This text was featured in One Story to Learn At present, a publication wherein our editors advocate a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday by way of Friday. Sign up for it here.
Within the course of a single month this 12 months, the next information studies emanated from Florida: A gun fanatic in Tampa constructed a 55-foot yard pool formed like a revolver, with a sizzling tub within the hammer. A 32-year-old from Cutler Bay was arrested for biting off the pinnacle of his girlfriend’s pet python throughout a home dispute. A 40-year-old man cracked open a beer throughout a police site visitors cease in Cape Coral. A father from East Orlando punched a bobcat within the face for attacking his daughter’s canine.
In headlines, all of those exploits had been attributed to a single character, one first popularized in 2013 by a Twitter account of the identical identify: “Florida Man,” often known as “the world’s worst superhero,” a creature of eccentric rule-breaking, rugged defiance, and unhinged minor atrocities. “Florida Man Often called ‘Sedition Panda’ Arrested for Allegedly Storming Capitol,” a recent news story declared, as a result of why merely insurgent in opposition to the federal government when you may gown up in a bear go well with whereas doing it?
Web memes generally confer with Florida as “the America of America,” however to a Brit like me, it’s extra just like the Australia of America: The wildlife is attempting to kill you, the climate is attempting to kill you, and the folks retain a pioneer spirit, even when their roughest expedition is to the 18th gap. Florida’s place within the nationwide mythology is as America’s pulsing id, a imaginative and prescient of life with out the mandatory restriction of disgrace. Chroniclers discuss its seasonless strangeness; the general public meltdowns of its oddest residents; how retired CIA operatives, Mafia informants, and Jair Bolsonaro could be reborn there. “No matter you’re doing dishonestly up north, you are able to do it in a a lot hotter local weather with much less regulation down right here,” stated the novelist Carl Hiaasen, who wrote concerning the weirder facet of Florida for the Miami Herald from 1976 till his retirement in 2021.
However underneath the memes and jokes, the state can be making an argument to the remainder of the world about what freedom appears like, how life must be organized, and the way politics must be achieved. That is clear even from Britain, a spot characterised by drizzle and self-deprecation, the anti-Florida.
What was as soon as the narrowest swing state has come to embody an emotional new pressure of conservatism. “The overall Republican mindset now could be about grievances in opposition to condescending elites,” Michael Grunwald, the Miami-based creator of The Swamp, informed me, “and it suits with the sense that ‘we’re Florida Man; everybody makes enjoyable of us.’ ” However criticism doesn’t faze Florida males; it emboldens them.
It’s no coincidence that the 2 main contenders for the Republican nomination each have their base in Florida. In a single nook, you could have Donald Trump, who retired, sulking, from the presidency to his “Winter White Home” at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Seaside. (When Trump entered the 2024 presidential race, the previously supportive New York Post jeered at him with the front-page headline “Florida Man Makes Announcement” earlier than relegating the information story to web page 26.)
Within the different nook stands the state’s present governor, Ron DeSantis, raised within the Gulf Coast city of Dunedin, a person desperately attempting to hide his attendance on the elite establishments of Harvard and Yale underneath lashings of bronzer and extremely choreographed outrages. In his speeches, the governor likes to boast that “Florida is where ‘woke’ goes to die.” In his 2022 marketing campaign movies, he styled himself as a Prime Gun pilot and probably even Jesus himself. You couldn’t get away with that in Massachusetts.
“The factor about being the ‘punch-line state’ is that it’s all true,” the author Craig Pittman informed me over Zoom, his tropical-print shirt gleaming within the solar. “Do you keep in mind the story concerning the girl who bought in hassle in New Jersey for attempting to board a airplane along with her emotional-support peacock?”
Sure, I do.
“The peacock was from Florida.”
![section break illustration with 3 palm trees](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/OlWSXomiZ5TapNQH8-PniViz-g4=/665x96/media/img/posts/2023/03/WebsiteSections_palms_01/original.png)
Once I first arrived in Orlando, in late October, I rented what to me was a comically giant Ford SUV and drove to McDonald’s for hash browns and a cup of breakfast tea (zombie-gray, error). Then I went to a gun vary, the place I started by firing two pistols. The very severe man behind the desk had clocked my enamel (British), accent (Hermione Granger), and intercourse (feminine), and expressed skepticism that I’d wish to hearth an AR‑15 assault rifle too. However I did. Previously decade, semiautomatic rifles just like the AR-15 have grow to be the weapon of selection for younger killers, and I wanted to see what America was keen to place into the palms of youngsters within the identify of freedom.
