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      US split on vaccine passports as country aims for return to normalcy

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      With summer around the corner, Americans are desperate for some sense of normalcy as the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine continues. Some businesses and lawmakers believe they have a simple solution that will allow people to gather in larger numbers again: vaccine passports.But as with so many issues in the US these days, it’s an idea dividing America.Vaccine passport supporters see a future where people would have an app on their phone that would include their vaccine information, similar to the paper record card from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that is given when a person is vaccinated. People would flash the app when entering a large venue for something like a concert or sports game.While many other countries have implemented or are considering vaccine passports, in a country where political divides have determined belief in mask usage, social distancing and even the lethality of the virus, it comes as no surprise that there is already a political divide over whether vaccine passports should be used at all.Leaders of some Democratic states have embraced the idea of vaccine passports at big events like concerts and weddings.New York launched its Excelsior Pass with IBM in late March with the intention of having the app used at theaters, sports stadiums and event venues. California health officials will allow venues that verify whether someone has gotten the vaccine or tested negative to hold larger events. Hawaii is working with multiple companies on a vaccine passport system that would allow travelers to bypass Covid-19 testing and quarantine requirements if vaccinated.“Businesses have lost a lot of money during this whole period here so there’s a lot to recoup,” Mufi Hannemann, president and chief executive of the Hawaii Tourism and Lodging Association, told local news station Hawaii News Now. “We’re anxious to get this economy moving forward in a safe and healthy manner.”On the flip side, a growing number of states are passing laws banning vaccine passports, citing concerns of privacy and intrusion on people’s decisions to get vaccinated.“Government should not require any Texas to show proof of vaccination and reveal private health information just to go about their daily lives,” said Governor Greg Abbott, who ordered that no government agency or institution receiving government funding should require proof of vaccination.The governors of Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, Arizona and Indiana have passed or voiced support for similar laws.Splits have already taken place. Norwegian Cruise Line, for example, told the CDC it would be willing to require passengers be fully vaccinated before boarding, but Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, said his ban on vaccine passports prohibits such a mandate.Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, like many colleges and universities, said they would require students to be vaccinated before returning to campus in the fall, but the school is considering backtracking the policy following DeSantis’s order.Though conservative figures like Donald Trump Jr, who called vaccine passports “invasive”, have started to broadly attack Democrats for backing vaccine passports, the White House has made it clear the federal government has no plans to release a vaccine passport, or require mandatory vaccines.“The government is not now nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential,” said Jen Psaki, White House press secretary, earlier in April.Psaki said the White House would release guidance for businesses and local governments who wish to implement vaccine passports.Vaccine passports have historically been used when crossing country borders. For example, some countries, including Brazil and Ghana, require people to have the vaccine against yellow fever before entering their countries. And while vaccine passports have not been used widely domestically in the US, vaccine mandates, and the proof of vaccines needed to carry them out, are common. Many schools require students to get a host of vaccines, while many healthcare systems often require the annual flu vaccine for employers.Sensitivity around a vaccine passport is probably an offshoot of a broader vaccine hesitancy. Recent polling has shown that vaccine skepticism has a partisan bent: 30% of Republicans said they would not get the vaccine versus 11% of Democrats, according to the Covid States Project. David Lazer, professor of political science at Northeastern University and a researcher with the Covid States Project, said “partisan divides on behaviors and policies have been acute throughout the pandemic”, but Democrats and Republicans are more evenly split on vaccines compared with other policies against Covid-19, like mask-wearing and social distancing.The term “passport” could also be turning people away from the concept, said Maureen Miller, an epidemiologist with Columbia University, as it implies that verification requires more personal information beyond vaccination status. A recent poll from the de Beaumont Foundation confirmed this, with Republican respondents being more supportive of vaccine “verification” over a “passport”.Miller said the World Health Organization, which is developing its own Smart Vaccine Certificate and standards for vaccine verification programs, has been adamant about making the distinction between a certificate and a passport.“A passport contains a lot of personal information, and a vaccine certificate does not,” Miller said. “It contains only the information necessary to convey the fact that the person has been vaccinated.”Other groups including the Vaccine Credential Initiative and the Covid-19 Credential Initiative are working on coming up with standards for digital vaccine passports with the aim of building trust in vaccine verification programs.Miller said the ultimate goal would be to reach herd immunity in the US, which would nix the need for vaccine passports but would require working through the skepticism that exists in the country.“People are not going to feel comfortable in large numbers, in social environments until we hit a kind of herd immunity, where, when you bump into someone, the risk of an infectious person bumping into someone who’s susceptible is decreased tremendously,” Miller said. 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      Florida bill would allow students to record professors to show political bias

