TIME's new cover: What Ron DeSantis means for America. mollyesque reports
Tom Williams—CQ-Roll Call/Getty Imagest’s a Tuesday morning in Tallahassee, and a wood-paneled hearing room at the Florida legislature is packed. The state senate’s fiscal-policy committee is considering a bill to prohibit most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, and dozens of citizens have lined up to testify: anguished young students in colorful hair and “abortion is health care” T-shirts; little old ladies wearing cardigans and crosses.
Out of a combination of fear and mutual interest, legislators have put aside their own pet projects to do DeSantis’ bidding, passing bills to shield his travel records from the public and allow him to run for President without resigning the governorship.
Soon DeSantis is expected to announce his presidential run and become Trump’s chief rival for the Republican nomination. Trump has attacked him relentlessly, denting DeSantis’ standing with GOP voters and sowing doubts about his national viability. But those who have witnessed DeSantis operate say it would be foolish to count him out. “He’s not charming,” says GOP state representative Fiona McFarland. “But he’s a terminator.”keeping the legislature in line are not subtle.
Activists stage a sit-in outside DeSantis' office as they speak out against the governor and his policies on May 3In 2010, DeSantis left active duty and settled near Jacksonville, where he worked as a lawyer and married a local TV anchor, Casey Black, whom he met at a driving range. As the Tea Party fervor crested, he self-published a book of conservative ideas,and traveled to local activist meetings to give talks and sell it.
In 2016, DeSantis briefly ran for the U.S. Senate seat that Marco Rubio had vacated to run for President, but dropped out when Rubio decided to return to the Senate. Instead, DeSantis announced a run for governor in 2018. It was another insurgent campaign: the Florida GOP establishment already had its handpicked candidate, Adam Putnam, the state agriculture commissioner. But DeSantis again read the changing currents of the GOP.
He was determined to use every bit of it. “One of my first orders of business after getting elected was to have my transition team amass an exhaustive list of all the constitutional, statutory, and customary powers of the governor,” he writes in“I wanted to be sure that I was using every lever available to advance our priorities.” Aides from the time have corroborated this account, describing a thick binder of information that DeSantis proceeded to devour.
Gaetz, who talked to DeSantis daily during this period, says the governor often brought up the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, in which people were wheeled onto beaches for sunlight and ventilation. He fretted about the long-term mental-health effects of shutting people indoors and became emotional describing nursing-home residents dying in isolation, prohibited from seeing their loved ones.
DeSantis addresses the crowd before publicly signing HB7,"individual freedom," also dubbed the"stop woke" bill during a news conference in Hialeah Gardens, Fla., on April 22, 2022office and the pandemic waned, the governor grew more emboldened. In 2021 and 2022, the legislature pushed through DeSantis-backed bills to make it harder to vote, ban vaccine passports, and crack down on “rioting” at protests.
A cardboard cutout of DeSantis stands against a wall at the New Hampshire Republican State Committee fundraiser on Jan. 28DeSantis’ chief of staff, James Uthmeier, says he has never seen a policymaker so hands-on. “He sits and talks through the nitty-gritty of policy and the budget,” says Uthmeier, who previously served as a senior official in Trump’s Commerce Department. “He’s ingrained in the process in a way I haven’t seen working in the Trump Administration or with other public officials.
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