With the pistols, my pictures pulled down from the recoil or the load. However the AR‑15 nestled into my shoulder pad, and the pictures skipped out of it and into the middle of the goal. I felt like I used to be in Name of Obligation, with the identical confidence that there can be no penalties for my actions; that if something went unsuitable, I might simply respawn.
Later, a pal texted to ask how firing the rifle had been. I liked it, I stated. Nobody must be allowed to have one. This isn’t a sentiment to be expressed brazenly in DeSantis’s Florida. When the Tampa Bay Rays tweeted in help of gun management after the Uvalde, Texas, bloodbath final 12 months, the governor vetoed state funding for a new training facility, saying that it was “inappropriate to subsidize political activism of a non-public company.” You may assume: How petty. Or perhaps: How efficient.
Maintain on to these ideas. DeSantis is a politician who preaches freedom whereas suspending elected officers who offend him, banning classroom discussions he doesn’t like, finishing up hostile takeovers of state universities, and obstructing the discharge of public data every time he can. And in some way Florida, a state that payments itself as the house of the ornery and the resistant, the obstinate and the can’t-be-trodden-on, the libertarian and the government-skeptic, has fallen for probably the most keenly authoritarian governor in the US.
![section break illustration with 3 palm trees](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/OlWSXomiZ5TapNQH8-PniViz-g4=/665x96/media/img/posts/2023/03/WebsiteSections_palms_01/original.png)
That is the purpose within the story when a international reporter would historically go to Walt Disney World and have a Huge Thought of how the true faith of America is capitalism. She may embrace a variation on the French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s remark that “Disneyland is introduced as imaginary with a view to make us imagine that the remaining [of America] is actual.”
Me? I went to Disney World; purchased a storm-trooper hat, a 32-ounce Coke, and a sizzling canine that seemed like a postapocalyptic ration; then I had my picture taken high-fiving Baloo. What an awesome time out. The Magic Kingdom drew practically 21 million vacationers in 2019, the final 12 months earlier than the pandemic, and is central to Florida’s mythology. I needed to go. For me, the visceral thrill got here from the park’s extraordinary paperwork: all the eye to element of a North Korean navy parade, purely on your enjoyment.
Disney flatters its clients the best way Florida flatters the wealthy, by hiding the equipment wanted to help decadence. You completely by no means see Cinderella smoking a joint behind her fort, or Mickey Mouse dropping it with a gaggle of irritating 9-year-olds. In Florida, nobody needs to listen to concerning the prices or the results. Why else would folks maintain rebuilding fragile beachfront properties in a hurricane zone—and anticipate the federal government to supply them insurance coverage? After all everybody needs the Man to butt out of their life, however on the identical time, the state-backed insurer of final resort hit 1 million insurance policies in August.
![Illustration with giant red/white soda cup with lid and straw towering over tiny hot dog with teensy flag](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/33jfts_XwpXY8dZprsL1qiGZIsM=/160x35:1355x1500/300x368/media/img/posts/2023/03/Helen_Florida_cup/original.jpg)
Baudrillard had it exactly unsuitable: Disney’s success solely underlines how the state is one large theme park. “This isn’t a spot that makes something, and it’s not likely a spot that does something, apart from convey in additional folks,” Grunwald had informed me. Having introduced in these folks, what Florida by no means tells them is no, nor does the state ask them to play properly with the opposite youngsters: “We’re not going to make you put on a masks or take a vaccine or pay your taxes or care concerning the colleges,” Grunwald stated.
I did have one Huge Thought in Orlando: It’s odd that Ron DeSantis solid Disney as an avatar of the “woke thoughts virus” after its then-CEO, Bob Chapek, spoke out in opposition to the Parental Rights in Schooling invoice—recognized to critics as the “Don’t Say ‘Gay’ ” law—which restricts the educating of gender and sexuality in colleges. Disney’s cartoons now characteristic LGBTQ characters, and its older movies carry warnings about their outdated attitudes, however the company itself is deeply conservative within the self-discipline it calls for from its workers, its deep nostalgia for the Fifties, and its celebration of American exceptionalism. At Epcot’s World Showcase, I noticed nationwide pavilions constructed on the type of gleeful cultural supremacy final seen in Nineteenth-century anthropologists marveling on the handicrafts of the natives. Britain was represented by a fish-and-chips store, a pub, and a retailer the place you may purchase a “masonic sword” for $350. It might have been worse: Brazil, the fifth-largest nation on Earth, had been lowered to a caipirinha stand.