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      Republicans in Florida have stepped up their assault on what they call “Marxist professors and students” in the state’s public universities and colleges with a bill that encourages the reporting of lecturers perceived to be stifling “viewpoint diversity” on campus.The bill, currently awaiting the signature of the Florida governor and Donald Trump ally Ron DeSantis, will allow students to make recordings of lectures without their professors’ consent, and present them as evidence of political bias.It requires all 40 of Florida’s state-funded institutions of postsecondary education to conduct an annual survey of faculty and students to establish how well intellectual freedoms are protected on campus; and to “shield” students from efforts to limit their “access to, or observation of, ideas and opinions that they may find uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive.”Any institution that blocks a student’s access to such “expressive activities”, the definition of which includes the content of lectures as well as “all forms of peaceful assembly, protests and speeches,” exposes itself to legal action, the new bill states.Opponents say the shield clause, a late addition to the bill’s text as it worked its way through Florida’s Republican-dominated legislature, opens the door for white supremacist or other rightwing hate groups.“As we saw in Charlottesville, if you give them an opening like that they will come,” Dr Karen Morian, the president of the united faculty of Florida (UFF) union of more than 20,000 educators, said. “And if it’s at FAMU [the historically black Florida agricultural and mechanical university] and they think they’re going to be able to intimidate black college students, they will come. That’s actually pretty scary.”Morian said the clause allowing the clandestine recording of lectures is also problematic, despite the insistence by the bill’s defenders that educators have no right of privacy in a publicly-funded institution.“It carves out our classrooms as a public space, whereas in actuality the general public cannot walk through it during class,” she said. “They can walk across the campus, or from the parking lot to the office, that’s public space. But my classroom has never been read as a public space.”The Florida bill appears to align with the position of rightwing student activist groups such as Turning Point USA, which has long railed against what it sees as the left’s domination of campuses nationwide and maintains an online watchlist of radical professors who “advance leftist propaganda in the classroom”.The politicians who shaped the Florida law acknowledge there is no evidence that political bias is a problem in the state’s 12 public universities and 28 publicly-funded colleges, but argue that legislation is needed to find out if it exists.“We have a lot of anecdotal evidence of largely conservative students feeling very uncomfortable sharing their viewpoints in university classrooms, they’re getting shut down,” said the state congressman Alex Andrade, a co-sponsor of the bill.“It’s a common joke [among] conservative students that they have to tailor some of their essays to make them more progressive or left-leaning to get a better grade. When there’s at least anecdotal evidence that people are concerned about action against them for their political viewpoints it’s an issue we’d like to collect some data on.”Opponents say there is no need for the law and state that mechanisms already exist for students to report offensive or egregious behavior by lecturers. “It’s based on national news reports and not related to any incidents in Florida,” Yale Olenik, an attorney and legislative specialist at the Florida Education Association, told lawmakers at a February hearing. “Florida’s colleges and universities are not reporting issues, students are not complaining.”Andrade rejected the criticism. “Anytime a university professor is afraid of information that potentially makes them look bad, they translate ‘the solution in search of a problem’ because university professors have a pretty bad habit of always being right,” he said.“This is just a strict collection of data related to people’s concerns about their viewpoints, whether progressive or conservative, being held against them on college campuses.”The law’s architect, the state congressman Spencer Roach, did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment but in a tweet when the bill passed the Florida senate earlier this month he framed the bill as a “protection of intellectual diversity”.