news outlets they referred to as “friendly.” Immediately after the news conference, DeSantis aides exerted influence over communications at the state attorney’s office, an independent county agency, working to ensure that the takeover did not result in negative coverage.And that night, the governor headlined Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to promote his move. Mr. Carlson opened with a 12-minute speech about prosecutors who disregard the law, then turned to an exclusive interview with the governor.“Ron DeSantis is the man who put an end to it today in the state of Florida,” Mr. Carlson said.Although Mr. DeSantis’s move was cheered in the conservative news media as a victory in his war on “wokeness,” a federal judge ruled in January that the governor had violated Mr. Warren’s First Amendment rights and the Florida Constitution in a rush to judgment. “The actual facts,” Judge Robert L. Hinkle wrote, “did not matter. All that was needed was a pretext.” Mr. DeSantis’s office, the judge said from the bench, had conducted a “one-sided inquiry” meant to target Mr. Warren. (The judge said he did not have the authority to reinstate Mr. Warren, who is appealing in state and federal court.)Mr. Warren, in an interview, said he believed Mr. DeSantis had disregarded the will of the voters in his county for political gain.“He’s willing to abuse his power to attack his political enemies,” Mr. Warren said.Mr. DeSantis, who declined to be interviewed, insists in his new book, “The Courage to Be Free,” that his action was justified by Mr. Warren’s public statements. He argues that prosecutors who want “to ‘reform’ the criminal justice system” should quit and run for the Legislature.In response to written questions, a spokesman for the governor referred to public statements and the trial record, adding, “Mr. Warren remains suspended from the office he failed to serve.”Like other Republicans, Mr. DeSantis has railed against prosecutors elected on platforms promising alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent crimes or avoiding the death penalty. Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesIn recent weeks, Mr. DeSantis has indicated that he intends to target other prosecutors with whom he disagrees, lashing out at another Democratic state attorney.Gov. Ron DeSantis and His AdministrationThe Republican governor of Florida has turned the swing state into a right-wing laboratory by leaning into cultural battles.Legislative Wish List: From immigration to gun rights to education, Florida lawmakers are advancing Gov. Ron DeSantis’s agenda, giving him a broader platform from which to launch a widely expected presidential campaign.A Rare Interview: Mr. DeSantis granted a rare interview to The Times of London. The paper is controlled by Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire has already thrown its considerable influence behind the prospect of the governor’s 2024 bid.Rift with Disney: In the latest development in a battle between Mr. DeSantis and Disney, the governor has gained control of the board that oversees development at Walt Disney World, a move that restricts the autonomy of Disney over its theme-park complex.Earlier this month, he told donors at a private gathering in Palm Beach that because he’d won only 50 percent of the vote in his 2018 election, people had told him to tread lightly.“But I won 100 percent of the executive power,” he said, “and I intended to use it to advance an agenda that I campaigned on.”‘All roads led to Mr. Warren’Midway through a meeting with his closest advisers in December 2021, Mr. DeSantis abruptly asked a pointed question: Did they know of any prosecutors in the state who weren’t enforcing the law?The topic was not on the meeting’s agenda, but it hardly came out of the blue.Right-wing pundits and podcasters had for years railed against local prosecutors elected on platforms promising alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent crimes or avoiding the death penalty. The critics painted those prosecutors as agents of George Soros, the billionaire Democratic donor, and as giving rise to a scourge of crime. One such prosecutor at the time, Chesa Boudin, was facing a recall election in San Francisco.A top DeSantis aide, Larry Keefe, set out to answer the governor’s question. A former United States attorney, Mr. Keefe’s title is public safety czar. But he has served in a broad role for the governor, executing high-profile projects including helping to coordinate the flight of scores of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard in September.Mr. Keefe began by asking Florida sheriffs whether they knew of any progressive prosecutors. Several mentioned the state attorney from Hillsborough County. Communicating over encrypted text messages and personal email, Mr. Keefe assembled a dossier on Mr. Warren’s policies and charging decisions.Mr. Warren was the only prosecutor he scrutinized, Mr. Keefe