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      in US Politics

      Florida’s rightwing governor Ron DeSantis backs Kemi Badenoch’s ‘war on woke’

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      Florida’s rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis, has backed UK business secretary Kemi Badenoch in taking on what he calls “the woke”.DeSantis, who is expected to challenge Donald Trump for the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election, met Badenoch and foreign secretary James Cleverly on a visit to London this week.In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, DeSantis said Badenoch had offered her support for his “war on woke”, which has included a bitter legal battle with Disney after the company questioned a Florida law aimed at limiting discussion of homosexuality and gender in schools.DeSantis said: “She complimented what we are doing in Florida. She committed that it is what they are trying to do in Britain.“She pointed out, and I think it’s true, that some of the woke has been exported from the United States.“I commend her and her efforts to make sure that this is not corrupting British society.”His staff tweeted a picture of him and Badenoch, describing them as “two great conservative fighters on a mission”.Some of DeSantis’s views would be considered far outside mainstream UK politics – he recently signed a law to ban abortion in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy, for example.So-called parental rights legislation passed under his governorship has also led to the removal of hundreds of books from school libraries in the state.DeSantis insists only books that are “pornographic, violent or inappropriate” have been banned, but some school districts have responded to the new laws by removing books including The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and Judy Blume’s Forever from circulation.DeSantis won a landslide re-election to the governorship last year and describes his state as “where woke goes to die”.He has not yet formally announced his candidacy for next year’s presidential race but is widely expected to stand.He told the Sunday Telegraph: “At the end of the day you cannot have a successful society if it is being operated by woke ideology. It is fundamentally at odds with reality and facts and truths, and ultimately a society needs to be grounded in truth.”The Florida governor has taken his battle against what he sees as leftwing ideology well beyond the traditional political sphere – accusing companies with environmental, social and corporate governance policies of trying to use economic power to “impose a political agenda”, for example.“We always just assumed that all these other institutions in society were healthy, whether that’s corporate America, academia or all these other things,” he said.“Now there is just more of a realisation that you can win an election, and we won an election big in Florida, and yet the left can still impose its agenda through these other arteries of society, and that’s a problem.”Some of his interventions have echoes in the UK, where the Conservative government has waded into rows over issues including historic statues, free speech at universities and the National Trust.DeSantis said he agreed with Badenoch’s theory that what he sees as woke ideology had been partly imported to the UK from the US.“It’s like you are sitting here in the UK trying to just do right and then all of a sudden you have this dump,” he said, accusing US “elites” of “pushing that outside of our borders”.He underlined the close relationship between the US and the UK, and gave his backing for Brexit, saying: “I personally thought it was a good idea. If I lived here, I would have supported it.”DeSantis’s trip to the UK formed part of an overseas tour, which also included Japan and South Korea and was apparently aimed at burnishing his foreign policy credentials.Badenoch ran in last summer’s Tory leadership contest, and is widely seen as a potential future candidate.Her campaign heavily featured culture war issues, including the claim that civil servants had tried to block a policy of providing single sex toilets in public buildings.She holds the equalities brief alongside her post as secretary of state for business and trade.Rishi Sunak has leaned into culture war issues since becoming prime minister, most recently taunting Labour leader Keir Starmer at prime minister’s questions by saying: “I am certain what a woman is, is he?” More