“Freedom of speech is an unalienable right, despite what Marxist professors and students think,” he wrote.Democrats who voted against the bill pointed to a series of aggressive educational manoeuvres that Republican lawmakers have attempted during Florida’s current legislative session, which ends next week.Politicians backed down on a proposal to withhold scholarships from students pursuing degree courses they perceived as liberal, but are still advancing plans to end guaranteed funding for certain scholarships and tie their availability instead to the vagaries of state budgets.This week, the Florida house voted to expand a school choice program that critics say strips money and resources from public schools and sends taxpayer money to private institutions with discriminatory practices.“I’m not surprised that Republicans are hobbling public education from kindergarten to college because they are afraid of educated voters,” the state representative Omari Hardy said.“Republicans have done poorly in recent years with college-educated voters, which has fed their belief and fear that colleges have become indoctrination camps. They believe college students are these frail and fragile intellectual creatures but there’s no data showing that professors are indoctrinating their students.” More

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      Florida Voting Restrictions Bill Heads to Legislature

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      The bill, which was recently softened, still includes measures like a ban on giving water to voters near polling places, and it would also empower partisan observers during the ballot-counting process.A bill that would impose a host of new restrictions on voting in Florida passed a key committee in the State Senate on Tuesday after a fiery debate among senators and hours of citizen testimony opposing the measure. The vote set the stage for a possible full floor vote in the Republican-controlled chamber in the coming weeks.The bill, known as S.B. 90, had significantly been revised last week by Dennis K. Baxley, the Republican state senator who introduced it, to roll back some of the more strident restrictions in the original bill, like banning drop boxes. It passed the Senate Rules Committee on Tuesday along a mostly party-line vote, with one Republican member of the committee, Jeff Brandes, voting against it.The measure also bans giving water to voters within 150 feet of a voting location; adds more identification requirements for absentee ballots; requires voters to request an absentee ballot every election rather than be on an absentee voting list; limits who can collect and drop off ballots; and empowers partisan observers during the ballot tabulating process.Florida, a major political battleground, is one of a number of Republican-controlled states, including Georgia, Texas and Arizona, that have marched forward with new bills seeking to limit access to voting. Republicans did well in Florida in 2020, with former President Donald J. Trump winning by more than 370,000 votes.State Senator Dennis K. Baxley during a legislative session in Tallahassee. Steve Cannon/Associated PressMr. Baxley, in introducing the bill, said that Florida’s election last year was the “gold standard” for the country, but that the new voting law was necessary to avoid potential problems.But the successful election in Florida was the reason that Democrats, as well as at least one Republican, pushed back on a lot of the provisions in the law. The newly amended bill that was passed limits the availability of drop boxes to early voting hours, rather than the 24-hour option that existed last year.Democratic senators, including Randolph Bracy, noted that there had been no evidence of any tampering with drop boxes, which was later confirmed in testimony by local election officials.Mr. Baxley replied simply that “things could happen.”The Republican sponsor did relent on one provision: requiring a “wet signature” (one handwritten using a pen or pencil) on file for voters who cast their ballots by mail for signature matching, rather than digital signatures, many of which are collected at Department of Motor Vehicle offices around the state.After intense debate and pressure, including from Republican senators, Mr. Baxley said on Tuesday morning that “by listening to others, and understanding your heart, I’m willing, and this Senate is willing, to take it out.”The bill was originally set for a vote last Wednesday, but the debate ran past the allotted meeting time and was abruptly gaveled to a close. The Senate Rules Committee picked up the final debate early Tuesday.During the public testimony last week, dozens of Florida voters spoke against the bill, as well as some local election officials, who took particular issue with the provision granting more authority to partisan poll watchers.Mr. Brandes, in his closing remarks on Tuesday morning, noted that election officials across the state had voiced opposition to the bill.“I need to put on the record that to my knowledge, not one Republican supervisor of elections in the state of Florida supports this bill in its current form,” he said.The lengthy debate last Wednesday grew heated at times, as Democrats grew frustrated with what they viewed as evasive answers from Mr. Baxley.“These are the most nonsensical, off-point answers I think I’ve ever heard to questions in my life,” said Gary Farmer, the Democratic minority leader in the State Senate.The bill that passed through committee on Tuesday brings the Senate effort more in line with a similar bill that has been introduced in the House by Blaise Ingoglia, a Republican representative from the Gulf Coast. The House bill, which passed a key House committee in March, also awaits a full vote later this month.The Florida Legislature is in session this year only through the end of April, so any bills will need to be passed by both chambers before May 1. More

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      in US Politics

      Florida passes ‘anti-riot’ bill as civil rights groups warn it will stifle dissent