said later in a deposition: “All roads led to Mr. Warren.”A former federal prosecutor, Mr. Warren, 46, was elected in 2016 promising to create a new unit to search for wrongful convictions, focus resources on prosecuting violent offenders, reduce prosecutions for first-time misdemeanors and curb the number of children charged as adults.Mr. Warren, who had been a frequent critic of Mr. DeSantis, has sued the governor over his removal. Octavio Jones/ReutersAfter Mr. DeSantis took office in 2019, Mr. Warren became a frequent critic. When the governor barred local governments from enacting their own Covid restrictions, Mr. Warren called the order “weak and spineless.” In 2021, he sought to organize opposition to a DeSantis-backed law that restricted political protests. In January 2022, Mr. Warren instituted a policy that made prosecutions of pedestrians and bicyclists for resisting arrest an exception rather than the rule, responding to studies that show the charge disproportionately affected Black people.Florida’s Constitution allows governors to suspend local office holders for reasons including “malfeasance” or “neglect of duty” until the Legislature votes on whether to permanently remove or reinstate them. Mr. DeSantis was the first Florida governor in many decades known to have suspended an elected prosecutor over a policy difference.By contrast, his predecessor, Rick Scott, publicly clashed with a prosecutor who refused to seek capital punishment and took death penalty cases away from her, but he did not force her from office.For months, Mr. Keefe’s dossier on Mr. Warren failed to cross the threshold to take action against him, Mr. DeSantis’s lawyers later testified. Then, in June, after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to an abortion, an advocacy group released a statement signed by Mr. Warren and 91 other prosecutors around the country.In it, they vowed to “exercise our well-settled discretion and refrain from prosecuting those who seek, provide or support abortions.”Whether the pledge would have any practical impact in Hillsborough County was unclear. Criminal cases of any kind involving abortion had been exceptionally rare in Florida. A new law banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy was being appealed.Florida legislators passed a law banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, but the measure has been held up in court.Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Warren told a TV reporter that the statement should not be read as a blanket policy: He would individually evaluate any cases that emerged. The governor’s aides saw the TV report and disregarded it, according to court records.Ryan Newman, the governor’s general counsel, and Ray Treadwell, Mr. Newman’s deputy, testified that the pledge was the evidence they needed. Mr. Warren had said he would not enforce abortion laws, and could therefore be considered negligent and incompetent.The lawyers discussed asking Mr. Warren to clarify whether his pledge would apply to existing abortion restrictions. But they decided not to, one later testified, because they worried that this would have “tipped him off” and given Mr. Warren a chance to walk it back, short-circuiting their effort to remove him.Records obtained through litigation show that Mr. Keefe and the lawyers began drafting the executive order suspending Mr. Warren.The tone of an early draft, written by Mr. Keefe in July, was highly partisan. The document named Mr. Soros six times, pointing to reports that Mr. Warren had received indirect support for his campaign from the billionaire Jewish philanthropist, a frequent target of conservatives and of antisemitic tropes.(In a deposition, Mr. Keefe said he had not known that Mr. Soros was Jewish, but said he was “concerned” that “one of Florida’s state attorneys had been co-opted” by the philanthropist.)In another draft, Mr. Treadwell highlighted a passage referring to Mr. Soros and wrote, “I would prefer to remove these allegations, but they may be valuable for the larger political narrative.”The signed executive order included no references to Mr. Soros.Editing out the dataOn July 26, Mr. Newman, Mr. Keefe and James Uthmeier, the governor’s chief of staff, met with Mr. DeSantis to present their plan, according to sworn deposition testimony.The governor was initially skeptical, transcripts show. He questioned whether Mr. Warren could be removed based on his signed pledge alone, lacking evidence that he had declined to prosecute an abortion-related crime.Mr. Newman argued that Mr. DeSantis should act while Mr. Warren’s refusal to prosecute was still hypothetical: It could be both impractical and unwise to wait to challenge Mr. Warren over a specific decision, Mr. Newman explained under oath at trial.Mr. DeSantis was persuaded. He asked for additional information about Mr. Warren’s record but gave a green light to charge ahead.Still, the governor seemed reluctant to hang Mr. Warren’s removal narrowly on the abortion pledge.In handwritten instructions on a draft of the executive order, he told his lawyers to list “non-abortion infractions first,” including language accusing the prosecutor of “acting as if he is a law unto himself.”Mr. DeSantis also crossed out three paragraphs packed with statistics about prosecution rates in Hillsborough County. Aides had dug up the data in hopes of showing a declining rate of prosecution during Mr. Warren’s tenure, but the numbers weren’t clear.