Political journalists and pundits spent much of Wednesday obsessing over the gimmicky way that the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, was announcing his candidacy for presidency – in an audio chit-chat on Twitter Spaces, in the company of the billionaire Elon Musk and of David Sacks, the South African-born venture capitalist and Republican donor who recently opined that continued military support for Ukraine could lead to “woke war III”.
Media speculation raged about DeSantis ditching an in-person event in his Tampa-area home town, and about how much attention he would get on Fox News, which keeps falling in and out of love with the wannabe Trump slayer.
Granted, the Twitter decision is fascinating in its way, since it signals that DeSantis is all in with the rightwing money guys. (The clear message to other rich Republicans: you can desert Trump and we’ll still have your back on tax policy, wages and the like. It’s the digital-age equivalent of a bumper sticker for your luxury car: Safe With DeSantis.)
The rollout was plagued with embarrassing glitches, no big surprise given Twitter’s general meltdown under Musk’s ownership.
But the far more important question is what would a DeSantis presidency – however unlikely it seems right now – mean to the United States and the world? Is the 44-year-old merely a younger and less impulsive Trump, or does he offer his own special set of worries for those who care about democracy, fairness and good government?
For the answer, just consider what the two-term governor has wrought in his home state and in his early forays into world affairs.
One clue came this very week as a Florida school district confirmed that – after only a single complaint from a parent – a school had decided to remove from the elementary-school area of its library The Hill We Climb, by the young Black poet Amanda Gorman, whose gorgeous recitation of it stole the show at Biden’s 2021 inauguration.
Presumably, DeSantis had nothing to do with that particular decision but his tireless campaign against supposed wokeness (read: egalitarian portrayals or treatment of Black, gay and transgender people) has freed a torrent of censorship. (One school district looked askance at both Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, proving that Florida’s book banners have a discerning eye for great literature – and want no part of it.)
On women’s reproductive rights, DeSantis signed into law a bill to ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, before many women even know they are pregnant. He proudly signed bills that ban gender-affirming care for minors, go after drag shows, restrict the discussion of personal pronouns in schools and force individuals to use particular bathrooms. As the Associated Press bluntly wrote, he puts forth a narrative that experts in the nation’s major medical associations say is false, such as the idea that children are routinely being “mutilated”.
And of course, he has pulled attention-getting and destructive stunts like flying planeloads of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts and feuding with Disney, a major employer and tourist draw. And on the global front, he infamously called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “territorial dispute”, a judgment he was forced to walk back when it didn’t play well within the Republican party.
What gets less media focus, though, is that while making sure that his home state is “where woke goes to die”, DeSantis has also made Florida a place that, as the journalist and author William Kleinknecht reported, “falls short in almost any measure that matters to the lives of its citizens”.
Florida is at the bottom of state rankings for healthcare, school funding and long-term elder care; it’s where teachers’ salaries are among the lowest in the nation, as are unemployment benefits, and where efforts to raise the low minimum wage drew the governor’s active opposition.
Then there’s the state’s regressive tax structure, which makes it clear why the rich are flocking his way.
“Florida is the ideal haven for privileged Americans who don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes,” Kleinknecht wrote, with no income tax for individuals and a rock-bottom corporate tax rate. With the tax burden in Florida falling disproportionately on the poor and middle class (because the state’s tax revenue comes mostly from sales and excise taxes), the state ranks worse than comparable northern states in diabetes, cancer deaths, teen birth rates and infant mortality.
What this means is that beneath the flashy distraction of the governor’s endless and often cruel culture wars is an appalling reality of policies that fail to serve the vast majority of Florida’s citizens: the non-rich.
As Florida goes, so goes the nation? If Americans elect Ron DeSantis – and let’s face it, stranger things have happened – we might be unlucky enough to find out.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