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      Florida has approved a so-called “anti-riot” bill that gives harsher penalties to protesters, handing a victory to the state’s Republican governor and dealing a blow to civil rights groups who warn it will stifle dissent. The bill, passed by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature on Thursday, includes stiffer punishment for crimes committed during a riot or violent protest. It would allow authorities to hold arrested protesters until a first court appearance, and it would establish new felonies for organizing or participating in a violent demonstration.The proposal would make it a second-degree felony to destroy or demolish a memorial, plaque, flag, painting, structure or other object that commemorates historical people or events. That would be punishable by up to 10 years in prison.It would also strip local governments of civil liability protections if they interfere with law enforcement’s efforts to respond to a violent protest, and it adds language to state law that could force local governments to justify a reduction in law enforcement budgets.State Republicans have argued the bill is about “law and order” and preventing violence. Its approval is a major legislative victory for the governor, Ron DeSantis, who began campaigning for the measure last year following a summer of nationwide protests over racism and police brutality against Black Americans.But critics have called the legislation an assault against the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as an attempt to curtail the right to free speech and to peaceably assemble.Indeed, the genesis of the measure dates back to a 21 September press conference held by the governor, in which he was joined by the state senate president, Wilton Simpson, and house speaker, Chris Sprowls, to condemn the unrest in cities across the country and what he referred to as attacks on law enforcement.After the bill’s final passage, DeSantis said he looked forward to signing the measure into law.“This legislation strikes the appropriate balance of safeguarding every Floridian’s constitutional right to peacefully assemble, while ensuring that those who hide behind peaceful protest to cause violence in our communities will be punished,” the governor said in a statement.The measure drew intense reactions over the months, as community activists gathered in the state capitol to implore lawmakers to turn down the effort.The American Civil Liberties Union said the new law would give police broad discretion over what constitutes a demonstration and a riot.“The bill was purposely designed to embolden the disparate police treatment we have seen over and over again directed towards Black and brown people who are exercising their constitutional right to protest,” said Micah Kubic, the executive director of ACLU of Florida.Christina Kittle, an organizer of the Jacksonville Community Action Committee, warned that the new law could escalate clashes between police and demonstrators.“It’s been a blow to our morale, for sure,” she said. “I’m not sure it’s going to be a setback, but this was created to intimidate people and to keep people from coming out.”Senator Darryl Rouson, a former St Petersburg chapter president of the NAACP who joined every Democrat and a lone Republican in voting down the bill, said the new law would not deter anyone from protesting a just cause.“This is not going to stop people from rising up,” Rouson said.“This won’t stop anything, except those who are afraid. I’m not afraid,” he said. “I just want to say to people, keep on knocking, keep on protesting, keep on rising in spite of an attempt to stifle voices.” More

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      What’s Donald Trump up to these days? I tried to find out via Instagram

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      What do US presidents do once they leave the White House? Barack Obama kite-surfed with Richard Branson. Jimmy Carter returned to his peanut farm and found that it was $1m in debt. George W Bush got into painting.It’s early days, but Donald Trump’s post-presidential life has been just like his presidency: non-traditional. Aside from setting up an eyebrow-raising new website, and releasing wannabe tweets as official statements, he’s spent most of his time inside his new home at Mar-a-Lago, the giant and exclusive resort he owns in south Florida.We know very little about what he’s doing there, and after the unavoidable spectacle of his presidency, many people are probably comfortable with that. But for those still interested we decided to take a virtual holiday there, and look inside the gilded walls of Mar-a-Lago via the only way we could: Instagram.Using the Instagram page that collects all the public posts geotagged Mar-a-Lago, anyone can comb through thousands of photos and videos to see what’s been happening inside its gilded walls, and catch glimpses of what Trump has been up to.We know already that he recently crashed a wedding, giving a speech where he railed against Biden and China before raising a toast to himself, and then the happy couple. But that’s not everything. Here’s what we found from guests’ photos:Trump loves to surprise Mar-a-Lago membersTaking photos with fans is something all past presidents do. But there is still something unique about how Trump lives at his own resort, wakes up in the morning and walks throughout his new home taking photos with its paying members.In one video uploaded recently from Mar-a-Lago, Trump suddenly appears as a couple pose for engagement photos. He was also spotted wandering around a car show on 21 March hosted at the resort. And in March he appeared at a fundraiser for the Big Dog Ranch Rescue, a charity linked to Lara Trump that was recently in the news for spending almost $2m at Trump-owned properties in the last seven years.Trump has