“You can kind of tell we didn’t have any definitive proof of a correlation,” Mr. Treadwell later testified.In December, during a three-day trial over Mr. Warren’s removal, Judge Hinkle, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, said the evidence suggested that the goal of the governor’s review of Mr. Warren’s record was really “to amass information that could help bring down Mr. Warren, not to find out how Mr. Warren actually runs the office.”“A cynic would say, ‘I just needed one pelt — just needed to nail one pelt to the wall,’” the judge added.Mixed signals in the messagingThe day before he was suspended, Mr. Warren and his staff were putting the finishing touches on a major announcement set for the next day: indictments in two decades-old rape and murder cases.Aides to Mr. DeSantis were planning a starkly different event, the legal records show.Mr. Keefe was sending over talking points for Susan Lopez, a state judge who had agreed to replace Mr. Warren.“Love it!” Ms. Lopez texted Mr. Keefe. “Sounds like me!”Christina Pushaw, the governor’s spokeswoman at the time, teased the coming news on Twitter: “Major announcement tomorrow morning” from Mr. DeSantis, she wrote. “Prepare for liberal media meltdown of the year.” Her tweet alone generated headlines by Fox News and other conservative news outlets.But Mr. DeSantis wanted to avoid the appearance that his ouster of Mr. Warren was an overtly partisan act.Susan Lopez, left, agreed to replace Mr. Warren as state attorney for Hillsborough County. Chris O’Meara/Associated PressHe told Ms. Pushaw he was displeased with her tweet, she later testified, saying he wanted the public message to be about protecting Floridians from a dangerous prosecutor, adding that his decision “had nothing to do with the media.”Ms. Pushaw, a combative force on social media, called this the only time the governor had ever “reprimanded” her over her tweets.And Mr. Uthmeier, the governor’s chief of staff, warned another aide that Mr. DeSantis wanted them to tone down the “sensationalism.”“Every comment impacts what will be contentious litigation,” Mr. Uthmeier wrote in a text message disclosed in litigation.The heated language, however, was coming from the legal department, too. Mr. DeSantis’s general counsel, Mr. Newman, added language to the governor’s speech calling Mr. Warren “a woke ideologue masquerading as a prosecutor.”Under oath, Mr. Newman later said he did not believe the statement to be true. He wrote it, he said, “to channel what I think the press shop wants.”That press shop was in high gear as the governor’s office removed Mr. Warren. It discussed handing out copies of the executive order to friendly news outlets. Other aides, meanwhile, contacted Republican Party groups to to find DeSantis supporters to fill the room.A few minutes before 10 a.m. on Aug. 4, Mr. Warren received an email notifying him that he had been suspended. He rushed to his office, but Mr. Keefe soon arrived with an armed sheriff’s deputy and ordered him to leave, according to testimony from Mr. Keefe. Mr. Keefe texted the governor’s staff: “Warren is out of the building.” And the news conference began.‘We’ll put the nail in the coffin’With Mr. Warren out, the governor’s office stepped in. Mr. Keefe and Taryn Fenske, the governor’s communications chief, had already discussed in text messages what Ms. Lopez’s first steps should be, planning for the new state attorney to issue a memo rescinding Mr. Warren’s prosecution policies.A memo that Ms. Lopez sent out days later mirrored that plan, saying, “The legislature makes the law and we, as prosecutors, enforce it.” (She testified that she did not recall consulting with anyone other than her chief of staff.)Two aides to the governor were dispatched to the state attorney’s office in Hillsborough to “help make sure there’s no funny business over there,” Savannah Kelly Jefferson, director of external affairs, wrote in a text message to her staff.Mr. Keefe, who had stuck around at the state attorney’s office, told Melanie Snow-Waxler, the office’s chief communications officer, to cancel Mr. Warren’s news conference on the cold cases, she said in an interview. The office said its chief of staff had made the decision.He listened in on a speaker phone as she called one murder victim’s aunt to tell her not to come.