![section break illustration with 3 palm trees](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/ZagNDUpzdckYex5ycyajCDeusY8=/0x0:2814x406/655x95/media/img/posts/2023/03/WebsiteSections_palms_01/original.png)
Outdoors Tallahassee, I fell in love. Having pushed 4 hours north to the Panhandle one brilliant day, sporting denim shorts that will be pointless in Britain for 9 extra months, I ended up in Wakulla Springs State Park.
This was primordial Florida, the swamp I had been promised, and it was heaven: a swimming spot overseen, on the alternative financial institution, by a 13-foot alligator named Joe Jr., one thing the tour information introduced as completely regular and under no circumstances alarming. Unwieldy manatees glided by way of the water as if somebody had given my SUV nostrils and flippers. Turkey vultures massed within the timber. I had bubble-gum ice cream and a root-beer float—how American is that?—and felt pure happiness flooding me like sunshine.
Right here was the magic that brings so many individuals to Florida, a glow that returned as I traveled across the state on my two journeys there: turning off an unremarkable highway and discovering myself within the public park exterior Vero Seaside, the place for $3 you may stroll by way of heat white sand on a weekday afternoon; having a beer and watching the pink-orange sundown over the marina within the small city of Stuart; the Day-Glo-graffiti partitions of Wynwood, south of Miami’s Little Haiti; the revelation that there’s a complete spare Miami simply over the bridge from the unique. Got rid of my return flight for 3 days by Hurricane Nicole, I drove to the Kennedy House Heart—simply in time to observe a SpaceX rocket blast off into the clear blue sky. At one level, I took a unsuitable flip exterior of Miami onto Alligator Alley and drove 15 miles into the Everglades earlier than I might flip round at a guests’ middle. I’ve by no means been someplace so wild that additionally had M&M’s in merchandising machines.
Braided by way of these experiences was the feeling of Florida as a refuge from actuality, one thing that has encapsulated each its promise and its peril since earlier than it was a part of America. Within the early 1800s, enslaved folks escaped from southern plantations and sheltered in Seminole lands, prompting Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, to launch the primary in a collection of devastating wars. Florida was quickly offloaded by the Spanish, and loosely hooked up to the U.S. for 20 years earlier than changing into a state in 1845. It was roundly ignored for a very long time after that. In 1940, it was the least populated southern state.
The explanations for its transformation after World Conflict II are well-known: air-conditioning and bug spray; generations of northeastern and midwestern seniors tempted by year-round sunshine; the a whole lot of 1000’s of Cubans who fled Fidel Castro within the Sixties. Then got here the rodent infestation: Disney, with all its cash and lobbyists and particular tax preparations, and finally its personal city, known as Celebration. Now the state attracts crypto hustlers, digital nomads, and individuals who simply plain hate paying state earnings tax. All of those migrants fueled many years of explosive development and a panorama of building, condos, and golf programs. In 2014, Florida’s inhabitants overtook New York’s, and in 2022, it was the nation’s fastest-growing state.
However these naked details conceal a extra basic change. As Florida has grow to be America, America has grow to be extra like Florida: older, extra racially various however not essentially extra liberal, and extra in danger from local weather change. “The state that appears most like what we’d anticipate the US to seem like in 2060?” Philip Bump writes in his new e-book, The Aftermath. “Florida.”
For thus many who select to stay right here, arriving in Florida seems like a reduction: a liberation from chilly winters, from COVID mandates, from the paralyzing concern of political correctness, from the warnings of climatologists and guilt journeys by Greta Thunberg. “That is an irresponsible place,” Grunwald informed me—a counterweight to Plymouth Rock and the puritanism of the Northeast. Once I drove throughout the border into Georgia, a battery of indicators greeted me, warning in opposition to dashing and littering, as if to say: Look, we’re relaxed right here, however not Florida relaxed. In freedom-loving Florida, you presume, each warning and restriction has been reluctantly imposed in response to a extremely particular drawback. (Exhibit A, the lodge swimming-pool signal: No swimming with diarrhea.)
Earlier than arriving within the state, I had known as the political strategist Anthony Pedicini, who has labored for a number of Republican state representatives and members of Congress in Florida since shifting there 20 years in the past from New York. He expressed a common frustration with the fussiness and rule-making of Democratic-controlled areas: “You’ve handled these blue-state politics which have raised your taxes, defunded your police, rewarded homelessness, made the colleges a mockery—you’re fed up with it.” And so that you go to Florida.
Then Pedicini stated one thing sudden. “You ever learn The Iliad and The Odyssey?” I do know them fairly properly, I responded, with the warning of somebody who’s anticipating a quiz.