been mingling with Mar-a-Lago members for many years now. During his early presidency he even crashed a wedding right after receiving news of a North Korean missile test, while hosting the former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe. Trump told the wedding guests that he had bumped into the newlyweds earlier and tried to cajole Abe over to them. “I said to the prime minister of Japan, I said, ‘C’mon Shinzo, let’s go over and say hello. They’ve been members of this club for a long time. They’ve paid me a fortune.”Republican lawmakers are flocking to Mar-a-Lago to pay their respectsThe House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, was the first top Republican to signal the party wasn’t abandoning Trump after the attack on Capitol on 6 January, when he appeared in a photo with Trump at Mar-a-Lago three weeks later.This seemingly opened the gates for Republicans to make the pilgrimage to Palm Beach and hobnob with Trump. Many of them have uploaded their photos with him to Instagram, or can be spotted in photos uploaded to the app. This includes the 25-year-old House representative from North Carolina Madison Cawthone, the former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and the Republican extremist from Georgia Marjorie Taylor Greene.On 13 March a delegation of Alabama Republicans also presented Trump with a framed resolution at Mar-a-Lago, which declared him “one of the greatest and most effective presidents in the 245 year of this republic”.Very few guests seem to be wearing masks at the resort, but staff areIn many ways Mar-a-Lago is just another US venue where people don’t wear masks. Given the lack of mask-wearing at Trump’s White House, where he hosted at least one super-spreader event in the Rose Garden, it’s not surprising that many Mar-a-Lago guests are also mingling mask-free.But there’s something still striking about seeing so many maskless people inside a building owned by a former president who contracted Covid himself, had access to the best information about it, and whose mismanaged response to the crisis saw half a million Americans die from the virus.In one video uploaded on 13 March, the charity fashion show for Big Dog Ranch, (called Wine, Women and Shoes) is in full swing inside a huge function room. The room seems to be filled with hundreds of people. Another photo shows a slide projected on to a screen that reads “More than 47,000 lives saved since 2008”, referring of course to the dogs.None of the guests seem to be wearing masks, but the staff serving them are. Some may be vaccinated, but Covid is still very much a risk at Mar-a-Lago. The charity event took place just six days before the resort was partly closed due to an outbreak among its staff.Sylvester Stallone is visiting – and Roger Stone tooUnless you count the Trump family, Sylvester Stallone is the only celebrity I’ve been able to find in photos taken at Mar-a-Lago. From the date and caption it looks like he was there having dinner on 6 March when he took a photo with a fellow guest.In another photo uploaded less recently on 20 December, we can also see Roger Stone having a good time with another guest. Their caption on the photo reads “Only positive comments please … he was far nicer than someone else!”Trump is now showing off his office in Mar-a-Lago, where he pretends to boycott Coca-ColaYou may have seen the photo already of Trump posing with Stephen Miller in his Mar-a-Lago office – it’s by no means exclusive to Instagram.Seemingly set up to project an all-American work ethic (that we know from the last four years Trump doesn’t have), what’s most striking about the photo is the bottle of coke hidden behind Trump’s phone. Two days earlier, Trump had called on his supporters to boycott companies speaking out about Georgia’s new voting law which, funnily enough, included Coke. More

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      Zeus of Twitter or mouse of Mar-a-Lago? Republicans court Trump in Florida

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      Donald Trump was scheduled to speak on Saturday at a Republican National Committee event held at his Mar-a-Lago resort, amid a weekend of summits and dinners in the former president’s corner of Florida.The Republican rush to court Trump – and to pay for the use of his properties – is proving highly profitable. According to the Washington Post, attendees at the 400-person banquet planned for Saturday paid more than $100,000 each to attend.On Saturday night, Trump was reportedly set to tell attendees: “I stand before you this evening filled with confidence that in 2022, we are going to take back the House and we are going to reclaim the Senate – and then in 2024, a Republican candidate is going to win the White House.”Nonetheless, debate continues over Trump’s place in a party he led to victory in one presidential election but then shepherded to defeat in another while losing the House and the Senate after four years of chaos and two impeachment trials.His spokesman, Jason Miller, told the Post he was still “the biggest name in politics”.A leading presidential historian countered, telling the Associated Press that where once Trump was “like Zeus … shooting tweets like thunderbolts from up high”, now he only released “little squeaks from the mouse of Mar-a-Lago”.As Republicans begin to mull their choice of presidential nominee for 2024, senators, governors and other figures are jostling for prominence and courting major donors.An unnamed attendee at events in Florida this weekend, an adviser to a top donor, told Politico the party’s focus was on limiting Trump’s influence in order to win back suburban voters who deserted him for Joe Biden.