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      in World Politics

      Americans are the US Government’s Greatest Enemy

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      in US Politics

      Traffic review: Ben Smith on Bannon, BuzzFeed and where it all went wrong

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      Ben Smith is a willing passenger on the rollercoaster also known as the internet. He reported for Politico, was founding editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed News and did a stint as a columnist for the New York Times. Then he co-founded Semafor. Graced with a keen eye and sharp wit, he has seen and heard plenty.People and businesses crash, burn and sometimes rise again. BuzzFeed News is no more. The New York Times trades 75% higher than five years ago. Tucker Carlson is off the air. Roger Ailes is dead. Twitter ain’t what it used to be.Smith’s first book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, captures the drama with light prose and a breezy tone. He observes that internet news morphed from being a vehicle for the left into the tool of the right. It’s a lesson worth remembering.Technology is agnostic. The market yearns to build the better mousetrap. Secret sauce seldom stays secret for long. Barack Obama demonstrated a then-unparalleled mastery of electoral micro-targeting; in turn, the first Trump campaign harnessed Facebook and social media in a manner few envisioned.Traffic is the narrative of an industry and its personas. Smith spills ink on the overlapping relationships between the late Andrew Breitbart, founder of the eponymous rightwing website, Arianna Huffington and Matt Drudge. He stresses that ideology tethered to accessible if potentially inflammatory content gains eyeballs and clicks. Kittens are cute. Listicles are good for laughs. On the other hand, dick pics get stale quickly unless there’s a story behind them. Brett Favre is the exception that proves the rule.Smith recounts discussions with Steve Bannon, the dark lord of Trumpworld. He describes a Trump Tower meeting, amid the 2016 campaign. Bannon, then Trump’s campaign chairman, “exuded confidence, but it didn’t feel like a winning campaign”, Smith observes. “He didn’t seem to have much to do.”But there was more to the confab than atmospherics. There was insight.“Breitbart hadn’t just chosen Trump, Bannon told me, based on the candidate’s political views.” Rather, “Bannon and his crew had seen the energy Trump carried, the engagement he’d driven, and attached themselves to it.”Charisma counts. Said differently, Hillary Clinton was only a candidate. Unlike Trump, she did not spearhead a movement, evoke broad loyalty or elicit passion. Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn-born socialist, stood in marked contrast. And he didn’t give speeches at Goldman Sachs or summer on Martha’s Vineyard.Sanders connected with the white working class and Latinos. A creature of the beer track, he came within two-tenths of a point of beating Clinton in Iowa then clobbered her in New Hampshire. The Democratic primary extended into July. The performance of the senator from Vermont presaged Clinton’s election day woes.“BuzzFeed, in Bannon’s view, had failed to recognize that Bernie Sanders could generate the same energy, the same engagement,” Smith writes. “Why hadn’t we gone all in for Bernie, he asked me.”Smith’s answer satisfied no one, not even himself: “I told Bannon that we came from different traditions.”Greed, sex and ambition also marble Smith’s tale. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX crypto exchange and a $10m investor in Semafor, faces a dozen federal criminal counts. The company plans to repurchase his shares. Tainted money is a flashpoint for aggrieved creditors.The pursuit of coolness, cash and desirability seldom respects boundaries. Like moths, journalists gravitate to flames only to be burned. In one chapter, Smith recalls the plight of BuzzFeed’s Benny Johnson.Johnson came from the Blaze, the hard-right brainchild of Glenn Beck, purveyor, Smith says, of “deranged conspiracies about Barack Obama before [Fox] pushed him out in 2011”. As for Johnson, he generated clickable copy. “He had a gift for traffic,” Smith writes. Johnson also had a plagiarism problem. In hindsight, he flashed warning signs. Apparently, Smith elected to ignore them.“I wasn’t really worried about whether Benny would fit in,” he admits. “I should have been.”Johnson was not another David Brooks or George Will. He was not “a bridge between BuzzFeed’s reflexive progressivism and the other half of the country”. Rather, Johnson crystallized something new, “a conservative movement more concerned about aesthetics than policy, motivated by nostalgia and culture more than by the overt subject matter of politics”.These days, owning the libs takes precedence over policy debate. Exhibit A: Marjorie Taylor Greene. Mien matters more than ever.Smith writes: “I sometimes wonder now if Benny was headed toward the kind of rightwing populism that Donald Trump came to embody.”Perhaps. Then again, “bullshit” and looks have always populated politics and the ranks of politicians. Smith’s words, again. After BuzzFeed, Johnson bounced to the National Review then on to the Daily Caller. He is now at Newsmax and Turning Point USA, the $39m non-profit led by Charlie Kirk.Elsewhere, Smith recalls an offer made by Disney in 2013, to purchase BuzzFeed for $450m with the “potential of earning $200m more”. Smith’s colleagues rejected the deal. The Disney chief, Bob Iger, exploded: “Fuck him, he loses, the company will never be worth what it would have been worth with us.”He was prescient.“By 2022, the internet had splintered,” Smith notes.America now faces a rerun of the last presidential election, Biden v Trump again.In his conclusion, Smith writes: “Those of us who work in media, politics and technology are largely concerned now with figuring out how to hold these failing institutions together or to build new ones that are resistant to the forces we helped unleash.”Rome wasn’t built in a day. Nor was the web. Sometimes, creative destruction is just destruction, slapped with a gauzy label.
      Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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      in US Politics

