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      Fewer pronouns, more guns: Ron DeSantis’s plan to turn the US into Florida

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      The title of Governor Ron DeSantis’s book, which he is zealously promoting across the nation, is less important than the subtitle. The Courage to Be Free is a forgettable title shared by a volume by actor and gun rights activist Charlton Heston. But the subtitle, Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, unlocks DeSantis’s national ambitions.While former US president Donald Trump labours under the frayed slogan of “Make America great again”, DeSantis is building a case to “Make America Florida” – a phrase that appears on caps, flags and other merchandise.The governor argues that he has made glorious summer in the Sunshine state. If and when he announces a run for US president in 2024, he will claim that he can repeat the formula in state after state across the US. Florida, his theory goes, is an incubator of conservative ideas that work.He dangles a carrot to Republicans who, weary of Trump’s losing streak, are seeking a saviour. DeSantis writes that when he was elected in 2018, there were nearly 300,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in Florida; by October 2022, there were more than 300,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats.“What Florida has done is establish a blueprint for governance that has produced tangible results while serving as a rebuke to the entrenched elites who have driven our nation into the ground,” DeSantis writes in The Courage to Be Free.But the governor’s critics question whether his fixation on culture wars (“Florida is where woke goes to die!”) is quite as popular as it seems. They also contend that, with numerous climatic, economic and social problems, Florida is not quite the paradise that DeSantis likes to portray.“What it is is a blueprint for is people who want to abuse their power in order to target people who disagree with them politically,” said Maxwell Frost, the youngest member of Congress, who represents a Florida district. “That’s what we’ve seen from someone like Governor DeSantis.“What we’re exporting out of Florida is fascism. For him to sit there and say, ‘Oh, yeah, my bill on banning trans kids from talking about who they are is now equated to a top education system,’ it’s just a bunch of bullshit, to be honest. Most Floridians hopefully will see through that.”DeSantis, 44, as governor of the third most populous state has imposed limits on how race and sexuality can be taught in schools, forcing some teachers to remove books from their libraries. He has also banned transgender girls from school sports, redrawn the state’s political maps to favour Republicans, attacked Disney and other businesses that disagree with his ideology, and cracked down on Black Lives Matter protests.Then there was the coronavirus pandemic. The governor mostly followed guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the early months, closing Florida’s beaches, bars and schools. But he pivoted in early 2021, reopening schools before other states and banning face mask and vaccine mandates in businesses and government. When the media questioned his approach, he hit back pugnaciously to the delight of a base that revels in “owning the libs”.DeSantis claimed vindication last year when he smashed fundraising records and won re-election by nearly 20 percentage points in what used to be a swing state, albeit against a weak candidate from a disorganised Democratic party. Republicans saw hope that DeSantis has cracked the code for a party that has lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections.The party now enjoys a supermajority in the Florida state legislature and is pushing issues such as telling teachers which pronouns they can use for students, making guns more available and easier to carry, keeping immigrants who are in the country illegally out of the state and criminalising some drag shows.Republicans argue that DeSantis’s agenda explains why Florida ranks number one in the nation for net in-migration. About 319,000 people moved there last year, according to an analysis of census data by the National Association of Realtors, while California lost the most residents, with 343,000 departing.Christian Ziegler, chairman of the Florida Republican party, said: “You’re seeing people leave other states that have completely opposite ideology and political positions and policy positions. California, New York – everyone’s leaving those states and everyone’s flocking to our state. That validates the claim that Florida is a working model. If it was a cellphone, it would probably be the Apple iPhone. Everyone wants it, everyone’s buying it and everyone’s gravitating towards it.”Part of the attraction, Ziegler claims, is DeSantis’s “pro-freedom” approach to the pandemic, which allowed businesses and tourism to bounce back more quickly than elsewhere, and his support for what Republicans frame as “parents’ rights”.“I can’t tell you how many parents have moved here from other states because they want their kids in school not shut down, not to have masks forced on them, not to have a vaccine forced on them,” he said.Critics of DeSantis present a very different version, noting that Florida has long been a magnet because of its sunny weather and lack of state income tax. The pandemic, and the rise of remote working, made it especially attractive to people fleeing expensive big cities such as New York. (The trend may be temporary: latest census data shows that Manhattan’s population grew last year.)Speaking from Sarasota, Ziegler also defended DeSantis’s controversial policies on the teaching of US racial history. “From my standpoint, I can tell you we learned about the injustices of slavery. We learned about the heroic efforts of Harriet Tubman or Dr Martin Luther King Jr,” he said. “That is far different than the critical race theory, where they’re trying to point out that everyone in society is oppressed or an oppressor or that just the colour of your skin is going to make you biased and hateful.”This is a misrepresentation of critical race theory, which examines the ways in which racism was embedded into American law and other modern institutions, maintaining the dominance of white people. It is not typically taught in public schools.Progressives dispute the assertion that DeSantis’s focus on hot-button culture war issues is working.