“The thing on every donor’s mind,” the person was quoted as saying, “is how much sway Trump should have.”Trump, however, consistently tops polls of Republican voters.He is also fervently courted for endorsements. In Florida on Friday he both hosted and endorsed Marco Rubio, a senator and former presidential rival many had thought likely to attract a challenge from Trump’s daughter Ivanka.Public appearances are also keenly sought. Amy Kremer of Women for America First, a conservative group holding an event at another Trump property, his golf course in Doral, Florida, told the Post: “We would love to see him. If he came and spoke to the group spending the weekend here, that would be great. If he came and played golf and people watched him … that would be great too.”Nonetheless some observers think Trump’s grip is slipping, not least because he has lost access to Twitter, his most powerful communication platform, for inciting the Capitol attack.Trump’s power “is waning by the day”, Alex Conant, a Republican consultant, told the AP. “When you’re president of the United States it’s very easy to insert yourself into every news cycle. But once you’ve left office, it has to be more strategic.”Conant said Trump should have announced a book, sat for primetime interviews or delivered speeches. Instead he has taken to releasing short tweet-like statements, sent straight to journalists by email. Trump has said he is developing his own social media platform but he has also said his statements work better than online messages.Speaking to the AP, Miller insisted Trump was still “the greatest news generator in American history” and said: “There was never this type of media interest in the post-presidential careers of Clinton, Bush or Obama.”Ari Fleischer, a White House press secretary under George W Bush, disagreed. Though Trump “looms large” in the Republican party, he said, and “was unlike any prior president in the amount of oxygen he sucked up … he increasingly resembles many former presidents in how little oxygen he now gets.”Harold Holzer, director of Hunter College’s Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, said: “I don’t think it’s unnatural for coverage to diminish. I’m sure it’s tough on his ego, given … how much ink he generates, but it’s not unnatural for an ex-president to get less attention.”Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, was harsher.“I think he lost all momentum when he got pulled from the platforms,” he said. “Politics is about momentum and he has none now. Where it used to be he was shooting tweets like Zeus, they were like thunderbolts from up high. Now it’s little squeaks from the mouse of Mar-a-Lago.”One election result this week did show Trump’s influence on key electoral battles: voters in the small Illinois town of Mettewa re-elected a mayor who ran a write-in campaign after Trump pardoned him in a gambling investigation.Casey Urlacher, the brother of the former Chicago Bears star Brian Urlacher, pleaded not guilty to federal charges of recruiting bettors in exchange for a cut of their losses. After the president pardoned him, he beat Jess Ray – by 151 votes to 105. More

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      in Elections

      Could Ron DeSantis Be Trump’s G.O.P. Heir? He’s Certainly Trying.

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      Florida’s governor has elbowed his way to the front of the line of 2024 Republican hopefuls by leveraging a brand of “competent Trumpism” (as one ally put it) and hitting back at critics of his pandemic leadership.MIAMI — No one had to tell Ron DeSantis that his mock debates had bordered on disastrous. His answers rambled. He seemed uninspired.By the time he got to the greenroom of the biggest political stage of his career, a Republican primary debate for Florida governor in June 2018, he had made a risky decision.“I thought about everything we did in debate practice,” his campaign manager, Brad Herold, recalled Mr. DeSantis’s telling him. “I’m going to throw it out and do my own thing.”At the debate’s start, the audience applauded louder for his better-known opponent, Adam Putnam. By its end — after he had cast Mr. Putnam as a vestige of old Republicanism and delivered a rat-a-tat of one-liners — Mr. DeSantis had taken command of the crowd.Nearly three years and a pandemic later, Mr. DeSantis’s inclination to keep his own counsel and drive hard at reopening Florida has made him perhaps the most recognizable Republican governor in the country and a favorite of the party faithful. In turn, he has become a polarizing leader in the resistance to lengthy pandemic lockdowns, ignoring the advice of some public health experts in ways that have left his state’s residents bitterly divided over the costs and benefits of his actions.Now, with Florida defying many of the gloomy projections of early 2020 and feeling closer to normal as the pandemic continues to dictate daily life in many other big states, Mr. DeSantis, 42, has positioned himself as the head of “the free state of Florida” and as a political heir to former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. DeSantis owes a mightier debt than most in his party to Mr. Trump, who blessed his candidacy when he was a nobody congressman taking on the staid Florida Republican Party.Mr. DeSantis’s political maneuvering and extensive national donor network have allowed him to emerge as a top Republican candidate to succeed Mr. Trump on the ballot in 2024 if the former president does not run again. The governor’s brand of libertarianism — or “competent Trumpism,” as one ally called it — is on the ascent. Seizing on conservative issues du jour like opposition to social media “censorship” and vaccine passports, he has forged strong connections with his party’s base.In February, Mr. DeSantis had a prominent speaking appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, another