“So there was one of many chapters the place the ship goes by the Sirens, calling the sailors off,” he continued. “Odysseus strapped himself to the mast so he wouldn’t go, however he made all his sailors plug their ears with wax and cotton. I feel Ron DeSantis is sort of a siren name to all of those suburban Republicans residing in these blue states.”
Proper, however weren’t the sirens luring folks … to their dying?
Pedicini was unperturbed. “I’ll inform you this, to provide you background on me. I misplaced my mom in the course of the pandemic to COVID. My mom selected to not get a shot, the one one in our household. Do I blame it on the governor? Completely not. Do I blame my mom? No, she made a selection for her that she thought was finest for her. It resulted in a disastrous consequence. However the authorities didn’t have the fitting to make that selection.”
![section break illustration with 3 palm trees](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/OlWSXomiZ5TapNQH8-PniViz-g4=/665x96/media/img/posts/2023/03/WebsiteSections_palms_01/original.png)
Everybody I met in Florida agreed that DeSantis was formidable, hardworking, and good—however, you recognize, so had been Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush. The place had been the fizz and the hearth and the electrical crackle of change that he claimed to offer?
Throughout a rally held on the American Muscle Automobile Museum in Melbourne, on the House Coast, I bought to see DeSantis in particular person, floodlit like a Pink Floyd live performance and flanked by candy classic rides. Flags fluttered within the parking zone, declaring BLUE LIVES MATTER and LET’S GO BRANDON, however the expertise was underwhelming. DeSantis’s speech was a rote recital of authorized villains, missing the chaos and hazard that Donald Trump brings to his rallies.
![Illustration of turquoise golf cart with striped awning and Trump 2024 flag](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/_A-Mft78315d5_ZsUJWgEQYLafo=/0x105:3000x2250/655x468/media/img/posts/2023/03/Helen_Florida_cart/original.jpg)
Any severe consideration of DeSantis inevitably runs headlong into his lack of charisma. Are you able to win the presidency with out with the ability to make small speak? The Republican donor class may be very eager to lubricate his path to energy, however they fear he can’t schmooze and flatter in addition to he bullies and schemes. He has courted partisan YouTubers and talk-radio hosts, however all through his reelection marketing campaign final 12 months, he did not grant a sit-down interview to any mainstream publication, and declined to cooperate with profiles in The New Yorker, the Monetary Occasions, and The New York Occasions. His press group makes a speciality of insults that learn as if ChatGPT has been educated on Trump speeches—gratuitous, but in some way cold. (Requested to answer fact-checking queries for this text, DeSantis’s press secretary, Bryan Griffin, replied by electronic mail: “You aren’t within the fact; that is simply one more nugatory Atlantic editorial.”)
The governor’s closest adviser is usually agreed to be his spouse, Casey—mockingly, a former tv reporter—who survived breast most cancers in 2022, and made a marketing campaign advert extolling the help DeSantis gave her. Usually, he reveals little about his inside life. Till lately, he had not spoken publicly concerning the sudden dying of his sister, Christine, at age 30 in 2015. In February, when the New York Put up adopted him to Dunedin, to see the governor in his residence atmosphere, probably the most the reporter bought out of him was that he’d parlayed his success as a Little League pitcher—his teammates known as him “D”—right into a job at {an electrical} retailer on the town. His mom was a nurse and his father put in Nielsen packing containers; his center identify is Dion; holidays had been spent visiting his grandparents in Pennsylvania and Ohio. He was good and labored arduous sufficient to get into Yale.
Ah, the Ivy League. That is the place DeSantis’s story actually takes off: the small-town Florida boy thrust right into a world of inherited privilege, elite tastes, and left-wing opinions. “I confirmed up my first day in jean shorts and a T-shirt as a result of that’s what we wore on the west coast of Florida,” he told Tucker Carlson in April 2021. “That was not one thing that was acquired very warmly. And I by no means fairly slot in there, and it was a complete tradition shock to me.” For the primary time, he informed Carlson, he heard somebody criticize America—and God, and Christianity. “They hated God,” he stated. “They hated the nation.” For the primary time, in different phrases, the younger Ron met folks with totally different political views—and he didn’t prefer it one bit.
After school, DeSantis spent a 12 months educating on the non-public Darlington College, in Georgia, the place, according to the Times, one scholar recalled him as a “complete jock” who “was positively proud that he graduated Ivy and thought he was very particular.” DeSantis as soon as dared a scholar who had been boasting about how a lot milk he might drink to show it. The scholar threw up in entrance of his classmates.
