The message was expected, the forms were startling. On the night of Thursday Swedish time, Harvard lawyer, Iraq veteran, Florida governor and Ronald Dion “Ron” DeSantis, 44, launched his campaign for the presidency in the United States. First, a classic campaign video was posted on Twitter. It highlighted the success at home in Florida.
– We chose facts over fear, education over indoctrination, law and order over riot and tumult, said Ron DeSantis, to the tunes of doom-laden music, with the American flag as background.
Then he would converse with tech billionaire Elon Musk on Twitter. Then the broadcast was delayed by extensive technical problems. When the conversation started, it became a bit like listening to a radio recording from the 1940s, with a lot of crackling, only sound, no image, rather long-winded ideological expositions, and not a single critical question.
It is a well-known fact that Ron DeSanti’s political talent is expressed in the ability to get things done, rather than personal charm.
– I don’t care about fanfare, he explained in the conversation on Twitter.
It was probably wise, because there were no bells and whistles for this launch. From the Trump camp came an email with 13 newspaper headlines, taken from everything from Breitbart News to the New York Times. Everyone revolved around the technical breakdown – the crash, the meltdown, the setback.
But the one who listened on the governor’s long explanations, could hear the voice of the new right.
Photo: Pontus Höök
DeSantis is not a Trump copy, but a deeply ideological politician. As a member of Congress, he co-founded the group Freedom Caucus, which caused great controversy over the presidential election last winter.
His culture war at home has already made a big impression on American politics. He has shown conservative politicians across the United States how to go on the offensive. He has said that Florida is the place where the “woke” – that is, everything that he perceives as the politically correct ideas of the left and the elite – comes to die.
The “Stop the woke” law that was hammered out in March this year seeks to stop teaching about structural racism and sexism. The so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law from last year has stopped conversations in the classroom about sexuality and gender identity.
DeSantis has eased up gun laws, tightened abortion restrictions, overhauled college governance, and airlifted migrants to the liberal East Coast. The other day he signed a law that prohibits minors from committing sex-affirming treatment.
This weekend, the civil rights organization NAACP came out and warned black Americans against visiting Florida. LGBTQ activists and migrant organizations have expressed similar concerns, following DeSanti’s progress with all of the new laws.
Photo: Pontus Höök
At the same time, the governor has caught up in a bitter feud with Disney, as the group has criticized Florida’s LGBT policy.
He himself believes that he has fought for freedom, against the establishment, ever since the pandemic. In the conversation on Twitter, he praised Elon Musk’s entrance as owner of social media.
– The truth was repeatedly censored. Now that Twitter is in the hands of a free-speech fighter, that won’t happen again, DeSantis said.
His candidacy could present decidedly centrist Republicans with a difficult choice. The governor from Florida is trailing Donald Trump in the polls, but he is still considered the main rival internally.
The Miami Herald newspaper recently interviewed several high-profile Trump critics. They think DeSantis is far to the right, but doubt that he wants to leave NATO or fire a large part of the bureaucrats in Washington. He is not perceived as an existential threat to the country and the party, in the same way as Donald Trump.
Photo: Pontus Höök
The Republican strategist Sarah Longwell put millions of dollars into fighting Trump in the 2020 election. She tells the paper she would support DeSantis in a primary. But she’d rather get behind Joe Biden in the general election — because she thinks the Florida governor resembles Hungary’s authoritarian leader Victor Orbán with his LGBT hostility.
However, Sarah Longwell believes that DeSantis would be more of a centrist politician, if he were allowed to step into the White House. She highlights DeSanti’s statements about the war in Ukraine earlier this spring. She does not agree at all that what is going on in Europe can be dismissed as a “territorial dispute”. But she notes that the Florida governor backed away from the move when he faced criticism.
Trump would never have done that, she notes.
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