high-profile gathering of Republicans in his home state. Erin Schaff/The New York TimesAnd his bonds with Republican leaders may be deepening: Mr. DeSantis has a plum speaking spot on Saturday night at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s resort and political base in Palm Beach, Fla., for the Republican National Committee’s spring retreat. Other possible 2024 rivals, like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Senator Marco Rubio, were relegated to appearances a night earlier.The governor has also taken steps to shore up his political standing around his handling of the pandemic, summoning reporters to the State Capitol on Wednesday to blast — complete with a slide-show presentation titled “FACTS VS. SMEARS” — a report in CBS News’s “60 Minutes” that did not have sufficient evidence to prove a pay-to-play dynamic between Mr. DeSantis’s administration and Covid-19 vaccine distribution for white and wealthy Floridians.His record on the virus is, in fact, mixed. By some measures, Florida has had an average performance in a pandemic that is not yet over. Yet his decisions helped keep hospitals from becoming overwhelmed with coronavirus patients. He highlights that he helped businesses survive and allowed children to go to school.What his critics cannot forget, however, is how he resisted some key public health guidelines. An op-ed article endorsing masks that his staff drafted under his name in mid-July was never approved by the governor for publication. The restrictions he now dismisses as ineffective, such as local mask mandates and curfews, which experts say in fact worked, were imposed in most cases by Democratic mayors with whom he hardly speaks.Given the ways people admire or despise him, however, the nuances seem beside the point.He infuriates passionate critics who believe he operates shrewdly to tend to his own interests. They fear that approach contributed to confusing public health messages, vaccine favoritism for the wealthy and the deaths of about 34,000 Floridians. “DeathSantis,” they call him. (Mr. DeSantis declined repeated interview requests for this article.)But at almost every turn, Mr. DeSantis has seized the criticism as an opportunity to become an avatar for national conservatives who relish the governor’s combativeness. He can score points that his potential Republican rivals in the minority in Washington, including Mr. Rubio and Senator Rick Scott, his predecessor as governor, cannot.“He’s taken the wrong approach on some of our most critical issues, Covid being first and foremost, yet within Republican political circles, he is considered to be the front-runner for the White House,” said former Representative David Jolly, an ex-Republican who is flirting with a possible run for governor. “He’s worked his hand perfectly.”Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump appeared together at a campaign rally in Tampa in 2018. The former president’s endorsement of Mr. DeSantis helped him win the Republican primary in the governor’s race that year.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. DeSantis has raised his profile despite lacking the gregarious personality that might be associated with an aspiring Trump successor. Unlike the former president, no one would describe the publicly unemotional and not especially eloquent Mr. DeSantis as a showman. (After a record day of coronavirus deaths in July, he offered, “These are tough, tough things to see.”) People close to him describe an un-Trump-like fondness for poring over articles in scientific journals.And, they say, do not underestimate the intellect and instinct that have repeatedly defied expectations and propelled Mr. DeSantis from Little Leaguer in middle-class Dunedin, Fla., to potential presidential contender.“He has a set of skills and traits that are ideal for the times,” said former Representative Carlos Curbelo, a Republican who served in the House with Mr. DeSantis. “Today, it would be very difficult to defeat him.”A long athletic, military and political résuméHe pronounces his last name “DEE-san-tis.” On the baseball field, he went simply by “D.”His team from Dunedin, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, made it to the Little League World Series in 1991. He was a 12-year-old known to be serious and competitive.Mr. DeSantis playing for Yale’s baseball team.Yale Athletics His father installed Nielsen TV-ratings boxes. His mother was a nurse. When he went to Yale, the Florida native — he was born in Jacksonville — arrived on campus in cutoff denim shorts.“One of the reasons we got along is we weren’t the traditional, Ivy-League-mold students,” said Nick Sinatra, a former Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity housemate. “He always talked politics. I’m a conservative, and at a place like that, that’s not common.”A history major, Mr. DeSantis lugged around a backpack full of books. He studied for both academics and athletics, scrutinizing ballplayers on TV. The Yale baseball team elected him captain.His résumé got only more sterling. He spent a year teaching history at a Georgia prep school before landing at Harvard Law. He received a commission in the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, where he served at Guantánamo Bay (“not as a detainee, as an officer,” he has quipped) and in Iraq. For two years, he worked as a federal prosecutor before winning a congressional seat near Jacksonville in 2012. His 2011 book, “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers,” which laid out a stridently conservative ideology, made him popular among Florida Tea Party Republicans.Mr. DeSantis and his wife greeted supporters after he won Florida’s election for governor in 2018, narrowly defeating Andrew Gillum, then considered a Democratic rising star.