“He’s selling a blueprint for hate and bigotry,” said Brandon Wolf, press secretary of the LGBTQ+ rights organisation Equality Florida and a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016. “Ron DeSantis is being honest about one thing and that is that he is trying to sell the snake oil of his authoritarian tactics in Florida to the rest of the country.”Wolf pointed out that, beneath the veneer of prosperity that the governor projects, there are plenty of shadows in the state. A haven for retirees, Florida has the worst long-term care for elderly people among all 50 states, according to the American Association of Retired Persons. It is among 10 states that have refused to expand Medicaid, a public health insurance programme for people with low income, under the Affordable Care Act. It ranks 16th worst for healthcare among the 50 states, says the Commonwealth Fund, a grant-making foundation that supports independent healthcare research.Meanwhile the cost of living is spiralling. Norada Real Estate Investments found that Florida home values have risen by 80% over the past five years. The cost of home insurance is rising fast as the market struggles to deal with stronger hurricanes and more intense rainstorms due to the climate crisis.“Leaning into the culture war issues was successful for him and the challenge that I pose to that is ask any everyday Floridian: what are the top five things keeping them up at night? I guarantee you, they’re not going to say someone in a wig reading Red Fish Blue Fish at the library,” Wolf said.“The question of has Florida been wildly successful is best posed to people who are kept up at night by the cost of housing, the potential for dangerous storms,” he added. “You just ask them if Florida feels like the most successful and freest state in the nation.”Education is another such example. While DeSantis has created political theatre around pandemic measures and racial and sexual identity, the state faces a severe shortage of teachers in its long-underfunded public schools. Florida ranked 49th in the country for average teacher pay in 2020, according to the National Education Association.Tim Canova, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale and a former congressional candidate, said: “Teachers are underpaid, understaffed, the curriculums are dictated centrally on down, whether it’s Common Core federal standards or from the state in Tallahassee.“It’s a miserable job for teachers. They don’t have much autonomy. They’ve got big class sizes. They don’t get paid much. They’ve got to constantly fill out reports about their teaching. It’s a problem that’s way beyond Florida but the schools in Florida have been weak for a long time.”Research by Data for Progress, a progressive polling firm and advocacy group, also raises questions about the viability of DeSantis’s hard-right policies beyond Florida’s borders, with independent voters across the country largely siding with Democrats on culture war issues.A survey of 1,252 likely voters nationally from 17 to 20 March found that 41% support and 50% oppose mandating K-12 libraries to immediately remove and review books flagged as inappropriate; 37% support and 47% oppose eliminating college diversity, equity and inclusion programmes; 39% support and 46% oppose banning college majors and minors in critical race theory.Danielle Deiseroth, interim executive director of Data for Progress, said: “Most Americans might agree that they like Florida’s weather. They certainly don’t like policies being put forward by Governor DeSantis and Florida lawmakers, especially on some of these culture war issues that have been dominating, especially on rightwing news media.”“In terms of DeSantis positioning himself for a potential presidential run in ’24, which seems all but certain at this point, these extreme policies are going to alienate a lot of voters right off the bat,” she said. “Women in particular were one of the groups most opposed to many of these policies.”Last year’s midterm election results appear to support this view as far-right Republicans underperformed among female voters, in part because of their extreme positions on issues such as abortion after the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade. DeSantis is expected to sign a six-week abortion ban, even though polls show that a majority of Floridians oppose it.DeSantis critic Rick Wilson, a fifth-generation Floridian and Republican strategist, has been involved in more than 30 political campaigns in the state, and co-founded the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group. Based in the state capital, Tallahassee, Wilson is sceptical of the notion that Florida could be the laboratory of ideas for a Republican revival.Recalling Texas governor Rick Perry’s failed presidential campaign, he said: “Perry came out and said, ‘I did all these conservative things, I’m the champion, I could make Washington work like Texas.’ That was his biggest line and it fell flatter than a pancake. That was also Jeb Bush’s argument: ‘I was Florida’s most conservative governor, I accomplished all these amazing conservative reforms.’”Far from a blueprint for America, Wilson describes Florida as “the Petri dish of bad ideas”. He added: “There is a slowly emerging theme among some conservatives I’ve been talking to of ‘I wish he’d do more about tax cuts and less about book banning, and talk more about smaller government and less about using government to punish people.’“In Maga world, that authoritarian stuff sells pretty well. But again, you can’t out-Trump Trump.”That authoritarian streak alarms activists who say DeSantis and his allies have pushed voter suppression bills to marginalise people of colour. His Florida model, they argue, would pose a fundamental threat to civil rights if exported elsewhere.Jasmine Burney-Clark, founder of Equal Ground, a Black-led civic engagement organisation, said: “It is not a state where people of colour, particularly Black people who have been on the other end as targets of his attacks, are feeling like this is a model for success, freedom or liberation.“If you are invested in a world that is seeded in white supremacy, hate and racist policies, then it is absolutely the perfect blueprint for the rest of the nation.” More