“I was confused. I didn’t know what was going on,” Ms. Snow-Waxler, who was fired soon after for reasons that are in dispute, said in the interview. “This is not someone who has been your boss, but it’s not like I was given an option. It was an order.”A former DeSantis spokesman, Fred Piccolo, was brought in as a communications consultant for the state attorney’s office. In an interview, Mr. Piccolo said his job included keeping the prosecutor’s office on the same page with the governor’s office in publicly discussing Mr. Warren’s suspension. In a text message to colleagues, Ms. Fenske said she would lean on Mr. Piccolo to push back on Mr. Warren’s contention that his suspension was invalid: “We’ll put the nail in the coffin.”Six days later, as the controversy continued to generate headlines and Mr. Warren publicly blasted his dismissal, the Hillsborough County state attorney’s office received a curious piece of correspondence from the governor’s office, documents from a public records request show.It was from Mr. Treadwell, the governor’s deputy general counsel, making his first request for information from the prosecutor’s office that might reveal whether Mr. Warren had done anything wrong.Jonathan Swan More

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      Ron DeSantis Has the Courage to Be Dull

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      Well, it’s certainly hard to avoid seeing Ron DeSantis these days. He’s all over the place, promoting his new book.Have you been paying attention? Here’s a pop quiz. DeSantis’s tome is called:A. “The Courage to Be Free”B. “From the Panhandle to Pensacola”C. “Available to Speak Is My Middle Name”Yeah, yeah. “The Courage to Be Free” it is. And let me be honest with you, people. I made it only about halfway through before throwing in the proverbial towel.That was when DeSantis was bragging about classifying the taping of professional wrestling matches as an “essential” service during Covid lockdown. And if he’d gone on to, say, tell us about meeting Hulk Hogan, we’d have been in totally different territory. But no — there are virtually no interesting stories or amusing anecdotes in the book. The defining lesson from “The Courage to Be Free” is that Ron DeSantis is really boring.His speeches don’t seem any better. On Wednesday he gave a long address denying that his administration had anything to do with banning books. (“That’s really a nasty hoax.”) In which he demonstrated that it’s possible to be passionate in a really non-engrossing way.This week’s State of the State speech to the Florida Legislature was another snooze. To be fair, these aren’t generally addresses you’d ever want to tape for after-dinner entertainment. But if the executive in question has national-level ambitions, his staff will generally toss in at least one quotable moment.Nah. There was only a little anti-vaxxing. (“No Floridians should have to choose between a job they need and a shot they don’t want.”) And a lot of introducing guests, notably the happy police officers who went to Florida under a state recruitment bonus program. No mention that said program was paid for with federal funds.We did see some tender shots of the governor waving to his wife and kids. Casey DeSantis, a former talk show host, is a very important factor in her husband’s career. Perhaps you remember the video she sent out during his re-election campaign that began, “And on the eighth day God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a protector.’”Hard to imagine Melania Trump coming up with something like that. Hey, whatever happened to Melania, anyway? This is an excellent opening for a comparison of the two most talked-about potential Republican presidential candidates.Wait wait wait wait!!! Why should I worry about comparing DeSantis and Trump when I’m not going to vote for either one of them anyway?Calm down. It’s your job as a concerned citizen to know about this stuff.Let’s take abortion. DeSantis, always an opponent, said he was “proud” to have signed a bill banning abortion at 15 weeks, and he has promised to do the same with a bill now bouncing around the State Legislature that would basically prohibit ending a pregnancy before most women have any idea they’re pregnant.Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a guy who told a national TV audience “I am very pro-choice in every respect” back in 1999, but ran for president in 2016 promising to appoint a Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade.The transformation had absolutely nothing to do with ethical evolution. It was all about his discovery, when he started eyeing the Republican nomination, that you could get a ton of applause at conservative events if you mentioned the evils of abortion.So would you rather see the guy with political principles win? Even if you hate the principles in question? DeSantis has well-worked-out right-wing positions on everything, from vaccines to the teaching of anything about gender identity in public schools. That’s the