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesTwo years earlier, he had married Casey Black, a local television anchor he met on a driving range. Ms. DeSantis would become one of her husband’s closest advisers and biggest political assets, with an office at the State Capitol. They have three children under the age of 5; the youngest was born in March 2020. Mr. DeSantis said he was not in the delivery room so as to avoid using up precious personal protective equipment.The most memorable part of Mr. DeSantis’s six years in Congress might be the platform they gave him to heighten his profile on Fox News, where he frequently represented the hard-line Freedom Caucus. Later, he would staunchly defend Mr. Trump over the Russia investigation.“He was a policy wonk with an ability to really identify a few areas within his committees, responsibilities which he knew would give him the political opportunity to get on television,” said Scott Parkinson, who was Mr. DeSantis’s chief of staff in 2018. Mr. DeSantis was appearing on cable TV multiple times a day, Mr. Parkinson recalled.Mr. DeSantis often slept in his office and walked the Capitol halls wearing headphones, avoiding unwanted interactions. He made few friends and struck other lawmakers as aloof.A brief Senate run in 2016 proved critical: It exposed him to a national network of wealthy donors he would later tap in his long-shot bid for governor.Mr. DeSantis speaking at a rally in Orlando in 2018. After winning the governor’s office, he pursued a broadly conservative agenda but made moves to appeal to moderates, and his approval ratings rose.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesMr. DeSantis barely defeated Andrew Gillum, at the time considered one of the Democrats’ brightest stars, after a bruising campaign laced with accusations of racism. Determined to show his independence in his first months in office, he appointed a chief science officer and pledged billions for the Everglades. He pardoned four wrongfully accused Black men. He lifted a ban on medical marijuana in smokable form.He was hardly a moderate: Mr. DeSantis also gutted a voter-approved measure meant to restore felons’ right to vote. He allowed some teachers to carry guns in schools. He banned so-called sanctuary cities in a state where there were none.But the mix pleased voters, and his approval ratings surged. Might the man who had shown his diaper-age daughter building a wall in a campaign ad actually be a pragmatist?Then came the pandemic.Defiant leadership during a crisisIn a state where political consultants often become synonymous with their clients over time, Mr. DeSantis has cycled quickly through advisers. A close friend and transition deputy was Representative Matt Gaetz, who is now embroiled in a scandalous federal investigation.Mr. DeSantis centralized power in his office early in the pandemic, ceding little of the spotlight to public health officials. The state Department of Health’s weekly Covid-19 recaps are titled “Updates on Florida’s Vaccination Efforts Under Governor DeSantis’ Leadership.”Mr. DeSantis’s slowness in locking down the state last year hurt his approval ratings. So did a deadly summer surge of the virus. But then, far earlier than most other governors, he pledged that schools would open in the fall and life would start returning to normal.Young people crowded the beaches in Fort Lauderdale on March 11 last year, as the coronavirus spread rapidly throughout the United States. Mr. DeSantis was slow to lock down Florida, which had a deadly summer surge.Saul Martinez for The New York Times“His policies were contrarian, and he was defiant,” said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster who has tracked Mr. DeSantis’s popularity and saw it rebound beginning last summer. “The more he stands his ground, the more he speaks his mind, the more the affinity grows for him.”His critics see the governor as stubborn and unwilling to hear dissent.“The governor we have today is the governor we anticipated after the election,” said Nikki Fried, Florida’s agriculture commissioner and the only Democrat elected statewide, who looks likely to run against Mr. DeSantis.“He surprised everybody in 2019,” she added, “but obviously that is not truly who he is.”In some ways, Mr. DeSantis has filled the void left by Mr. Trump, minus the tweets. He remains a Fox News regular. He counts among his scientific advisers Dr. Scott W. Atlas, the former Trump adviser who has promoted dubious theories. Mr. DeSantis’s office said he had received a vaccine last week but not in public, reminiscent of Mr. Trump, who was given the shot behind closed doors.Mr. DeSantis spoke at a news conference in January about the opening of a coronavirus vaccination site at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens. Vaccine access in the state has been slower for Black, Latino and poorer communities.Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesAnd the governor’s favorite foes are the “corporate media,” against whom he has scored political points.His recent tangle with “60 Minutes” centered on the extent to which political connections have helped white, wealthy Floridians get vaccinated.Local news outlets have chronicled how vaccine access has been slower for Black, Latino and poorer communities. Some pop-up vaccination sites were opened in neighborhoods that had many older residents — and that also had ties to DeSantis campaign donors.But “60 Minutes” focused on how Publix supermarket pharmacies received doses and left out relevant details, including an extended response from the governor at a news conference.On Wednesday, in Mr. DeSantis’s words, he “hit them back right between the eyes,” accusing “60 Minutes” of pursuing a malicious narrative.He left without taking questions.Research was contributed by More