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      Florida teacher fired for asking students to pen obituaries for active shooter drill

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      A Florida teacher who was fired from his school after asking his students to write their own obituaries in advance of an on-campus active shooter drill says he has no regrets about the assignment that cost him his job.“It wasn’t to scare them or make them feel like they were going to die, but just to help them understand what’s important in their lives and how they want to move forward with their lives and how they want to pursue things in their journey,” the dismissed psychology teacher, Jeffrey Keene, told NBC News.Keene’s dismissal once again has cast a spotlight on the persistently bizarre decisions within the public education system of Florida, which has banned discussions of gender and sexual identity in classrooms but whose Republican extremist governor, Ron DeSantis, staunchly supports keeping the guns which help fuel school shootings across the country as accessible as possible.According to NBC, Keene learned that his 11th- and 12th-grade students at Dr Phillips high school in the Orlando area would be rehearsing how to respond to a shooting attack at their campus during their first period on 4 April. That prompted him to ask his students to write their own biographical obituaries as classwork, reasoning that the assignment would cause them to reflect on their lives as they prepared to undergo the active shooter drill.“This isn’t a way to upset you or anything like that,” Keene recalled telling his class of 35 students. He added: “If you can’t talk real to them, then what’s happening in this environment?”Just one week earlier, an intruder shot and killed three nine-year-old students as well as three staffers at Covenant elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee. Police shot and killed the intruder. The attack was one of more than 100 shootings at kindergarten through 12th-grade schools or during school-related activities in the US this year as of Saturday, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database resource.The murders at Covenant also occurred during what as of Saturday was one of more than 140 mass shootings in the US this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four victims are wounded or killed.It later became apparent that someone was upset by Keene’s assignment. By second period that day, Keene said some of his students revealed to him that they had been interviewed by school officials about the obituaries. And in the middle of seventh period, he was told that he’d been fired from his job, which he had started in January.The public school district which oversees Dr Phillips high has largely declined to discuss the case. A spokesperson for the district only told NBC in a statement that an employee responsible for “an inappropriate assignment about school violence” had been fired.Keene said to NBC that he was too new of a hire to qualify for membership to the local teachers’ union, so he had no administrative method available to seek reinstatement to his job. The school district’s statement also noted that Keene was still completing his post-hiring probation, implying that his dismissal could be implemented more swiftly than for a teacher who had finished the trial period.Keene hopes to find another job in teaching and believes his assignment was appropriate, according to NBC.“I don’t think I did anything incorrectly,” Keene told the network. “I honestly didn’t think a 16-, 17-, 18-year-old would be offended or upset by talking about something we’re already talking about.”The steady presence of mass shootings and violence at schools in US news headlines has moved many to call for more meaningful gun control, but Congress has been unable to pass anything substantial, even as schools acknowledge their vulnerability by making students practice what to do if heavily armed intruders barge onto their campuses and try to shoot them to death.A bill passed by Congress and signed into law by Joe Biden last year expanded background checks for the youngest gun buyers and funded some mental health and violence intervention programs. But the president is among many who say much stronger measures are needed, including an assault weapons ban that Congress has been unable to pass.Three days after the Nashville school murders and five days before Keene lost his job, Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature voted to allow gun owners to carry around their firearms without a state permit.They did so at the behest of DeSantis, who has also successfully advocated for a legislative ban against classroom discussions of systemic racism, saying the concept joined learning about sexual and gender identity as one of the biggest threats to Florida’s schoolchildren.Florida’s 22 million or so residents make it the country’s third-most populous state. More