      Leaked abortion draft made us ‘targets of assassination’, Samuel Alito says

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      Samuel Alito said the decision he wrote removing the federal right to abortion made him and other US supreme court justices “targets of assassination” but denied claims he was responsible for its leak in draft form.“Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination,” Alito told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published on Friday.“It was rational for people to believe they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.”Alito wrote the ruling in Dobbs v Jackson, the Mississippi case that overturned Roe v Wade, which established the right to abortion in 1973.Alito’s draft ruling was leaked to Politico on 2 May last year, to uproar and protest nationwide. The final ruling was issued on 24 June.On 8 June, an armed man was arrested outside the home of Brett Kavanaugh, with Alito one of six conservatives on the nine-justice court. Charged with attempted murder of a United States judge, the man pleaded not guilty.The conservative chief justice, John Roberts, voted against overturning Roe, but the three rightwingers installed by Republicans under Donald Trump ensured it fell regardless.Progressives charged that a conservative, perhaps the hardline Alito, might have orchestrated the leak in an attempt to lock in a majority for such a momentous decision.Alito said: “That’s infuriating to me. Look, this made us targets of assassination. Would I do that to myself? Would the five of us have done that to ourselves? It’s quite implausible.”The leak was investigated by the supreme court marshal, without establishing a perpetrator.Saying the marshal “did a good job with the resources that were available”, Alito said he had “a pretty good idea who is responsible, but that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody”.Alito said the leak “was a part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft … from becoming the decision of the court. And that’s how it was used for those six weeks by people on the outside, as part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court.”He also said the leak “created an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust”. The justices “worked through it”, he said, “and last year we got our work done … but it was damaging”.Last November, after a bombshell New York Times report, Alito denied leaking information about a decision in a 2014 case about contraception and religious rights.His Wall Street Journal interview seemed bound to further anger Democrats and progressives. Justices regularly claim not to be politically motivated, but even with a Democrat in the White House the court has made other momentous conservative rulings, notably including a loosening of gun-control laws.Joe Biden’s administration has shied from calls for reform, including the idea justices should be added to establish balance or give liberals a majority, reflecting Democratic control of the White House and Senate.Alito told the Journal he did not “feel physically unsafe, because we now have a lot of protection”. He also said he was “driven around in basically a tank, and I’m not really supposed to go anyplace by myself without the tank and my members of the police force”.Complaining that criticism also stoked by corruption allegations against two more conservatives, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, were “new during my lifetime”, Alito said: “We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances.“And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us. The idea has always been that judges are not supposed to respond to criticisms, but if the courts are being unfairly attacked, the organised bar will come to their defense.”Alito said legal authorities had, “if anything … participated to some degree in these attacks”.He declined to comment on reporting by ProPublica about Thomas’s friendship with Harlan Crow, a Republican mega-donor who has bestowed gifts and purchases which Thomas largely did not disclose.But Alito did complain about how Kavanaugh was treated when allegations of sexual assault surfaced during his confirmation process.“After Justice Kavanaugh was accused of being a rapist … he made an impassioned speech, made an impassioned scene, and he was criticised because it was supposedly not judicious, not the proper behavior for a judge to speak in those terms.“I don’t know – if somebody calls you a rapist?”Accusations against Kavanaugh included attempted rape while a high school student. On Friday, the Guardian reported that new information showed serious omissions in a Senate investigation of the allegations, mounted when Republicans controlled the chamber.Polling shows that public trust in the supreme court has reached historic lows.“We’re being bombarded,” Alito complained, “and then those who are attacking us say: ‘Look how unpopular they are. Look how low their approval rating has sunk.’“Well, yeah, what do you expect when … day in and day out, ‘They’re illegitimate. They’re engaging in all sorts of unethical conduct. They’re doing this, they’re doing that’?”Such attacks, he said, “undermine confidence in the government [as] it’s one thing to say the court is wrong; it’s another thing to say it’s an illegitimate institution”.With some court-watchers, the interview landed heavily.Robert Maguire, research director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an independent watchdog, said: “There is no depth to the pity [justices] – and Alito in particular – feel for themselves when they face public criticism.” More