issue that got him into a war with Disney World — and truly, you have to be pretty darned conservative to be pals with World Wrestling Entertainment but a foe of the Magic Kingdom.Trump, meanwhile, is intensely opposed to … taxes. That really does come from deep in his heart. The rest is kind of whatever works.And he does love connecting with the public — at least the friendly segment. While DeSantis was out promoting his book, Trump was at the Conservative Political Action Conference making a more, um, vigorous presentation. (“I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”)When DeSantis wants to get people excited, he generally falls back on the war against “woke.” Last year, after an easy win in the Republican gubernatorial primary, he made a speech in which observers counted five assaults on wokeism in under 20 seconds.So here are the choices. One is a rather dull potential Republican presidential nominee who wants you to think of him as a very conservative deep thinker.The other just wants to stay in the headlines. Trump was happy to talk with reporters before his CPAC speech, even when the question was whether he’d keep running if indicted in any of the ongoing criminal investigations into his behavior. (Perhaps it goes without saying, but the answer was yes.)OK, you wouldn’t vote for either of these guys even if the contest was for an Academy Award for best inaccurate documentary. But warm weather’s coming — time to prepare for those spring picnic conversations.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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      Republican states pull out of voter rolls program amid false claims of bias

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      Republican states pull out of voter rolls program amid false claims of biasThree states announce end of Eric membership citing unfounded concerns over security and political leaning of organizationThree Republican states announced this week that they would be terminating their membership with a prominent, multi-state consortium that shares voter rolls data to keep their lists up to date. The moves come amid unfounded rightwing conspiracies about the security and partisan leaning of the organization.Florida, West Virginia and Missouri said this week that they are leaving the Electronic Registration Information Center (Eric), a group of roughly 30 states on both sides of the aisle that assist one another in voter roll maintenance. The group matches member states’ voter rolls to each other to flag registrations of duplicate voters or people who have moved or died. The more states that are involved, the more accurate Eric’s services can be.Georgia Republicans race to pass laws to restrict and challenge votesRead moreIn a statement announcing its decision on Monday, Florida’s Republican secretary of state, Cord Byrd, said he is withdrawing to protect the data privacy of state residents.“As secretary of state, I have an obligation to protect the personal information of Florida’s citizens, which the Eric agreement requires us to share,” he said. “Florida has tried to back reforms to increase protections, but these protections were refused. Therefore, we have lost confidence in Eric.”Earlier this year, Alabama and Louisiana also pulled out of Eric, citing similar concerns. Alabama’s new secretary of state has denied the results of the 2020 election and supported a lawsuit brought by Texas against four other states for election “irregularities” that allegedly caused Trump’s loss.Eric has been supported by its member states, including many GOP-controlled states, since it launched in 2012 as a way to supplement the insufficient national voter registration database. It was not until last year, when rightwing conspiracy theories began to spread, that the organization began to be viewed as partisan and states began to question their membership.Far-right groups and websites, which were already actively spreading election misinformation and sowing doubt in election administration, began describing Eric as left-leaning and falsely tied the organization to liberal billionaire George Soros. The rightwing website Gateway Pundit published a series of baseless blog posts claiming that Eric was a liberal plot to inflate voter rolls and that it could allow private voter data to become public.Republican states have also begun to take issue with the governance of the organization. In his statement announcing West Virginia’s departure, the secretary of state, Mac Warner, said the Eric board of directors rejected recommended changes during a recent meeting which he claimed would have prevented partisan, non-state actors from having influence over the organization.