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      Trump reportedly seeks 2024 campaign role for far-right activist Laura Loomer

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      Donald Trump has told aides to hire the far-right anti-Muslim activist and failed congressional candidate Laura Loomer for a role in his campaign to return to the White House in 2024, the New York Times has reported.Citing four anonymous sources, the Times noted that Loomer, 29, attended Trump’s speech at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Tuesday night, an angry rant delivered hours after the former president pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges in New York over hush money payments, including to the porn star Stormy Daniels.Trump remains the clear frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, enjoying big leads over his closest challenger, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, despite the historic indictment and multiple other forms of legal jeopardy.DeSantis has not declared a campaign but has nonetheless presented himself as a candidate in Trump’s hard-right mould. The former governors Nikki Haley (South Carolina) and Asa Hutchinson (Arkansas), declared candidates closer to the political centre, barely register in polling.Loomer told the Times: “I’m not going to comment on private conversations that I had with the president. The president knows I have always been a Trump loyalist and that I’m committed to helping him win re-election in 2024.”A Trump spokesperson said: “The entire movement is united behind President Trump and his campaign, and it will take everyone rowing in the same direction in order to beat [Joe] Biden and take our country back.”Loomer said Trump “likes me very much. And it’s a shame that he’s surrounded by some people that run to a publication [the Times] notorious for attacking him in order to try to cut me at the knees instead of being loyal.”Loomer ran for Congress in Florida in 2020, winning Trump’s endorsement and a Republican primary but losing the general election.She told the Times she was a “Jewish conservative woman, a Trump loyalist and a free speech absolutist”. In the current election cycle, she has agitated against DeSantis, in one instance picketing an appearance to promote his campaign memoir.Loomer has previously described herself as “pro-white nationalism”, claiming “there’s a difference between white nationalism and white supremacy … and a lot of liberals and leftwing globalist Marxist Jews don’t understand that”.In the same conversation with a white supremacist podcast, in 2017, Loomer said the US “really was built as the white Judeo-Christian ethnostate, essentially. Over time, immigration and all these calls for diversity, it’s starting to destroy this country.”Another attendee at Trump’s speech on Tuesday, the far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, greeted news of Trump’s courtship of Loomer with evident dismay.“Laura Loomer is mentally unstable and a documented liar,” wrote Greene, who has risen to power in the Republican party despite spreading conspiracy theories including that wildfires are caused by space technology controlled by the Rothschild family and that the Parkland school shooting in Florida was a “false flag” operation.Loomer, Greene said, “can not [sic] be trusted. She spent months lying about me and attacking me just because I supported Kevin McCarthy for [House] speaker and after I had refused to endorse her last election cycle.”Greene also accused Loomer of “loving” Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic white supremacist activist who controversially dined with Trump and the rapper Ye last November.Observers pointed out that Greene has appeared with Fuentes in public and spoken at a conference he staged.Regarding Trump, Greene said she would “make sure he knows” why hiring Loomer would be a bad move. More

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      ‘US going to hell’: Donald Trump attacks hush money case in grievance-filled Mar-a-Lago speech