In contrast to Trump, DeSantis might have succeeded by the elite’s guidelines. Like George H. W. Bush, he was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and the captain of the baseball group. He graduated magna cum laude from Yale. His efficiency bought him into Harvard Regulation College, after which he joined the authorized arm of the U.S. Navy.
He spent Christmas 2006 on the navy jail in Guantánamo Bay—not as an inmate, he would later joke on the marketing campaign path. One former Guantánamo prisoner, Mansoor Adayfi, has accused DeSantis of laughing as he was force-fed; Adayfi says he threw up within the younger lawyer’s face. “I used to be screaming,” Adayfi informed Eyes Left, which describes itself as a socialist anti-war podcast hosted by veterans. “I checked out him, and he was truly smiling. Like somebody who was having fun with it.” Adayfi was launched in 2016 after being detained with out cost for 14 years, and the United Nations Fee on Human Rights later labeled this force-feeding as torture. (In his 2023 e-book, The Braveness to Be Free, DeSantis gives few particulars about his stint at Guantánamo, saying that though detainees would typically “declare ‘abuse’ ” in U.S. amenities, “in Iraqi custody they actually would get abused and handled inhumanely.”)
In 2007, DeSantis deployed to Iraq with SEAL Workforce 1, not as a stone-cold killer himself, however because the stone-cold killers’ lawyer. The 12 months earlier than, he had met his future spouse on a golf course (very Florida), and in 2009 he married her at Disney World (much more Florida). In honor of the couple’s Italian heritage, the reception was at Italy Isola in Epcot, a non-public terrace subsequent to a small faux-Venetian canal. They now have three youngsters: Mamie, Mason, and Madison.
Casey DeSantis’s job as a neighborhood TV host meant she couldn’t transfer out of the state, so her husband determined to go away the navy and started considering his future whereas serving as a particular assistant U.S. lawyer in central Florida. He wished to run for Congress in Florida’s Sixth District, north of Orlando, however he knew he had an issue. “I considered having earned levels from Yale and Harvard Regulation College to be political scarlet letters so far as the GOP main went,” he later wrote. He wanted a mythology. He wanted to embrace his future as a Florida Man, a crusader for individuals who wish to open-carry in Publix in opposition to the blue-state pencil-necks who worship Rachel Maddow and scoff at birtherism. “If I might stand up to seven years of indoctrination within the Ivy League,” he took to telling audiences, “then I can survive D.C. with out going native!”
![section break illustration with 3 palm trees](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/OlWSXomiZ5TapNQH8-PniViz-g4=/665x96/media/img/posts/2023/03/WebsiteSections_palms_01/original.png)
Driving again from Melbourne to Orlando took me previous the Reedy Creek Enchancment District—a forgettable euphemism for Disney’s non-public fiefdom, 25,000 acres of land round Lake Buena Vista, the place for greater than half a century the corporate was in a position to management constructing codes, utilities, and waste assortment. Till it crossed Ron DeSantis.
The therapy of Disney—which has greater than 70,000 workers within the state—has grow to be the cornerstone of DeSantis’s pitch to voters; he calls it “the Florida equal of the shot heard ’around the world.” It reveals each his governing philosophy and the evolution of the Republican angle towards firms. In February, on the eve of his e-book’s publication, DeSantis signed a invoice ending Disney’s management of the district and changing its board of supervisors along with his personal handpicked selections. These included Bridget Ziegler, an schooling activist whose husband had been elected earlier that month as chair of the Florida Republican Get together. For a man who had by no means run something earlier than changing into governor, DeSantis has proven an unbelievable aptitude for patronage.
The marketing campaign in opposition to one among Florida’s largest non-public employers is DeSantisism distilled into its purest type, a type of Mafia discount paying homage to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary: Don’t come for me and I gained’t come for you. Companies could be supportive of ruling politicians, or studiously impartial. What they have to not do is trigger hassle.
What else does DeSantis imagine? We all know from the media tour for The Braveness to Be Free that he’s removed from a foreign-policy hawk. He has stated that it’s not in America’s interests to grow to be “additional entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia.” His first e-book, 2011’s Desires From Our Founding Fathers—printed by a Florida self-importance press known as Excessive-Pitched Hum, and clearly riffing on the title of Barack Obama’s first memoir—paints him as an originalist; he claims that the Founding Fathers thought-about the Structure a “basic legislation with a steady that means” moderately than a “residing doc.” He confidently asserts that the nation’s first Black president betrayed the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., who “didn’t dream of a change of America wherein the foundational ideas of the nation had been tossed apart.”