“It truly is a shame that an organization founded on the principle of nonpartisanship would allow the opportunity for partisanship to stray the organization from the equally important principle of upholding the public’s confidence,” he said.Politico reported that the withdrawing secretaries of state also took issue with Eric’s requirement that state election officials contact eligible but unregistered voters at least every two years to see if they would like to register.Top state officials push to make spread of US election misinformation illegalRead moreIn his letter announcing Missouri’s withdrawal, the secretary of state, Jay Ashcroft, wrote that “Eric focuses on adding names to voters rolls by requiring a solicitation to individuals who already had an opportunity to register to vote and made the conscious decision not to be registered.”Trump has called for more Republican states to withdraw, falsely claiming that Eric is inflating the rolls for Democrats.Tammy Patrick, chief executive officer for programs with the Election Center, said that Eric had benefited for more than a decade from state and local officials from both sides of the aisle working together to serve the electorate.“The weaponizing of any election administration function is problematic – particularly when it is not based on factual evidence to appease a particular faction or is done under partisan pressures,” she said. “Voter list maintenance and registering voters in as efficient a manner as possible should not be viewed as partisan when done properly.”TopicsUS politicsThe fight for democracyRepublicansFloridaWest VirginiaMissourinewsReuse this content More

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      G.O.P. States Abandon Group That Helps Fight Voter Fraud

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      Five red states have severed ties since last year with the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonprofit that helps maintain accurate voter rolls.First to leave was Louisiana, followed by Alabama.Then, in one fell swoop, Florida, Missouri and West Virginia announced on Monday that they would drop out of a bipartisan network of about 30 states that helps maintain accurate voter rolls, one that has faced intensifying attacks from election deniers and right-wing media.Ohio may not be far behind, according to a letter sent to the group Monday from the state’s chief election official, Frank LaRose. Mr. LaRose and his counterparts in the five states that left the group are all Republicans.For more than a year, the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonprofit organization known as ERIC, has been hit with false claims from allies of former President Donald J. Trump who say it is a voter registration vehicle for Democrats that received money from George Soros, the liberal billionaire and philanthropist, when it was created in 2012.Mr. Trump even chimed in on Monday, urging all Republican governors to sever ties with the group, baselessly claiming in a Truth Social media post that it “pumps the rolls” for Democrats.The Republicans who announced their states were leaving the group cited complaints about governance issues, chiefly that it mails newly eligible voters who have not registered ahead of federal elections. They also accused the group of opening itself up to a partisan influence.In an interview on Tuesday, Jay Ashcroft, a Republican who is Missouri’s secretary of state, said that the group had balked at his state’s calls for reforms, some of which were expected to be weighed by the group’s board of directors at a meeting on March 17. He denied that the decision to pull out was fueled by what the organization and its defenders have described as a right-wing smear campaign.“It’s not like I was antagonistic toward cleaning our voter rolls,” Mr. Ashcroft said.Shane Hamlin, the group’s executive director, did not comment about particular complaints of the states in an email on Tuesday, but referred to an open letter that he wrote on March 2 saying that the organization had been the subject of substantial misinformation regarding the nature of its work and who has access to voter lists.Wes Allen, Alabama’s secretary of state, withdrew the state from the Electronic Registration Information Center in January, a day after he was sworn in.Butch Dill/Associated PressDefenders of the group lamented the departures, saying they would weaken the group’s information-sharing efforts and undermine it financially because of lost dues. And, they said, the defections conflict with the election integrity mantra that has motivated Republicans since Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020.Republicans haven’t always been so sour about the work of the coalition, which Louisiana left in 2022.It was just last year that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida mentioned the group’s benefit to his state, which he described as useful for checking voter rolls during a news conference announcing the highly contentious arrests of about 20 people on voter fraud charges. He was joined then by Cord Byrd, Florida’s secretary of state, a fellow Republican who, on Monday, was expressing a much different opinion. In an announcement that Florida was leaving the group, Mr. Byrd said that the state’s concerns about data security and “partisan tendencies” had not been addressed.