The race to become the Republican challenger to Joe Biden in next year’s presidential election has suddenly started to heat up.
Republican Party leaders announced on Thursday that their first event to pick a candidate would be the traditional Iowa caucuses in February next year. (Democrats have chosen to start their race in South Carolina.) Although it is a full year before Iowa kicks off the race, it was enough to send a shiver of excitement through the party and through those considering a run against former president Donald Trump.
Trump announced his intention to stand again in November. He suggested that he and Biden had unfinished business, and that, in light of his persistent claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, his Republican rivals for the nomination should wait their turn. The prospect of having to face Trump’s wrath by daring to challenge him deterred other candidates for a while.
But late last month Nikki Haley, Ambassador to the UN under Trump and a two-term governor of South Carolina, announced that, notwithstanding Trump’s prior claim, she was ready to become the next Republican presidential champion. Trump’s response to her announcement, so far, has been to damn the 49-year-old daughter of Indian immigrants with faint praise. He had only awarded her the UN job, he said, to clear the way for Henry McMaster, her successor as South Carolina Governor, whom he thought more in tune with his own thinking. It is too early to tell how formidable Haley’s challenge to Trump will prove to be.
But the opinion polls reveal that there is a rival to Trump whom Trump is taking seriously: the Governor of Florida, Conservative “firebrand” Ron DeSantis. De Santis has just made headlines again for signing a bill which will bring an end to the “corporate kingdom” of Disneyland by removing the district’s special tax status in what is being regarded as a calculated anti-woke move, ahead of announcing his presidential candidacy, to appeal to the Republican voter base.
The poll figures tell the story: while Trump has established an early lead, with support from around 45 per cent of Republican voters, DeSantis logs in in second place with an impressive 25 to 30 per cent, while the rest of the field, including Haley, are stuck well below the 10 per cent mark. DeSantis’s support is even more impressive because he has not formally declared his intention to run for the nomination.
DeSantis has so far played it cool. But by taking on Disney, and announcing he is “the new sheriff in town”, it looks like he is getting ready to enter the race. But when?
So long as he avoids announcing a challenge, he escapes a full-scale, no-holds-barred, vicious assault upon him by Trump. Still Trump has not been able to resist firing warning shots across DeSantis’s bow. “If he did run, I will tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering,” Trump said. “I know more about him than anybody other than perhaps his wife.” DeSantis is married to Casey, a 42-year-old former television anchor (on the Golf Channel), a breast-cancer survivor, and mother of three.
Trump has already accused DeSantis of grooming schoolgirls for sex and taking part in drinking parties with underage girls when teaching at a private school 20 years ago. Turning the other cheek, DeSantis has declined to directly respond to Trump’s attacks. “I spend my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden,” he said. “That’s how I spend my time. I don’t spend my time trying to smear other Republicans.”
Trump has been at a loss to counter the buzz around DeSantis. In his attempt to find a schoolyard nickname to diminish the Florida governor—nicknames being his most effective weapon against rivals; think “Crooked Hillary” Clinton, “Low Energy” Jeb Bush, “Little Marco” Rubio—his early shot at “Shutdown Ron” has been made irrelevant by DeSantis’s Covid record. Trump has tried “Ron Meatball”, apparently aimed at DeSantis’s body shape and his Italian heritage, but found it wanting. Instead, Trump has finally landed on “Rob Sanctimonious”, which is a direct reference to DeSantis’s Roman Catholic faith.
Sixty years ago, in the 1960 presidential election campaign, Catholicism became a contentious issue. John F. Kennedy, a Boston Catholic of Irish descent, was obliged to deliver a carefully worded speech assuring Americans that if elected to the White House, his Roman Catholicism would not come between him and the American people.
Catholicism looms over next year’s presidential election. If DeSantis manages to see off Trump, American voters could be offered a choice between two Catholics: DeSantis and the incumbent President Joe Biden. Neither man strictly follows Catholic teaching, even when it comes to matters of life and death. While Biden finds a way round his faith to support abortion—one of the issues which, since the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, appears to have minimised his mid-term congressional losses—DeSantis supports the death penalty being applied more often for particularly heinous crimes.
Two new pieces of legislation in Florida would make capital punishment far easier, which has prompted the Church to express its concern. Michael Sheedy, executive director of the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, said, “Weakening the current standards in law to make it easier to impose death is deeply concerning”. He alluded to the fact that in recent years, 30 inmates on Florida’s death row have been exonerated for the capital crimes they had been accused of.
In his attempts to attract Trump supporters away from their hero, DeSantis has continued the “culture wars” that have so sharply divided America between liberals and conservatives. He does this from a position of electoral strength in Florida. DeSantis likes to remind Republican audiences that, in sharp contrast to Trump’s failed 2020 bid for reelection, in November, he was reelected to the Florida governorship in a landslide, beating the Democratic candidate, former Republican Charlie Crist, by 19-points, while also winning a veto-proof majority in Florida’s legislature.
Among the Floridians who voted for DeSantis was none other than Trump himself, who has abandoned his Fifth Avenue New York Trump Tower legal residence for his Mar-A-Lago seaside estate and golf course in Palm Beach, Florida. Implicit in DeSantis’s reminder of his success at the polls last year is that Republican candidates did badly in the Congressional Midterm elections held at the same time, contrary to the traditional success granted to the party that does not hold the White House. In particular, the candidates Trump went out of his way to campaign for did worst of all.
Armed with a super-majority in Florida, DeSantis has been honing his record as a Republican every bit as successfully as Trump in waging war against the “woke” culture of cultural diversity, sexual liberation and gender ambiguity embraced by the Democratic Party. And the inspiration for this crusade against wokeness is his Catholic faith.