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      in Elections

      Mike Pence interviewed by grand jury investigating Capitol attack – live

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      From 2h agoHere’s more from the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell about Mike Pence’s interview with federal investigators, and why his testimony may be so important to any case against Donald Trump:Mike Pence testified before a federal grand jury on Thursday in Washington about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to a source familiar with the matter, a day after an appeals court rejected a last-ditch motion to block his appearance.The former vice-president’s testimony lasted for around seven hours and took place behind closed doors, meaning the details of what he told the prosecutors hearing evidence in the case remains uncertain.His appearance is a moment of constitutional consequence and potential legal peril for the former president. Pence is considered a major witness in the criminal investigation led by special counsel Jack Smith, since Trump pressured him to unlawfully reject electoral college votes for Joe Biden at the joint session of Congress, and was at the White House meeting with Republican lawmakers who discussed objections to Biden’s win.The Biden administration announced on Thursday a set of new initiatives to discourage immigrants from illegally crossing into the US via the US-Mexico border.The measures include harsher crackdowns on those who do come and new pathways that offer an alternative to the dangerous journey, the Associated Press reports.Such alternatives include setting up migration centers in other countries, increasing the amount of immigrants allowed in, and faster processing of migrants seeking asylum. Those not eligible for asylum who cross over will be penalized, AP further reports.The policies come as May 11 approaches, which will end the public health rule instituted amid the Covid-19 pandemic that allowed for many migrants to be quickly expelled.The Montana governor was lobbied by his non-binary child to reject several bills that would harm transgender people in the state, according to the Guardian’s Sam Levine.
      The son of the Republican governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte, met their father in his office to lobby him to reject several bills that would harm transgender people in the state, the Montana Free Press reported.
      David Gianforte told the paper they identify as non-binary and use he/they pronouns – the first time they disclosed their gender identity publicly. They told the outlet they felt an obligation to use their relationship with their father to stand up for LGBTQ+ people in the state.
      “There are a lot of important issues passing through the legislature right now,” they said in a statement. “For my own sake I’ve chosen to focus primarily on transgender rights, as that would significantly directly affect a number of my friends … I would like to make the argument that these bills are immoral, unjust, and frankly a violation of human rights.”
      Read the full article here.A Tennesee lawmaker who was previously outsted for calling for gun control after a Nashville mass shooting has spoken about Zephyr being silenced.In an interview with Democracy Now, Tennessee representative Justin Jones spoke with Zephyr about the need for continued solidarity.“An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us,” said Zephyr, after Jones said that several communities stood with Zephyr amid attempts to silence her.Earlier this week, Republicans in Montana barred the state’s sole transgender lawmaker, Democrat Zooey Zephyr, from the floor of the state House of Representatives.Their justification? That Zephyr’s interaction with protesters who were demonstrating against her earlier silencing by the House’s Republican majority amounted to “encouraging an insurrection.” The Associated Press reports that such claims have become increasingly common in recent months in state legislatures where Republicans rule. Case in point, the rhetoric used by GOP lawmakers to briefly expel two Democrats from the Tennessee state House of Representatives earlier this month.Here’s more from the AP:
      Silenced by her Republican colleagues, Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr looked up from the House floor to supporters in the gallery shouting “Let her speak!” and thrust her microphone into the air — amplifying the sentiment the Democratic transgender lawmaker was forbidden from expressing.
      While seven people were arrested for trespassing, the boisterous demonstration was free of violence or damage. Yet later that day, a group of Republican lawmakers described it in darker tones, saying Zephyr’s actions were responsible for “encouraging an insurrection.”
      It’s the third time in the last five weeks — and one of at least four times this year — that Republicans have attempted to compare disruptive but nonviolent protests at state capitols to insurrections.
      The tactic follows a pattern set over the past two years when the term has been misused to describe public demonstrations and even the 2020 election that put Democrat Joe Biden in the White House. It’s a move experts say dismisses legitimate speech and downplays the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump. Shortly after, the U.S. House voted to impeach him for “incitement of insurrection.”
      Ever since, many Republicans have attempted to turn the phrase on Democrats.