“Therefore, we have lost confidence in ERIC,” Mr. Byrd said.Representatives for Mr. DeSantis, who is considering a Republican run for president, did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. LaRose, in Ohio, also had a stark shift in tone: After recently describing the group to reporters as imperfect but still “one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have,” by Monday he was also calling for reforms and put the group on notice.“Anything short of the reforms mentioned above will result in action up to and including our withdrawal from membership,” Mr. LaRose wrote. “I implore you to do the right thing.”The complaints about partisanship seem centered on David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer who helped develop the group and is a nonvoting board member. Mr. Ashcroft said he didn’t think that Mr. Becker, a former director of the elections program at the Pew Charitable Trusts who has vocally debunked election fraud claims, including disputing Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, should be on the board.Mr. Becker is the founder and director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, another nonpartisan group that has been attacked by election deniers.“There’s truth and there’s lies,” Mr. Becker said on a video call with reporters on Tuesday. “I will continue to stand for the truth.”Mr. Hamlin vowed that the organization would “continue our work on behalf of our remaining member states in improving the accuracy of America’s voter rolls and increasing access to voter registration for all eligible citizens.”While some Republican states are ending their relationship with the group, California, the nation’s most populous state, could potentially join its ranks under a bill proposed by a Democratic state lawmaker. But in Texas, a Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill with the opposite intention.Still, Sam Taylor, a spokesman for Texas’s Republican secretary of state, said in an email on Tuesday that “We are not currently aware of any system comparable to ERIC, but are open to learning about other potentially viable, cost-effective alternatives.”New York, another heavily populated state, is also not a member of the group.Seven states started the organization more than a decade ago. It charges new members a one-time fee of $25,000 and annual dues that are partly based on the citizen voting age population in each state. The Pew Charitable Trusts provided seed funding to the group, but that money was separate from donations that it had received from Mr. Soros, according to the website PolitiFact.Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who is Maine’s secretary of state, said in an interview on Tuesday that the group had been particularly helpful in identifying voters who have died or may no longer live in the state, which became a member in 2021.“We have a lot of Mainers who retire to Florida for example,” Ms. Bellows said.Ms. Bellows called the recent defections “tragic” and said that her office had received several inquiries from residents who had read criticism of the group online.“Unfortunately, this move by our colleagues in Florida and elsewhere to leave ERIC in part because of misinformation being spread by election deniers deprives all of us of the ability to effectively clean our voter rolls and fight voter fraud,” she said. More

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      Ron DeSantis has his next target in his sights: freedom of the press | Trevor Timm

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      Ron DeSantis has his next target in his sights: freedom of the pressTrevor TimmFlorida’s rightwing governor and legislature want to gut one of the United States’ most important first amendment rulingsRon DeSantis, the Florida governor, and his cronies, not content with destroying free speech in public schools, have set for themselves a new target: destroying press freedom and every Floridian’s right to criticize public officials. Along the way, they aim to overturn the most important first amendment US supreme court decision of the 20th century.The latest bill to raise eyebrows sounds like it’s made up by the opponents of Florida Republicans to make them sound ridiculous. Unfortunately, it’s real. The proposed law, authored by state legislator Jason Brodeur, would – I kid you not – compel “bloggers” who criticize the governor, other officers of the executive branch, or members of the legislature to register with the state of Florida. Under the bill, anyone paid to write on the internet would have to file monthly reports every time they utter a government official’s name in a critical manner. If not, they’d face potentially thousands of dollars in fines.Banning