Desires From Our Founding Fathers was DeSantis’s calling card for his profitable 2012 congressional run. He rapidly grew to become a co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus. Conscious of the Tea Get together power coursing by way of the occasion, DeSantis was cautious to not seem co-opted by the institution. He slept in his workplace as an alternative of renting an condominium in Washington, declined the congressional pension plan, and flew again to Florida—and his rising household—as quickly as votes ended every week.
Throughout his third time period, DeSantis made his bid for promotion to governor—and that’s when he acquired the blessing of this story’s different Florida Man, Donald Trump. The details are disputed: Trump lately claimed that DeSantis begged him with “tears coming down from his eyes” for an endorsement; different sources have the president moved by watching the potential candidate reward him on Fox Information. Both approach, in late 2017 Trump posted a tweet describing DeSantis as “a superb younger chief, Yale after which Harvard Regulation, who would make a GREAT Governor of Florida.”
That endorsement allowed DeSantis to grow to be a staple of Fox Information, with greater than 100 appearances in 2018. “The as soon as little-known congressman spent a lot time broadcasting Fox Information TV hits from Washington this 12 months that he realized to use his personal powder so he might look as polished as he sounded,” Politico reported.
![Illustration of T-shirt with "Florida, Man!" and drawing of man in sunglasses with mullet hairstyle shaped like the state of Florida](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/7ds6-eX_L6l3fDpHsjszcoHlM0o=/0x116:1365x951/655x401/media/img/posts/2023/03/Helen_Florida_shirt/original.jpg)
Buoyed by Trump’s blessing and the help of right-wing media, DeSantis gained Florida’s Republican main for governor in August 2018 by 20 factors. Two months later, he went on to win the final election by simply 32,463 votes. In The Braveness to Be Free, he remembers asking his transition group to attract up an “exhaustive listing of all of the constitutional, statutory, and customary powers of the governor. I wished to make certain that I used to be utilizing each lever accessible to advance our priorities.” If DeSantis ever sits behind the Resolute Desk, you possibly can wager he’ll do greater than order Weight loss plan Cokes and compulsively test Twitter.
![section break illustration with 3 palm trees](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/OlWSXomiZ5TapNQH8-PniViz-g4=/665x96/media/img/posts/2023/03/WebsiteSections_palms_01/original.png)
In January, after DeSantis had been reelected as governor by 1.5 million votes, I returned to Florida, touchdown in Miami. This time, the car-rental company provided me an improve to a Cadillac Escalade. I bought all the best way to climbing up the little step to the motive force’s seat, the place I seemed backwards at two extra rows of seats and a trunk, earlier than I made a decision to set out as an alternative in a positively demure GMC Terrain.
I had been informed that there have been three Floridas: the Panhandle, finest considered as an extension of the Deep South; the state’s central belt, the place maps ought to learn “Right here Be Seniors”; and the south, the place apartment towers and bustling Spanish-speaking enclaves merge slowly into the laid-back seashores of the Keys. Visiting Miami, I might barely comprehend how the town—with its bitcoin brunches and graffiti district and cops who seem like male strippers—may very well be in the identical nation as Tallahassee, by no means thoughts the identical state.
Maria-Elena Lopez, the vice chair of the Miami-Dade Democrats, volunteered to inform me why the historically blue and “rabidly Latin” county had voted for DeSantis by 11 factors in November (he misplaced there by 21 factors in 2018). Her reply was easy: Its newer arrivals had been middle-class conservatives of their international locations of origin, and “they didn’t come right here to combat the combat of the opposite folks.” Additionally, she stated, “Latin Individuals love strongmen.”
Lopez, who got here to the US from Cuba at age 4, additionally underlined the complicated relationship between current migrants and the concept of presidency assist, explaining that her fellow Cubans had been significantly triggered by something that smacked of socialism. She pointed to Hialeah, “which might be our most Latin metropolis in Miami-Dade County … and there may be the very best enrollment of what’s casually known as Obamacare. Okay. But they’re like, ‘Obama was Communist.’ Oh, however you want his insurance coverage insurance policies? The messaging doesn’t go along with what the precise actuality is.”
