Our reckless, feckless former Congressman from St. Johns County, Boy Governor RONALD DION DeSANTIS, is a laughingstock as a result of his FDEP's plans to run amuck with development in eight state parks, including our beloved Anastasia State Park. From Florida Times-Union:
With national ambitions extinguished, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is adrift | Commentary
Nate MonroeFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis' first act in office was a surprisingly moderate one: He pardoned the Groveland Four, he was bullish on environmental spending and talked tough about Big Sugar, and he even seemed a bit humbled by his narrow 2018 win over Democrat Andrew Gillum, whom he addressed on election night with now-unrecognizable good sport. After an excruciating run under the bionic Rick Scott, Florida's new governor sounded vaguely human.
His pandemic act was a darker phase that shattered those earlier hints of moderation: Facing a complex problem with no easy solutions, beset by media coverage he considered grossly unfair, and nursing a longtime suspicion of outsiders, DeSantis' small circle became even smaller. He ousted a respected set of advisers and replaced them with cranks, conspiracy theorists and sycophants. They privately flattered him and publicly fawned over him and kept him sated with a buffet line of grievances against an ever-growing list of his perceived enemies — the media, academia, the Democrats, cruise lines, Disney, social media companies and, eventually, even Donald J. Trump, the man who could credibly claim to have made DeSantis a national figure in the first place. It was during this long adolescence of his governorship that DeSantis got a taste for national office and felt the high of political performance. The pandemic became his origin story.
DeSantis' third act saw those presidential ambitions predictably actualized and then spectacularly smashed. The costs of his folly for Florida were enormous: DeSantis devoted nearly entire legislative sessions — those precious 60 days each year during which Florida's part-time lawmakers set about policymaking for the nation's third-largest state — to noxious culture-war posturing. Presidential Candidate DeSantis, buoyed by an easy re-election campaign, his small coterie of crackpots still whispering in his ear, became his cruelest, most unrelatable self.
Trump pulverized DeSantis. Instead of emerging from this third act as a triumphant national figure, DeSantis limped out as a greatly diminished one. Trump's campaign and network of allies helped turned Florida's governor into a punchline: pudding fingers, meatball, and do you think he wears lifts? DeSantis provided them plenty of ammunition: High on his own supply, DeSantis badly misjudged his fluency in retail politics and, most crucially, his ability to navigate basic human interactions — which proved to be ... subnormal. Trump glided right past DeSantis' culture-war posturing and burned him over Florida's very real and serious problems, like the state's collapsed property insurance market.
By the end, the machismo-obsessed branding DeSantis' brain trust concocted felt as if it had been almost deliberately and precisely calculated to maximize a sense of irony to trail the emasculated governor like a shadow during the frigid final days of his Iowa crusade.
We are now in the fourth and final act of DeSantis' tenure as Florida governor.
Federal courts have put a stop to some of his signature culture war initiatives. DeSantis has begun to lose his once-iron grip on the Florida Legislature. Trump's selection of U.S. Sen. JD Vance as his running mate has foreclosed any easy or intuitive pathway DeSantis might have had in the future to present himself as the scion of Trump's fevered far-right movement. And what must be most wounding of all: There is a palpable sense people in Florida are beginning to look past DeSantis and on to the next governor's race.
Sure, DeSantis made his pilgrimage to Milwaukee to atone for his sins and pledge fealty, but there was no absolution awaiting the prodigal son, no unconditional love forthcoming from MAGA's jealous god. Vance was the ultimate DeSantis snub, an unmistakable sign Trump will remember DeSantis' treachery for the rest of his days. Vance and DeSantis, born to modest means and products of elite academia, aren't so different, save for Vance's relative youth; he even aped DeSantis' original calling card — weirdness. Trump knew exactly how to torment his little quisling in the governor's mansion.
These days, with no golden ring to chase, DeSantis seems unfocused, languid, adrift — searching for some sort of meaning. His news conferences have become even more ponderous than usual. In one recent appearance, DeSantis puzzled over how much weed is in a joint. "I think it’s up to like, what, 40 joints, is that the 3 ounces would be 40? More than that, 80 joints. Something like that," DeSantis told a group of sheriffs.
The bulk of his energy seems to be focused on opposing widely popular constitutional amendments that will be on the November ballot protecting abortion access and permitting recreational marijuana. Florida requires 60 percent approval for such proposals to become law, which is a high bar, but it's telling that DeSantis' already vocal opposition has made little apparent difference in support for either initiative.
In the presidential race, which he'd desperately hoped to be a part of, DeSantis has been reduced to the role of color commentator — the washed-up college quarterback who never went pro. "Is it possible to completely manufacture a cultural phenomenon by taking a vapid, leftist San Francisco Democrat and turning her into something that she’s not through nonstop gaslighting?," DeSantis, or more likely someone on DeSantis' behalf, tweeted this week.
DeSantis would know a bit about this: His since-aborted presidential campaign briefly benefitted from a kind of mirror-image effort by a chunk of conservative media, which attached a mythology to him, rooted in his pandemic-era governance, that never quite matched reality. That puffed-up image of DeSantis as a populist, witty warrior deflated the moment he met an Iowan face to face.
Trump did to Florida what he tends to do to those around him: He didn't become Floridian so much as he made Florida more like him. Mar-a-Lago, and not Tallahassee, is the center of right-wing power here, and it's probable that no matter what happens in November, it will be Trump and not DeSantis who looms largest over Florida's 2026 governor's race, whose endorsement will be the most coveted and the most likely to elevate its recipient. DeSantis faces the real prospect of becoming an afterthought in his own backyard.
That would be a fitting anti-climax for Florida's B-list governor.
Nate Monroe is a Florida columnist for the USA Today Network. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU. Email him at nmonroe@gannett.com.
2 comments:
He participated in the culture war game.. which benefits nobody at the end of the day. That's what all these idiots are gonna find out. You played a dishonest game to the detriment of the nation for your own profit.. and you paid a price instead. You ask for enemies.. you're gonna get em. Anything but cooperate is how these stupid people do business.
You relatively poor? Vote Republican to stay poor. You middle class? God only knows what might happen to you. It's a coin flip. One things for sure though..a vote for a Republican is a vote for the upper classes because they're the only people they represent. Money doesn't trickle down. That's a myth.
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