American politician Ron DeSantis has been considered Donald Trump’s most formidable opponent for months in the Republican party primaries for the presidential candidacy. In November, he was confirmed governor of Florida by nearly 20 points ahead of the Democratic candidate, the largest margin recorded in the state in the last 40 years. Nationally, Trump-backed candidates underperformed nationally in that election, raising many questions about the former president’s political future and his ability to continue to attract broad support. Much attention from important financiers of the party, as well as the most influential right-wing media, Fox News inclusive, they moved on to 44-year-old DeSantis.
A few months after the primary, polls show a clear Trump advantage. DeSantis is second: he is more than 30 percentage points away, but it must be considered that until Wednesday he had not even officially announced that he wanted to run. In any case, Trump has long considered DeSantis a threat, as confirmed by the repeated attacks that he has reserved with increasing frequency in recent months.
The two candidates for the nomination have been close in the past: DeSantis was a supporter of the former president during the last years of his term in Congress (2013-2018), while Trump was instrumental in DeSantis’s first election as governor in Florida. In the governor’s re-election campaign, which ended last November, things had changed. Trump had already distanced himself in view of the 2024 presidential elections and the two had never participated in the same electoral events.
DeSantis was first elected to Congress in 2012, just over ten years ago: since then he has always maintained rather radical political positions. In 2015 he was among the nine founders of the Freedom Caucus parliamentary group, which later became the expression of the Republican far right.
Ron DeSantis on one of the typical boats of the Everglades region, Florida (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee, File)
As governor he almost completely embraced Trump’s ideas and policies, for example he was a supporter of building a wall with Mexico. Last September, he was among the governors who flew immigrants to Democratic-ruled states. Under his tenure, the rights of gun owners (who own one can now carry one without the need for a license) and crimes that carry the death penalty have increased, for which a unanimous jury verdict is no longer required (an 8 to 4 majority is sufficient).
He limited the access to vote of some minorities, increasing the necessary documents, and making impossible to vote in the midterm elections for nearly a million people released from prison. He signed the ban on abortion in Florida after 6 weeks of gestation, one of the most restrictive laws in the country on the subject: the law has not yet formally entered into force pending a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court. He has promoted a law on “pronouns” that prevents students and school staff from requesting to be called by pronouns other than those relating to their biological sex, which he called an “immutable trait”.
He pushed through a law informally called “Don’t say gay,” which among other things prohibits talking about sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. Disney’s criticisms of the law have opened a long dispute between the Florida government and the company, which employs over 70,000 employees in the state, not counting related industries.
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In the dispute with Disney, DeSantis wanted to continue his image as a “strong man” and opponent of the so-called “woke” ideology, a word that defined the attitude of those who were particularly attentive and committed to social injustices but who today have a often derogatory and sarcastic connotation. He dismantled many state inclusion and minority protection programs, defunding them. This role as an opponent of the demands of the Democratic party, of the media considered “leftist” and in general of the civil rights movements has earned him a lot of support in the camp of the more radical conservatives.
In the same way, his popularity has grown due to an almost denial management of the Covid emergency: DeSantis initially imposed a lockdown in Florida, but then he was among the first governors to eliminate the restrictions, opening schools, removing the obligation to wear masks and to present vaccination certificates to work. As the months passed he moved more and more positions no vaxhosting some members of the movement in joint press conferences and promoting vaccine skeptic doctors, such as Joseph Ladapo, to the most important roles in state health.
His foreign policy positions are not very clear: he has repeatedly expressed himself harshly towards China and Iran, while his condemnation of the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s Russia has never been particularly convinced or incisive .
His political priorities are therefore quite overlapping with those of Trump, of whom he is considered a possible successor, much younger and with fewer verbal and behavioral excesses. THE American media report anyway that DeSantis has a very complex and particularly “arrogant” character and that his closest collaborators often change due to the complicated environment in which they work.
Unlike Trump, DeSantis comes from middle-class America: his mother worked as a nurse, his father installed televisions equipped with tools to evaluate the audience, the equivalent of our Auditel. DeSantis’s great-grandparents were all from Southern Italy, who emigrated to Pennsylvania and Ohio at the turn of the century: DeSantis studied history at Yale, (where he was also captain of the baseball team) and then attended Harvard law school.
After university he signed for the US Navy, for which he was a legal officer, first in the detention base in Guantanamo (Cuba) then also in Iraq, as a consultant.
Ron DeSantis, wife Casey and children Mason, Madison and Mamie (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)
DeSantis is a Catholic and married his wife, Casey Black, in 2009. She was a well-known television journalist in Florida and was instrumental in his early political career. Even today, Black is considered a “de facto” member of her political staff, with broad powers. The couple has three children, who also starred in a famous spot for governor election: De Santis asked a daughter to build an anti-immigrant wall with buildings and another to repeat the phrase from a Trump television program: “You are fired”.
In these years as governor he has built a radical image appreciated by conservative voters, but also a positive reputation among industrialists and businessmen: with a liberal approach, limiting taxes to a minimum and cutting public spending a lot, he has kept the state accounts in surplus and favored the wealthier classes. Also for this reason he has already obtained the support not only of Elon Musk (he announced his candidacy in a live Twitter which had many technical problems), but also of some very influential entrepreneurs such as Ken Griffin, founder of a large investment fund investment, or Stephen Ross, real estate mogul.