ideas and authors is not a ‘culture war’ – it’s fascism | Jason StanleyRead moreIt’s a policy so chilling that it would make Vladimir Putin proud, and I wish that was hyperbole. In 2014, Russia’s autocratic leader signed a very similar provision, then known as the “blogger’s law”. As the Verge explained at the time, “under it, any blogger with more than 3,000 readers is required to register with the Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media oversight agency”.As despotic as this proposed Florida blogger law may be, it’s also so laughably absurd, and so unconstitutional on its face, that it’s hard to imagine even DeSantis’s rubber-stamp legislature would pass it. As Charles C Cooke recently wrote, “Senator Jason Brodeur is a moron, but he’s a solo moron” with no apparent further support here. One would hope. But the blogger blacklist bill may be useful for another reason: as an attention-grabbing sideshow, to take heat off another free speech-destroying proposal that has DeSantis’s explicit backing – this one aimed at a bedrock principle of press freedom in the United States.For the past few weeks, while his new Orwellian higher education rules have been getting the lion’s share of attention, DeSantis has also been on the warpath against New York Times v Sullivan, the landmark supreme court decision from the early 1960s that set the bar for defamation law in this country – and gave newspapers and citizens alike wide latitude to investigate and criticize government officials.Many legal scholars consider it the most important first amendment decision of the last century. It is one of the primary reasons newspapers in the US can aggressively report on public officials and powerful wealthy individuals without the constant fear that they are going to be sued out of existence. And up until a few years ago, when Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch started criticizing it, everyone assumed it was settled law.Recently, DeSantis staged a dramatic “roundtable” discussion to present to the public that he was now invested in changing Florida defamation law for “the little guys”, “the run-of-the-mill citizens”, the ordinary folk who don’t have “thick skin” like his. He then proceeded to use the majority of the presentation to rail against New York Times v Sullivan, which of course doesn’t apply to “the little guys” at all – only to powerful public figures like him.A few days later, DeSantis’s allies in Florida’s legislature introduced bills that would fulfill his wish and directly violate the Sullivan supreme court ruling. In their original draft, the law’s authors made no attempt to hide their disdain for the bedrock first amendment decision either. They called it out directly in the bill’s preamble, bizarrely stating that the unanimous decision from almost 60 years ago “bears no relation to the text, structure, or history of the first amendment to the United States constitution”. (That sentence was later deleted in the next version.)While the Florida house and senate version vary slightly in specifics, even the “tamer” senate version – introduced by the very same state senator Brodeur – guts almost every aspect of journalists’ rights. Here’s just a partial list of what the bills aim to do:
      Kill off a large part of Florida’s journalist “shield bill”, which protects reporters from being forced to testify in court.
      Presume any news report written with anonymous sources is defamation.
      Roll back Florida’s anti-Slapp law, which ironically protects “little guys” like independent newspapers when they are sued by wealthy individuals for the primary purpose of bankrupting them.
      Weaken the “actual malice” standard from Sullivan, to make it easier for public officials to sue newspapers or critics.
      Now, can states just pass laws that blatantly ignore supreme court precedent? Of course not. Any responsible judge would strike this down as unconstitutional right away. But DeSantis may be hoping for a friendly appeals court ruling from a Trump-appointed judge or supreme court showdown to revisit the Sullivan ruling – following the same decades-long Republican strategy that finally overturned Roe v Wade. And in the meantime, DeSantis can burnish his anti-media bona fides for his presidential run, and Republican legislatures around the country can use the opportunity to copy the bill or one-up him.Whether the bill survives in the long term doesn’t change the fact that it would destroy all media in Florida – the traditional and mainstream, but also the independent and alternative, including all the conservative publications that have sprouted up all over the state in recent years.DeSantis has turned Florida into a national laboratory for speech suppression. And every American – Republican or Democrat – should be horrified.TopicsUS politicsOpinionRon DeSantisFreedom of speechJournalism booksFloridaUS supreme courtcommentReuse this content More