“Ron’s strength as a politician is that he doesn’t give a fuck,” a Republican consultant said, of the Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. “Ron’s weakness as a politician is that he doesn’t give a fuck.”
Nearly everyone I talked to who knew DeSantis commented on his affect: his lack of curiosity about others, his indifferent table manners, his aversion to the political rituals of dispensing handshakes and questions about the kids. One former associate told me that his demeanor stems from a conviction that others have advantages that were denied to him. “The anger comes more easily to him because he has a chip on his shoulder,” she said. “He is a serious guy. Driven.
DeSantis told me that he’d brought his family to Dunedin from Jacksonville, where Ron was born, in 1978. He had a job with Nielsen, the television-ratings company. For years, he traversed neighborhoods, asking people if they would agree to have a Nielsen box attached to their television. “It’s incredible how many people would just let me into their houses, even though they didn’t know me,” he said. “I’d be there until eight o’clock installing the thing.
At Yale, DeSantis majored in history and played on the baseball team, in the outfield. In the Yale tradition, the team never had a winning season while DeSantis was there. In his senior year, he was among the best hitters, batting .336, and was elected captain. His former teammates’ recollections are sharply divided, but nearly everyone I spoke with remembered him as singularly focussed, with little time for parties or goofing off; he worked several jobs to help pay his tuition.
DeSantis campaigned on smaller government and lower taxes, arguing to overturn Obamacare and eliminate entire federal agencies. “My mission was largely to stop Barack Obama,” he told a crowd later. As the campaign got under way, DeSantis published a book titled “Dreams from Our Founding Fathers”—a swipe at the President’s memoir.
DeSantis’s colleagues say that he was less interested in drafting legislation than in positioning himself for higher office. In his first term, he started courting leading conservative donors, including the Koch family and Sheldon Adelson, and money began to flow. “It’s not easy getting those meetings,” Jolly told me. “But Ron did it, and he convinced them that he was one of their friends.”
For much of the campaign, DeSantis trailed Putnam. But, in 2017, he started appearing regularly on Fox News, railing against the investigation of Russia’s role in helping Trump get elected. On Laura Ingraham’s show, he said that the special counsel Robert Mueller’s efforts had criminalized ordinary political behavior. “This is actually taking a bias and basically saying you’re gonna use the machinery of government to prevent the American people from making a choice,” he said.
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