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      Simmering with anger and defiance, Donald Trump returned to the safe space of Mar-a-Lago and his loyal supporters on Tuesday night, seeking to turn his status as an accused criminal into a political war cry.The former president ignored a plea from the judge in the case to refrain from inflammatory rhetoric, even launching a broadside at the judge’s daughter over her political connections.Trump flew back to Florida from New York, where prosecutors had accused him of orchestrating hush-money payments to cover up claims of affairs before the 2016 election. Sitting in a Manhattan court, Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.But on the evening of a sombre day for America and its judicial system, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination walked into the opulent ballroom at the Mar-a-Lago estate to the familiar strains of Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA, a staple of his campaign rallies.Supporters wore “Make America Great Again” and “Trump 2024” caps and snapped pictures of the president turned defendant. The audience included Trump’s son Eric and his wife, Lara, Florida congressman Matt Gaetz and pillow maker and conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell.Wearing a blue suit, white shirt and red tie, and standing behind a lectern that said “Text Trump to 88022” amid an array of US flags, he portrayed himself as a political martyr.“I never thought anything like this could happen in America,” Trump said. “I never thought it could happen. The only crime that I have committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it.”The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, alleges that Trump – the first former president to face criminal charges – falsified business records to conceal a violation of election laws.Payments were made to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels and the former Playboy model Karen McDougal. Another was made to a former Trump Tower doorman, $30,000 to buy the rights to an untrue story about a child fathered out of wedlock.Trump appeared subdued as he pleaded “not guilty” but at Mar-a-Lago felt liberated to protest his innocence and lash out with typical invective, saying “our country is going to hell”.He described Bragg, an elected Democrat, as “a local failed district attorney charging a former president of the United States for the first time in history on a basis that every single pundit and legal analyst said there is no case.“There’s no case. They kept saying there’s no case. Virtually everyone. But it’s far worse than that because he knew there was no case.”Some experts have said Bragg might have to rely on untested legal theories but few have said he has no case at all.Trump added: “The criminal is the district attorney because he illegally leaked massive amounts of grand jury information for which he should be prosecuted or, at a minimum, he should resign.”In court, prosecutors requested protective orders for discovery materials, including Trump’s incendiary posts on his Truth Social platform, including a warning of “death and destruction” if he should be indicted. The judge, Juan Merchan, advised Trump: “Please refrain from making statements that are likely to incite violence or civil unrest.”But in his prime-time address, there was no sign Trump was prepared to modify his rhetoric. He assailed Merchan, claiming: “I have a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris.”In fact Merchan’s daughter, Loren, is a partner at a digital campaign strategy agency that has worked for many prominent Democrats, including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2020 election.Trump addressed multiple other cases against him, including an investigation into his attempt to interfere in the election in Georgia.“In the wings they’ve got a local racist Democrat district attorney in Atlanta who is doing everything in her power to indict me over an absolutely perfect phone call,” he claimed, referring to a call in which he was recorded asking state Republicans to overturn the result.Trump also went into a lengthy denunciation of the investigation of his mishandling of classified materials at Mar-a-Lago. “They’re looking at me through the Espionage Act of 1917, where the penalty is death,” he said.He described the special counsel, Jack Smith, as a “lunatic” and complained: “Our justice system has become lawless. They’re using it now – in addition to everything else – to win elections.”Trump could not resist reverting to his usual campaign stump speech, railing against Democrats’ handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, urban crime, the threat of a third world war, a military “gone woke” and high inflation.He listed baseless grievances including “impeachment hoax number one”, “impeachment hoax number two”, “millions of votes illegally stuffed into ballot boxes” and Hunter Biden’s laptop which, he claimed, “exposes the Biden family as criminals”.There is no evidence to support that assertion.The indictment has led to a surge of support for Trump in Republican polls and a surge in cash donations. But many commentators are sceptical about whether Trump could prevail in a general election.The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said in a statement: “Tonight at Mar-a-Lago we saw a paranoid and delusional speech cheered on by fanatical cult members who do not care about democracy and American values. Trump got the circus he wanted. The rest of the GOP has fallen in line.”Bill Burton, a former White House deputy press secretary under Barack Obama, was also unimpressed.“This is the worst I’ve ever seen Trump,” he tweeted. “I watch all of his speeches – saw him ramble in Waco, watched him ramble in his ‘announcement’ to run again – this is the very worst of it. Puffy face, bloodshot eyes, his precious hair a mess. And his cadence just plain sad.” More

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      Trump’s Prime-Time Speech From Mar-a-Lago: A Laundry List of Grievances