When the Walt Disney company, the biggest employer in Florida, expressed dismay that DeSantis had introduced a law that forbade Florida school teachers from telling children about homosexuality—the “don’t say gay” law—DeSantis removed by law the exceptional rights to run its own affairs Disney had extracted from the state when setting up Disney World in 1971.
To limit the rights of transexuals, a favoured minority of “woke liberals”, DeSantis set out to remove and replace members of the Florida High School Athletic Association who had failed to oblige women students to log their menstrual histories on official medical forms—a regulation designed to expose the lack of reproductive organs of men-to-women transexuals.
In a similarly hostile move against homosexuals, DeSantis stripped the Orlando Philharmonic Plaza Foundation of its alcohol licence because the musical charity had held a fundraising show featuring men in drag.
In a decision that angered many black Americans and liberal Democrats who support the teaching of history which includes America’s slave-owning past, DeSantis insisted that the Florida College Board cease providing scholarships to students specialising in an African American Studies course he deemed “significantly lacks educational value”.
The veto included a ban on the teaching of the notion of reparations to black Americans to compensate for their ancestors being held as slaves, on “queer studies”, that teaches the history of the homosexual rights movement, and of teaching about the history of feminism.
Courses on the history of the Black Lives Matter movement and the mass incarceration of black criminals were demoted from required subjects to optional, and a history of “Black conservatism” was added to the curriculum.
When Florida State was sued and found guilty of flying undocumented immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, to draw the attention of rich liberals on vacation to the scale and seriousness of illegal immigration, DeSantis had the Florida legislature change the law making such a flight legal.
DeSantis likes to draw a comparison between his successful execution of conservative policies and attempts by Trump to pander to MAGA (Make America Great Again) supporters. He, like Trump, dismisses the mainstream media as pro-Democratic—a central truth held by Trump’s supporters—and complains that while Democratic governors are treated gently, Republicans like him are excoriated.
When CBS reported Florida state data showing that black and Hispanics were vaccinated against Covid at a much lower rate than whites, the broadcaster pointed the finger at DeSantis, who as governor oversaw the vaccine’s rollout. DeSantis told Fox News that CBS, like the rest of the press, were “basically ambulance chasers with a microphone.
They are not trustworthy. They lie. They know they’re lying and we know they’re lying. They lie and they lie and they lie.”
DeSantis says he delivered a more robust approach to Covid and to vaccinations than the former president. DeSantis stood down the nationwide Covid shutdown in Florida faster than most other states, and way before Dr Anthony Fauci, the federal medical expert much-derided by Trump supporters, recommended that restrictions be lifted.
He was also against forced vaccination, a gesture that has made him a favourite of the anti-vax movement, which is led by pro-Trump Republicans. In December a poll found that 44 per cent of Republicans think parents should be able to opt out of vaccines for their children for diseases like measles and mumps, compared with only 20 percent who thought that way in 2019.
DeSantis’s assault upon wokeness is underpinned by a set of moral values derived from his Catholic religion which he wears as a badge of courage. While many American politicians affect piety when asked about God, DeSantis has boldly embraced the Creator.
In a campaign television ad in November, an echoing, sonorous voice announced, above stirring music: “And on the eighth day God looked down on his planned paradise and said, I need a fighter.” It went on, “God said, ‘I need somebody who will take the arrows, stand firm in the wake of unrelenting attacks, look a mother in the eyes and tell her that her child will be in school…’” God’s chosen fighter, according to the ad, was DeSantis.
DeSantis delivered a similarly Godly message last year at Hillsdale College, Michigan. “Put on the full armour of God. Stand firm against the left’s schemes,” he urged his audience of conservative students and faculty. “You will face flaming arrows. But if you have the shield of faith, you will overcome them, and in Florida we walk the line here. And I can tell you this, I have only begun to fight.”
The Tampa Bay Times has reported that DeSantis is “increasingly using biblical references in speeches that cater to those who see policy fights through a morality lens and is flirting with those who embrace nationalist ideas that see the true identity of the nation as Christian.”
DeSantis has no qualms about it. “The governor is a Christian and there is absolutely no issue with him sharing his values or utilising them in his decision-making as a leader,” said Bryan Griffin, DeSantis’s press secretary.
DeSantis has repeated his claim that he is doing God’s work in a number of important Republican venues, including at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, at the Florida Republican Party’s annual conference, and when campaigning alongside Doug Mastriano, a candidate for the Pennsylvania governorship who promotes Christian power in America.
He sees his campaign against “wokeness” as a religious crusade. “This woke ideology functions as a religion,” DeSantis told the conservative Christian podcast “Focus on the Family”. “Obviously it is not the Judeo-Christian tradition, but they want that to be effectively the governing faith of our country. They want that to be the core orthodoxy in public schools and other types of public function. … They really want to impose their world view to the exclusion of the rest of us.”
In response, DeSantis says he would like to see the clear separation between church and state advocated by the Founding Father Thomas Jefferson and incorporated in the U.S. constitution to be rescinded by the Supreme Court, a decision that would allow prayers and hymn singing in state schools and Christian symbols to be displayed on state property.
So long as the Republicans pick Trump to be their presidential candidate, Democrats believe President Biden would once again beat him in a head to head battle for the White House. But if the Republicans choose DeSantis, Biden’s nomination as the Democratic champion would be less likely and a head-to-head contest between two Catholic candidates would be less certain.
If DeSantis announces his candidacy for 2024 and manages to survive the expected onslaught of abuse from Donald Trump, the Democrats may well think again about nominating the 80-year-old Biden and replace him with a younger, more energetic candidate. But whoever the Democrats pick, DeSantis would enjoy a clear advantage from the electoral map. Every president this century, except for Biden in 2020, has won the White House by winning DeSantis’s home state of Florida.
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