MAGA Disruptor or Neocon Plant? Who is Ron DeSantis?

Florida Governor Ron De Santis stomped his Democratic opponent Charlie Crist on November 8, picking up a second term with over 59 percent of the vote and painting the map of Florida red by winning 62 of the state’s 67 counties.

The incumbent’s victory in the Sunshine State – which has voted Republican more often than not since the late 1990s, but has swung wildly in presidential elections, may have been made possible in part thanks to his state’s efforts to crack down on vote rigging, including through the creation of an "Office of Election Crimes and Security."

Before joining the race for governor in 2018, DeSantis was a run-of-the-mill Republican congressman. A Yale graduate and member of the school’s “St. Elmo Society” (the same secret society former George W. Bush attorney general and Patriot Act architect John Ashcroft is a part of), DeSantis served as an officer in the US Navy in the 2000s, working at the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, where the US has held and in many cases tortured terror suspects detained without trial. He deployed in Iraq as a legal aide to the Navy SEALs between 2007 and 2008. DeSantis began his congressional career in 2013.

During his tenure in the House, DeSantis was assigned to the committees on foreign affairs, the judiciary, oversight and reform, and the subcommittee on national security, where he served as chairman. Before Trump descended down the escalator of his New York skyscraper in 2015 and proceeded to shake up the political landscape inside the GOP, DeSantis stuck to conventional, off-the-rack Republican positions on issues like climate change, healthcare, and the Second Amendment. His only notable piece of legislation was the "Faithful Execution of the Law Act of 2014," a failed bill designed to prevent the president from being able to ignore Congress’ will by forcing the Department of Justice to report to lawmakers on any cases of federal agencies failing to enforce laws and regulations.

In the 2016 election, DeSantis actually endorsed Marco Rubio over Trump in the primaries, switching allegiance only well after it became clear that Trump would win the nomination.

After Trump entered the Oval Office in January 2017, DeSantis transformed himself into a Trump Republican, with the president endorsing his 2018 gubernatorial campaign, giving him a massive boost in the primaries. During the election, DeSantis’ campaign copied Trump’s "Make America Great Again" and "Build the Wall" slogans, helping him to coast to victory.

DeSantis’ first opportunity to come into his own and draw national attention for himself came in 2020 with the coronavirus crisis. After spending a brief period of fastidiously following federal guidelines on lockdowns, masks, and other health precautions, the Florida governor gradually began to shift his state’s approach to the pandemic, asking uncomfortable questions about the Centers for Disease Control’s recommendations and, after consulting with medical experts challenging the dominant narrative, lifting lockdowns, restrictions on businesses, and mask mandates statewide.

In 2021 and again in 2022, DeSantis garnered fresh attention and acclaim from supporters by rejecting vaccine mandates, as well as the mandatory vaccination of children.

Florida’s live-free-or-die approach to the virus, made possible by DeSantis, has resulted in a running battle between state and federal medical officials, with State Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo’s recent statement advising that young men not be vaccinated or revaccinated using mRNA vaccines due to myocarditis concerns sparking an outcry from the CDC and the White House.

After Biden entered the Oval Office, scrapped nearly a dozen hardline Trump-era immigration directives, and sparked a crisis at America’s southern border, DeSantis proved his mettle for garnering national attention, demonstrating that he was not a political one-trick pony.

In September, DeSantis took a page out of Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s playbook of busing migrants to Democratic Party strongholds in northern cities by chartering a pair of planes to send about 50 migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts inhabited primarily by yuppie liberals, most of them Democratic voters. The stunt was a spectacular success, sparking predictable outrage from Biden and pro-Democratic Party media, with the Treasury opening a probe into the flights, and the migrants encouraged to file lawsuits against Florida. Republicans across the country enjoyed a healthy helping of liberal tears, and DeSantis promised to continued to fly additional migrants north if his state’s immigration concerns weren’t addressed.

Amid his status as a rising star among Republicans and potential challenger to Trump for the Republican nomination in 2024, DeSantis has not matched the former president on one issue important to many observers of American politics: foreign policy.

Unlike Trump, who slammed the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a “big fat mistake,” and initiated a drawdown of American troops from the country in 2020 under pressure from Baghdad and Iran, DeSantis has refused to publicly disown the neocons’ biggest foreign policy blunder of the early 21st century. In August 2021, after Biden completed the pullout of American forces from Afghanistan bequeathed to him by Trump in a 2020 deal with the Taliban*, DeSantis joined hawkish Republicans like Nikki Haley and Ted Cruz in slamming the pullout, characterizing it as Biden’s “9/11 moment.”

DeSantis has taken neocon stances on other global hotspots too, from Latin America and Iran to the ongoing security crisis in Ukraine. Last month, DeSantis praised SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk for spending tens of millions of dollars a month to keep the Starlink satellite service in Ukraine up and running. DeSantis, coincidentally, is Musk’s favorite for president in 2024.

As other MAGA Republicans have slammed Biden, Democrats, and neocon members of their own party for sending tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine while ignoring domestic issues, DeSantis has remained curiously silent on the matter, notwithstanding his national stature as Trump’s potential replacement.

With the dust settling in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, the anti-Trump wing of the Republican Party has gone full knives-out against the former president, blaming him for the promised "red wave’s" failure to materialize.

A day before the vote, MAGA Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene openly warned DeSantis not to challenge Trump in 2024, urging him to stay on as governor and not “abandon” Florida. “If anyone steps into the political ring and tries to challenge President Trump as far as being the Republican nominee for 2024, we feel like it’s political suicide. This is [Trump’s] party, this is his race to run,” she said.

Trump himself tore into DeSantis on Thursday, accusing him of “playing games” by not openly ruling out any 2024 plans. “Well, in terms of loyalty and class, that’s really not the right answer,” Trump said, adding that DeSantis was only an “average governor” and boasting that the politician was “politically dead” before coming to him “in desperate shape in 2017,” begging for endorsement.

Trump has already prepared an epithet for DeSantis - “Ron DeSanctimonious,” adding to the toxic stew of names he used successfully in 2016 to defeat “Low Energy Jeb” Bush, “Sleepy Ben Carson,” “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, “Little Marco” Rubio, and ultimately, “Crooked Hillary” Clinton.

Two years from 2024, whether “Ron DeSanctimonious” proves as successful a moniker as “Crooked Hillary,” or flops like “Sleepy Joe” is anyone’s guess.