      “They want to ring alarm bells and they want to compare this to Jan. 6,” said Andy Nelson, the Democratic Party chair in Missoula County, which includes Zephyr’s district. “There’s absolutely no way you can compare what happened on Monday with the Jan. 6 insurrection. Violence occurred that day. No violence occurred in the gallery of the Montana House.”
      This week’s events in the Montana Legislature drew comparisons to a similar demonstration in Tennessee. Republican legislative leaders there used “insurrection” to describe a protest on the House floor by three Democratic lawmakers who were calling for gun control legislation in the aftermath of a Nashville school shooting that killed three students and three staff. Two of them chanted “Power to the people” through a megaphone and were expelled before local commissions reinstated them.
      The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports on the latest steps in Florida authorities’ march to tighten down on voting access, as the state’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis edges closer to announcing a presidential campaign:Florida Republicans are on the verge of passing new restrictions on groups that register voters, a move voting rights groups and experts say will make it harder for non-white Floridians to get on the rolls.The restrictions are part of a sweeping 96-page election bill the legislature is likely to send to Governor Ron DeSantis’s desk soon. The measure increases fines for third-party voter registration groups. It also shortens the amount of time the groups have to turn in any voter registration applications they collect from 14 days to 10. The bill makes it illegal for non-citizens and people convicted of certain felonies to “collect or handle” voter registration applications on behalf of third-party groups. Groups would also have to give each voter they register a receipt and be required to register themselves with the state ahead of each general election cycle. Under current law, they only have to register once and their registration remains effective indefinitely.Stephanie Kirchgaessner reports that a 2018 investigation that played a role in Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the supreme court was less thorough than it appeared. If you read one Guardian story today, make it this one:A 2018 Senate investigation that found there was “no evidence” to substantiate any of the claims of sexual assault against the US supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh contained serious omissions, according to new information obtained by the Guardian.The 28-page report was released by the Republican senator Chuck Grassley, the then chairman of the Senate judiciary committee. It prominently included an unfounded and unverified claim that one of Kavanaugh’s accusers – a fellow Yale graduate named Deborah Ramirez – was “likely” mistaken when she alleged that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a dormitory party because another Yale student was allegedly known for such acts.Here’s more from the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell about Mike Pence’s interview with federal investigators, and why his testimony may be so important to any case against Donald Trump:Mike Pence testified before a federal grand jury on Thursday in Washington about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to a source familiar with the matter, a day after an appeals court rejected a last-ditch motion to block his appearance.The former vice-president’s testimony lasted for around seven hours and took place behind closed doors, meaning the details of what he told the prosecutors hearing evidence in the case remains uncertain.His appearance is a moment of constitutional consequence and potential legal peril for the former president. Pence is considered a major witness in the criminal investigation led by special counsel Jack Smith, since Trump pressured him to unlawfully reject electoral college votes for Joe Biden at the joint session of Congress, and was at the White House meeting with Republican lawmakers who discussed objections to Biden’s win.Good morning, US politics blog readers. On Thursday, former vice-president Mike Pence appeared before the grand jury empaneled by special counsel Jack Smith to consider charges against Donald Trump over the January 6 insurrection. The possibility that Trump could face a federal indictment over the attack, as well as his involvement in plots to stop Joe Biden from taking office and the classified materials found at Mar-a-Lago, is a major unknown in the presidential race, particularly since polls show Trump as the most popular Republican candidate. There’s no saying when Smith could make his charging recommendation, but Pence’s testimony is a reminder that the investigation remains a real threat to the former president.Here’s what’s going on today:
      House Democratic leadership will hold their weekly press conference at 10.30am eastern time. Expect plenty of railing against the debt limit proposal Republicans passed earlier this week.
      Joe Biden is keeping it low key, presenting the Commander-in-Chief’s trophy to the Air Force Falcons, champions of last year’s Armed Forces Bowl, at 2.30pm, then heading to a Democratic fundraiser in the evening.
      Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat representing deep-red West Virginia, yesterday afternoon again called on Biden to negotiate with Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy on an agreement to raise the debt limit. The president has thus far refused to do so. More