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      Former President Donald J. Trump, speaking at his Florida resort at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday evening hours after his arraignment in New York, cast the case against him as unfair and politically motivated in an unusually short 21-minute speech that focused as much on other grievances and investigations.Standing before his family members, Republican Party officials and allies, Mr. Trump called the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, a “criminal,” claiming without evidence that Mr. Bragg had leaked information from the grand jury. And Mr. Trump also called the judge overseeing the case, Juan M. Merchan, “a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family.”In the courtroom during his arraignment earlier on Tuesday, Justice Merchan admonished Mr. Trump about his public remarks, urging him to refrain from making statements about the case with “the potential to incite violence and civil unrest.”In his speech, which was carried live by CNN and Fox News, Mr. Trump spent much of his time airing other perceived wrongs against him. He renewed his criticisms of the F.B.I.’s search of Mar-a-Lago in August, the New York attorney general’s civil investigation into him and his family’s business dealings and the open case in Georgia about his meddling in the 2020 election there.“This is a persecution, not an investigation,” he said of the New York attorney general’s case.Anticipation for Mr. Trump’s remarks had been building all day as cable networks and national media outlets delivered minute-by-minute updates. The former president, meanwhile, declined to speak with reporters in New York and instead saved his remarks for a prime-time address back home in Florida..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.But Mr. Trump seemed to squander his opportunity with a speech that was long on complaints and light on applause lines. Inside the ballroom, the biggest cheer of the night was when he ended his speech by repeating his 2016 campaign motto.His remarks amount to a strategy that has become commonplace for Mr. Trump: blurring the lines between his court battles and political opponents to sway public opinion over his arrest while ginning up enthusiasm — and campaign contributions — from supporters.The ballroom at Mar-a-Lago where Mr. Trump spoke — the same spot where he announced his third White House bid in November — was set up with a wide walkway for Trump allies and relatives to make their entrances. The design also divided the room in a way that made the crowd appear larger than it was. Roughly 350 seats were set up for the audience, which included two of Mr. Trump’s adult children, Tiffany Trump and Donald Trump Jr., as well as Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, both far-right Republicans.The former president spoke roughly seven hours after he left a Manhattan courthouse, where he pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges that prosecutors brought against him over his role in coordinating hush-money payments to a porn star. He is the first former president to face the prospect of a criminal trial.Mr. Trump has long aimed to paint himself as a target of politically motivated attacks and claimed the charges against him were baseless. Shortly after being indicted by a grand jury last week, he issued a statement calling the indictment “political persecution and election interference at the highest level in history.”His message has resonated with supporters. Since his indictment, Mr. Trump’s poll numbers in the 2024 Republican presidential primary have risen by double digits, even as some longtime supporters have slowed in their rush to defend him. As he was arraigned on Tuesday, a crowd of his supporters gathered in the streets outside the Manhattan courthouse. More

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      What the Trump Indictment Means for Ron DeSantis and the G.O.P.