Within the November election, DeSantis’s success was not an outlier in Florida; Senator Marco Rubio notched an equally giant win, and the occasion gained 4 Home seats. But DeSantis deserves some credit score for this: He had pushed an exquisitely gerrymandered redistricting proposal by way of the state legislature. “His plan wiped away half of the state’s Black-dominated congressional districts, dramatically curbing Black voting energy in America’s largest swing state,” ProPublica reported last year. As one instance, the DeSantis map shattered the seat held by the Black Democrat Al Lawson, which stretched alongside the border with Georgia, dividing it into 4 items, every of which was inserted right into a majority-white district. (DeSantis has rejected the criticisms, calling the previous district itself “a 200-mile gerrymander that divvies up folks primarily based on the colour of their pores and skin.”)
DeSantis additionally established an Workplace of Election Crimes and Safety, whose officers carried out broadly publicized arrests for alleged voter fraud. Fentrice Driskell, the state Home minority chief, factors to the chilling effect of police officers “parading round 20 people who thought that that they had registered to vote lawfully” in entrance of the cameras. (Three defendants have thus far had their fees dismissed.) “They had been simply bogus instances,” Driskell informed me, “getting used to gin up a giant lie that there’s election fraud in Florida.”
![section break illustration with 3 palm trees](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/OlWSXomiZ5TapNQH8-PniViz-g4=/665x96/media/img/posts/2023/03/WebsiteSections_palms_01/original.png)
Sunday morning in Ron DeSantis’s imaginative and prescient of hell, and I used to be ingesting bottomless mimosas. This was R Home, a drag bar in Wynwood, an space of Miami that has made the journey from sketchy to bougie in simply 20 years. Final July, a viral video filmed at R Home confirmed a drag performer, her implausible breasts barely coated with pasties, greenback payments stuffed into her thong, displaying a small youngster easy methods to strut alongside a catwalk. “Kids belong at drag reveals!!!!” learn the caption. “Kids need to see enjoyable & expression & freedom.” DeSantis responded by ordering a authorities investigation of the restaurant.
Once I visited R Home, I didn’t see any minors, though the menu did provide a $30 youngsters’ brunch. If something, the drag present revealed how completely homosexual tradition has been absorbed into the mainstream; judging by all of the sashes and tiaras, many of the clients had been a part of bachelorette events. On the desk subsequent to me, a lady daintily fed a glass of water to a chihuahua in a jeweled collar. Followers had been snapped, greenback payments had been waved, and some performers did some mild twerking, however the one severe hazard to youngsters right here would have been from a flying wig.
I left perplexed. In all honesty, I had discovered the viral video disturbing; because the DeSantis administration’s grievance argued, the efficiency had a “sexualized nature” that was clearly inappropriate for youths to observe. However it was no extra disturbing to me than giving an 8-year-old a “purity ring,” or letting them hearth a pistol, or forcing 10-year-olds to bear their rapists’ infants. Why can’t America simply be regular? And why wouldn’t DeSantis, extoller of “parental rights in schooling,” let mothers and dads determine what to indicate their very own youngsters? The paradox of freedom, Florida type, is that it’s actually an assertion of management. Folks like us must be free to do what we wish, and free to cease different folks from doing what they need after we don’t approve. That’s why it will be deeply unfair to name Ron DeSantis a petty tyrant. If he’s a tyrant, he’s an expansive one.
Ask Andrew Warren. After the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the twice-elected Democratic state lawyer in Hillsborough County signed a pledge that he wouldn’t prosecute ladies who sought abortions, or medical doctors offering gender surgical procedure or hormones to minors. The DeSantis administration responded by suspending him whereas he was in the midst of an unrelated grand-jury case. “5 minutes after receiving the e-mail concerning the suspension, I used to be escorted out of my workplace by an armed deputy,” he informed me. There wasn’t even sufficient time to gather his home keys from his desk. In January, a decide dominated that DeSantis had violated Warren’s First Modification rights and the Florida Structure, however stated he had no authority to reinstate him.
Warren believes his suspension was designed to be a warning to others: “That is what authoritarians do, proper? They are saying that we have to quell dissent, as a result of dissent is so inherently harmful.”
Equally stuntlike was DeSantis’s choice to fly 49 migrants to Martha’s Winery final 12 months, which grew to become a dependable applause line within the governor’s stump speech. Every part about that story stinks, together with the truth that the aviation firm concerned, Vertol—which had shut ties to DeSantis aides—made a good-looking revenue. That’s a part of a sample. When DeSantis owns the libs, his donors and loyalists have a tendency to learn. Firstly of the 12 months, underneath the guise of his “war on woke,” he appointed six right-wing activists as trustees of the New College of Florida, a small public liberal-arts school in Sarasota. The board promptly pressured the president out and changed her with Richard Corcoran, a former Republican speaker of Florida’s Home of Representatives, on a wage of $699,000 (greater than double the earlier president’s). One of many new board members was Christopher Rufo, who has achieved fame among the many Very On-line for turning important race principle right into a family time period. So what if Rufo lives in Washington State? He’s huge on Twitter and a beloved model amongst Tucker Carlson viewers.
