In the only face-to-face they had during the campaign for the elections on Tuesday, the former governor of Florida and candidate for the same position, Charlie Crist, asked the current occupant of the position and candidate for re-election, Ron DeSantis, if in case of leaving elected would commit to fulfilling the four-year mandate; In other words, if he would not abandon the game in the middle of the game to, in 2024, run for president. The Republican seemed not to know what to answer, and the other took advantage of that silence to highlight his lack of response. But DeSantis fired back soon. And in what way Without actually answering the question, he said: “I know that Charlie is interested in talking about 2024, just like Joe Biden. But I just want to make one thing clear: the only old donkey I want to put to pasture is Charlie Crist.”
This is how the 44-year-old ultra-conservative, married with three children, spends them, who two weeks after that debate was re-elected governor of the Sunshine State with a difference of almost twenty points over his contender (59.4% to 40%). At the victory celebration party, his supporters did not sing “Two more years! Two more years!” So Crist would not be misled about the secret intentions of his rude and lacking adversary. He, however, would continue all that night and in the following days without confirming or denying his presidential ambitions, which Donald Trump, one day his mentor, already takes for granted and considers disloyalty to him.
DeSantis is the same as the former president in the ideological and different in the rest; cold and military sobriety
When he ran for governor for the first time, after resigning his seat in the House of Representatives in 2018, the Tampa Bay Times interviewed one of his former teachers at his elementary school in the city of Dunedin, Dee Centinaro: “He was brilliant. He always did his job. And today he has a promising future, including more important things than being governor ”.
The young Ronald Dion DeSantis, of Italian descent, the son of a nurse and a television audience meter installer, served as a diligent student and great baseball player. His prowess as a pitcher and hitter actually helped him get into Yale University, where he studied history and political science while serving as team captain for that sport. He then went on to Harvard, where he earned his J.D. and then specialized in military law at the US Naval College of Justice.
DeSantis practiced law at Guantanamo Bay (2006) and Fallujah, Iraq (2007), advising soldiers on the treatment of prisoners in both hot spots. Upon his return home in 2008, he acted as an adviser to active duty military lawyers in the southeast of the country, especially on how to proceed with “sensitive” cases, such as those of soldiers accused of rape. Later, after finishing writing the book Dreams of Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama, in 2012 he jumped into politics, via a run for a congressional seat, which he won.
As a parliamentarian, he cultivated an image of military austerity. In his environment, they say that he used to sleep in the office and refused privileges for medical care and pension. Even today, his declared net worth amounts to just over $300,000. However, his ability to raise campaign funds knows no limits. In the last one, he raised 200 million dollars.
The man who is angering Trump today, who has just baptized him “Ron DeSanctimonious”, that is, Ron the Meapila, always maintains a distant attitude, even with his collaborators. It is not uncommon to see him answering his cell phone while others talk to him or walking through the corridors with his headphones, looking straight ahead, without looking at anyone who crosses him. That utter lack of warmth is often made up for on the campaign trail by his wife Casey DeSantis, an affable and talkative former television host who often accompanies him at key events.
Newly re-elected Florida Governor Ron DeSantis at the party celebrating his election victory over Democrat Charlie Crist at the Tampa Convention Center in Florida.
Ron DeSantis follows to the millimeter the agenda of the American extreme right: zero concessions to immigrants, whom in alliance with other governors of his party he has sent by the hundreds to Democratic states; out the right to abortion; no sex education at school, much less recognition of gender identities other than sex at birth, and not a minute of teaching on the history of racism in the United States, those last two topics that it has legislated to avoid “inconveniences” to Florida parents. To parents who think like him.
DeSantis is, in short, the same as Trump in the ideological and like an iron sergeant in the rest. Only with more and more power.