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      There is a presumption among a certain kind of analyst — rooted, I presume, in a deeply buried belief in the vengeance of Almighty God — that because Republicans morally deserve Donald Trump they will be stuck with him no matter what. That having refused so many opportunities to take a righteous stand against him, they will be condemned to halt at the edge of a post-Trump promised land, gazing pathetically across the Jordan even as they cast in their lots with the False Orange Messiah once again.That assumption informs some of the reactions to the Trump indictment and the immediate rally effect that it produced among Republicans, with the former president’s (presumptive) leading challenger, Ron DeSantis, not only condemning prosecutorial overreach but promising some kind of Floridian sanctuary should Trump choose to become a fugitive from New York justice.A certain part of the media narrative was already turning against DeSantis, or at least downgrading his chances, in part because he hasn’t yet swung back hard at any of Trump’s wild attacks. Now with the indictment bringing the Florida governor and most of the G.O.P. leadership to Trump’s defense, that narrative is likely to harden — that this is just another case study in how leading Republicans can’t ever actually turn on Trump, and they will be condemned to nominate him once again 2024.In reality, the electoral politics of the indictment are just as murky as they were when it was just a hypothetical. One can certainly imagine a world where a partisan-seeming prosecution bonds wavering conservatives to Trump and makes his path to the nomination easier. But one can equally imagine a world where the sheer mess involved in his tangle with the legal system ends up being a reason for even some Trump fans to move on to another choice. (A poll this week from Echelon Insights showing a swing toward DeSantis in the event of an indictment offers extremely tentative support for that possibility.)Either way, the response from DeSantis and others right now, their provisional defense of Trump against a Democratic prosecutor, is not what will determine how this plays out politically.I have argued this before, but there’s no reason not to state the case again: The theory that in order to beat Trump, other Republicans need to deserve to beat him, and that in order to deserve to beat him they need to attack his character with appropriate moral dudgeon, is a satisfying idea but not at all a realistic one. It isn’t credible that Republican voters who have voted for Trump multiple times over, in full knowledge of his immense defects, will finally decide to buy into the moral case just because DeSantis or any other rival hammers it in some new and exciting way.Instead the plausible line of attack against Trump in a Republican primary has always been on competence and execution, with his moral turpitude cast as a practical obstacle to getting things done. And as others have pointed out, including New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, nothing about defending Trump against a Democratic prosecutor makes that case any more difficult to make.You can imagine DeSantis on the debate stage: Yes, I condemn the partisan witch hunt that led to this indictment. But the pattern with my opponent is that he makes it too easy for the liberals. If you’re paying hush money to a porn star, you’re giving the other side what it wants.It was the same way all through his presidency — all the drama, all the chaos, just played into the Democrats’ hands. Into the deep state’s hands. He would attack lockdowns on social media while Dr. Fauci, his own guy, was actually making them happen. He tried to get our troops out of the Middle East, but he let the woke generals at the Pentagon disregard his orders. He didn’t finish the Wall because he was always distracted — there was a new batch of leaks from inside his White House every week. He’s got valid complaints about the 2020 election, about how the other side changed election laws on the fly during the pandemic — but he was president, he just watched them do it, he was too busy tweeting.I admire what he tried to do, he did get some big things accomplished. But the other side fights to win, they fight dirty, and you deserve a president who doesn’t go into the fight with a bunch of self-inflicted wounds.Is this argument enough? Maybe not. It certainly doesn’t have the primal appeal that Trump specializes in, where all those self-inflicted wounds are transformed into proof that he’s the man in the arena, he’s the fighter you need, because why else would he be dripping blood?But it’s the argument that DeSantis has to work with. And nothing about its logic will be altered when Trump is fingerprinted and charged.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 Reunites With a Key Adviser as Campaign Plans Unfold