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      in US Politics

      Michigan students sue after school bans ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ sweatshirts

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      Two students in Michigan have filed a lawsuit against their school district after they were banned from wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts.The slogan is widely understood as a coded euphemism for a profane curse towards Joe Biden and is popular with conservatives.The lawsuit, filed by the two middle-school students through their mother, accuses Michigan’s Tri County Area school district of “censoring the students’ peaceful, non-disruptive political expression in school”.According to the lawsuit, one of the brothers wore a “Let’s Go Brandon sweatshirt” to Tri County middle school last February. The sixth-grader was stopped in the hallway by the school’s assistant principal who asked that he remove the sweatshirt, saying that it was equivalent to “the F-word”.The boy, fearing further punishment, took off the sweatshirt, the lawsuit said.The boy then wore the sweatshirt again a few weeks later “to express his opposition to President Biden”. to which a teacher responded, “Take the sweatshirt off. I’ve told you before and won’t tell you again.”The lawsuit states that the slogan “conveys the same opposition to President Biden, sanitized to express the sentiment without using profanity or vulgarity”, adding that the sweatshirt “did not disrupt class, cause disturbance among students, or invade the rights of others”.A few months later, the boy’s older brother also wore the sweatshirt to the same school. The eighth-grader was removed from class and was asked to remove his sweatshirt, which he did.“Despite prohibiting ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ apparel, the school district permits students to wear apparel expressing other political and social messages, including but not limited to apparel expressing support for LGBTQ+ rights,” the lawsuit said.The school district has defended its decision to prohibit the slogan. Its attorney Kara T Rozin said: “The commonly known meaning of the slogan ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ is intended to ridicule the president with profanity. At least one of the students … has acknowledged knowing what this slogan means, and a simple Google search confirms the slogan means ‘Fuck Joe Biden’.”She added that although the school district “does not prohibit students from the right to express their political views or from wearing clothing with political slogans”, its student code prohibits “language or clothing containing language that is offensive, vulgar or profane”. More

