Disney’s lawsuit over his attempt to seize its self-governing powers is a political stunt with no legal merit, the increasingly embattled hard-right Florida governor Ron DeSantis, told reporters on Thursday.
“I don’t think the suit has merit,” the likely Republican White House hopeful said, adding: “The days of putting one company on a pedestal with no accountability are over in the state of Florida.”
DeSantis was speaking in Jerusalem, midway through an international tour officially a trade mission for his state but widely seen as an attempt to burnish his image ahead of an expected presidential run.
Disney sued on Wednesday, shortly after a board DeSantis appointed voted to overturn covenants the entertainment giant put in place to counter the governor’s power-grab over the Disney World resort near Orlando.
The issue came to a head after Disney opposed a so-called “don’t say gay” law, concerning the teaching of gender and LGBTQ+ issues in state schools.
In an ironic twist, DeSantis spoke on Thursday at Jerusalem’s Museum of Tolerance.
Disney, he said, “had no accountability, no transparency, none of that. And that arrangement was not good for the state of Florida. We did not think that that should continue. So we now brought accountability. And so the idea that somehow being pro-business means giving companies their own governments, that is not what a free market is all about last I checked.”
Disney, he added, was “upset because they’re having to live by the same rules as everybody else. They don’t want to pay the same taxes as everybody else and they want to be able to control things without proper oversight, whereas every other Floridian has to have this type of oversight, all Florida businesses.
“So it’s a little bit much to be complaining about that.”
DeSantis, however, faces growing complaints from fellow Republicans, for seeking to force a private company to conform to his political views.
Donald Trump, who enjoys big leads in Republican polling, has called the Disney fight a political stunt.
Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who has declared her presidential candidacy, tweeted: “Hey Disney, my home state will happily accept your 70,000+ jobs if you want to leave Florida.”
South Carolina, Haley added, was “not woke, but we’re not sanctimonious about it either”.
DeSantis has declared a “war on woke”, even evoking Winston Churchill’s “fight them on the beaches” speech from the darkest days of the second world war. Trump has nicknamed him “Ron DeSanctimonious”.
In Jerusalem, DeSantis said the Florida legislature, where Republicans have a super-majority, “could abolish every special district if they want to”.
“The people of Florida, they understood that this was an issue. You want one company to have their own fiefdom or do you want everyone to live under the same laws? And not only did they did they re-elect me in that area where Disney is, we did better than any Republican has done in quite some time.”
Notwithstanding a recent high-profile desertion by a major donor concerned by DeSantis’s anti-LGBTQ+ policies, DeSantis also parroted a common Republican talking point when he claimed “a lot of Floridians were upset, particularly parents, that [Disney] really went so headstrong into trying to get the sexualization of the curriculum in the elementary schools”.
Disney alleges “a targeted campaign of government retaliation”, adding: “At the governor’s bidding, the state’s oversight board has purported to ‘void’ publicly noticed and duly agreed development contracts, which laid the foundation for billions of Disney’s investment dollars and thousands of jobs.
“The governor and his allies have made clear they do not care and will not stop.”