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      A central area of expertise for Dustin Carmack, who will leave his post at the Heritage Foundation, is national security, with a focus on cybersecurity.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida plans to install his former congressional chief of staff as a senior adviser specializing in national security when he formally begins his presidential campaign, according to three people briefed on the plans.Dustin Carmack served as a key aide to Mr. DeSantis, whose tenure in the House lasted from 2013 until 2018, and he was chief of staff for the director of national intelligence during the Trump administration. Now at the Heritage Foundation, Mr. Carmack intends to leave that post to join the DeSantis campaign-in-waiting on the payroll of the Republican Party of Florida, the people said.The party apparatus has become something of a staging ground for prospective DeSantis campaign staff while the governor waits to make an official announcement.The planned appointment makes Mr. Carmack the most significant prospective policy hire to date for a DeSantis campaign. It indicates the governor will continue his pattern of filling key roles with trusted loyalists. Traditional Republican foreign policy elites, who are monitoring Mr. DeSantis’s every move for clues about his intentions, will most likely be relieved that, in Mr. Carmack, Mr. DeSantis will have an adviser who leans more hawkish than the governor’s allies on the Tucker Carlson-adjacent New Right.Mr. Carmack’s portfolio with an eventual DeSantis campaign will be broadly focused on policy. But one of his key areas of expertise is national security, with a focus on cybersecurity.Mr. Carmack did not respond to requests for comment. An official with the Republican Party of Florida did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for Mr. DeSantis, Lindsey Curnutte, declined to comment.During his most recent stint at Heritage, Mr. Carmack took a hawkish approach to his foreign policy writings, especially as they related to cybersecurity and Russia and China.In an article in The Daily Signal on July 20, 2021, Mr. Carmack argued that President Biden should consider “offensive cyber reprisals” or tougher sanctions to hit back against Chinese cyberattacks.“As we move further into the digital age, we need to take the kid gloves off when dealing with China,” he wrote.And, while Mr. DeSantis has recently declared that defending Ukraine is not a vital national interest, Mr. Carmack is on the record as a Ukraine hawk. He has called on the Biden administration to include “offensive cyber operations in the package of military assistance to Ukraine.”“The United States has sent Ukraine a variety of military equipment, including killer drones, Stinger surface-to-air missiles, Javelin anti-tank missiles, small arms and ammunition,” he said in an April 2022 article co-written with Michael J. Ellis, the former senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council. “We should do more.”“If ordered,” Mr. Carmack and Mr. Ellis wrote, “U.S. Cyber Command could develop the ability to temporarily disable key Russian military, intelligence or logistics networks. This would be a tremendous boon to Ukrainian forces. Moreover, such cyber operations would not be clearly traceable back to the U.S. — reducing the possibility of escalating tensions with Russia.”When Mr. DeSantis previously supported a more hawkish posture toward Russia, as a congressman in 2015, Mr. Carmack was his chief of staff.As a sitting governor and undeclared candidate, Mr. DeSantis has no official campaign apparatus. Instead, a super PAC that is backing him has been making a number of hires, as has the Republican Party of Florida, from which staff members are expected to move to an eventual campaign.Mr. DeSantis, who is polling the closest to former President Donald J. Trump but is still trailing by a large margin in national polls of the Republican primary electorate, is not expected to declare a candidacy until after the Florida legislative session ends in May.That delay is giving Mr. Trump, who announced his candidacy in November, and his allies a window to try to define Mr. DeSantis and harden public opinion about him before he can formally enter the race. The dynamic of the 2024 campaign was upended on Thursday, however, when a grand jury in Manhattan voted to indict Mr. Trump in a hush-money case.Make America Great Again Inc., the super PAC supporting Mr. Trump’s candidacy, has begun running commercials for the first time, with a roughly $1.3 million ad buy on CNN and Fox News for a spot attacking Mr. DeSantis.As expected, the ad focuses on Mr. DeSantis’s votes on Social Security and Medicare while he was a congressman. He once vocally supported restructuring both programs and raising the retirement age when he was a budget hawk in 2012. It’s a position that Mr. Trump has attacked him for relentlessly, and with reason: Such votes have historically been unpopular with seniors, who make up a substantial chunk of the Republican voting base.“He’s just not ready to be president,” the ad narrator intones. More

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      in US Politics

      Disney v DeSantis dispute hinges on clause referencing King Charles III

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      A dispute between the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and Disney over control of the company’s Florida theme park district hinges on a clause referencing King Charles III and his descendants.The row began after DeSantis in March 2022 passed a “don’t say gay” law banning classroom teaching on sexual orientation and gender identity. The law was highly controversial, with LGBTQ+ activists saying it was discriminatory. Joe Biden denounced it as “hateful”.Under former chief executive Bob Chapek, Disney was initially hesitant to state public opposition to the bill, but did so after pressure. That prompted DeSantis and Florida Republicans to try to revoke privileges Disney has had for decades at its theme park, which employs 75,000 people.However, a new governing board appointed by DeSantis on Wednesday reportedly said it will need to overturn last-minute agreements which would prevent it from taking control.The document states that its provisions will stand until “21 years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III, king of England living as of the date of this declaration”.“Royal clauses” of this kind are used to avoid rules in some places against contracts which last in perpetuity. The British royal family was chosen for the clauses because information about the family tree was readily available, but also because of the “better healthcare available to, and longer life expectancy of, a royal family member compared to a non-royal”, according to the law firm Birketts.In February, the Florida state house passed a bill to end the unusual status that allowed Disney World to govern itself. Under the status, Disney World had its own police and fire departments, planning powers and some other public functions.The bill gave DeSantis the power to appoint the five members of the board that controls government services for the Reedy Creek district.“We’re going to have to deal with it and correct it,” board member Brian Aungst said of the last-minute agreements on Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. “It’s a subversion of the will of the voters and the legislature and the governor. It completely circumvents the authority of this board to govern.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a statement, Disney said: “All agreements signed between Disney and the District were appropriate, and were discussed and approved in open, noticed public forums in compliance with Florida’s ‘Government in the Sunshine’ law.”Buckingham Palace declined to comment. More