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      in US Politics

      Ron DeSantis to meet UK ministers on tour to boost foreign policy credentials

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      Ron DeSantis is due to spend Friday in Britain on the last leg of a world tour aimed at enhancing his foreign policy credentials before an expected run for the Republican nomination.Formally, DeSantis will meet the foreign secretary, James Cleverly, and the business secretary, Kemi Badenoch, in his role as governor of Florida, the third most populous US state.Nigel Farage’s new rightwing Reform UK party is also trying to secure a meeting with DeSantis, Politico reported on Thursday.Despite being greeted by the prime ministers of Japan and South Korea on earlier legs of the trip, he won’t meet the British prime minster, Rishi Sunak – in part because it is not standard diplomatic protocol for a prime minister to meet a US governor, UK officials say.There is additionally an issue of logistics, with Sunak in Scotland on a pre-planned trip to the Conservatives’ conference there.DeSantis’s visit is not completely on a pretext. The UK regularly ranks as Florida’s top business partner, and there are more than 600 British businesses in the state, employing more than 50,000 Floridians. However, the timing of DeSantis’s tour, which has also included Japan, South Korea and Israel, has been dictated by the brewing primary contest with Donald Trump. It is a race in which he is trailing badly, though as he pointed out on the Japanese leg of the trip, the numbers could change when he formally declares his bid.The fact he has not officially entered the race has not stopped attacks from the Trump camp, who view him as the only serious challenger. While Trump boasts of his personal rapport with some of the world’s leaders, suggesting it gives him a unique ability to resolve big conflicts around the world, DeSantis’s previous experience abroad is limited to his deployment as a legal adviser to a Navy Seal team in Iraq, and some limited travel as Florida governor. This trip, and the accompanying footage of handshaking with foreign officials, will provide a rebuttal to claims he is too inexperienced in the ways of the world to be president.“It’s an irony that people like him who make the case that America should focus more on itself, also sees it as indispensable to go around and present themselves in a dog and pony show to the world,” Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said.Trump is due to be in the UK next week for a visit to his golf course in Scotland.Such tours are a rite of passage for presidential candidates. In 2008, Barack Obama, who also had a foreign policy experience deficit, visited Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Germany, France and the UK. On the last three stops, Obama met Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown. But, unlike DeSantis, he had already secured the nomination at that point.The inclusion of Tokyo and Seoul in DeSantis’s tour is telling, a reflection of how the centre of US foreign policy has shifted.“I think it really does indicate a growing focus in US foreign policy generally, but even in the public consciousness, on the Indo-Pacific, on competition with China,” Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center thinktank, said. “I think the fact that he chose to go there really does suggest that’s the direction foreign policy is moving.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIsrael has long been a must-do for US presidential hopefuls on tour, though now that is more true of Republicans, who are generally in lockstep with Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government, than Democrats. It has been called the “new Iowa” for Republican hopefuls – a primary for the Jewish and evangelical vote.In his speech at the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem on Thursday, DeSantis repeated a story about how he had used water from the Sea of Galilee to baptise his children. He talked about “Judeo-Christian values” binding the two countries. The only mention of the world “Palestinian” was in a line about terrorism.DeSantis disowned the Biden administration’s criticism of Netanyahu’s efforts to curb the independence of the judiciary, saying: “It shouldn’t be for us to butt in to these important issues”, but there was nothing of substance separating his position from Trump’s.The one area of policy difference with the Republican frontrunner is over Ukraine. DeSantis’s support for a ceasefire and for less US involvement sparked a backlash from the more hawkish end of the Republican party, and Cleverly can be expected to echo those misgivings. DeSantis has tried to hedge his position, potentially opening space between his stance and Trump’s pro-Moscow inclinations.DeSantis’s world tour has come at an awkward time, as support among congressional Republicans has slid towards Trump in his absence, but the fact that he felt he had to leave the US at all, suggests that the maxim foreign policy does not matter in US presidential elections is not always true.“Differences over foreign policy can matter in the team-building phase of the campaign,” Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at Tufts University, said. “This seems like a box-checking exercise and actually a horribly timed one from DeSantis’s perspective, because the last thing you want to do, when your campaign is faltering, is go overseas.” More