At 44, DeSantis represents a brand new technology of Republicans who’ve realized to talk Rumble—the unmoderated various to YouTube—in addition to fluent Fox. He is aware of which of his actions to shout about, and which of them are higher smothered in boredom. At a flashy press convention on April 19, 2021, for instance, DeSantis surrounded himself with cops to signal the Combating Public Dysfunction Act, which was introduced as taming the excesses of the Black Lives Matter motion however—in line with Jason Garcia, a former Orlando Sentinel investigative reporter who now runs a Substack known as Looking for Rents—gave police further energy to quell dissent and civil disobedience extra usually. That was a second value staging for applause by the Blue Lives Matter contingent. Against this, the governor waited till simply earlier than midnight the identical day to approve Senate Invoice 50, a blandly worded legislation that collects gross sales tax from internet buyers whereas giving tax breaks to Florida companies. The distinction between the splashy staging of the anti-riot invoice and the quiet enactment of S.B. 50 “illustrates DeSantis to me so completely,” Garcia stated. “He’s a governor that’s masterful at driving these offended social-war fights that divide folks, then turning round and governing like a pro-corporate Republican.”
![section break illustration with 3 palm trees](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/OlWSXomiZ5TapNQH8-PniViz-g4=/665x96/media/img/posts/2023/03/WebsiteSections_palms_01/original.png)
From the surface, Mar-a-Lago appears much less like a millionaires’ playground and extra like an all-inclusive Mediterranean resort. However Trump’s Palm Seaside property does have a watchtower exterior, and a guard who was not eager to let me in, even to talk to the supervisor.
Regardless of. As a substitute I headed across the nook to the home owned by the real-estate billionaire Jeff Greene, hoping that he had perception into the one man who might crush DeSantis’s ambitions. Somebody, someplace, buzzed me into the gate, however Greene was enjoying tennis once I arrived, so I wandered across the property for 5 minutes, frightened about being shot by an overzealous safety guard. When Greene lastly introduced me inside, his home was all the things I had hoped for: bogs with self-warming seats, a terrace backing onto the seaside, pictures of him embracing world leaders, the works. “That’s a Picasso,” he stated, main me down a hall to his terrace. This was the Palm Seaside life-style I had heard a lot about.
Greene was as soon as a member of Mar-a-Lago, however he let his membership lapse after he ran as a Democratic candidate for governor in 2018 (he got here in fourth within the main). His marketing campaign promoted him as somebody keen to face as much as Donald Trump, utilizing a grainy video of him and Trump gesticulating at one another within the eating room on the Trump Worldwide Golf Membership in West Palm Seaside in December 2016 as proof. Regardless of this historical past, Greene had sympathy for Trump’s grievance that DeSantis can be nothing with out him.
Trump appears to really feel DeSantis’s betrayal keenly. Shortly earlier than the November election, he debuted a brand new nickname for his rival: Ron DeSanctimonious. However it didn’t land, in some way, and Trump’s newer efforts—Meatball Ron, Shutdown Ron, Tiny D—haven’t been as devastating as Low-Vitality Jeb or Little Marco. Locked away for 2 years in Mar-a-Lago just like the world’s most gregarious shut-in, the previous president has been consumed by his insistence that the 2020 election was stolen, gone when it stopped being a helpful, base-enraging lie.
The calls for of Palm Seaside socializing meant that Greene was sure to come across Trump once more—in truth, Greene was due at Mar-a-Lago the next weekend for a profit in assist of the Palm Seaside Police and Fireplace Basis. That is likely to be awkward, as a result of just a few months earlier he had informed the Monetary Occasions that Trump had “no pals.” Then got here the previous president’s dinner with Ye—Kanye West—who was going round saying issues like “I like Hitler,” and the white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
“I spotted that I most likely ought to name the Monetary Occasions to say I owe President Trump an apology,” Greene informed me, trying the least apologetic a person has ever seemed, an angle the tennis whites amplified, “as a result of he actually does have two pals.”
Was he not frightened about going to Mar-a-Lago underneath the circumstances? In no way, it turned out, as a result of Greene can be accompanied by his pal Mehmet Oz, Trump’s anointed (and failed) candidate for a Senate seat in Pennsylvania, in addition to by his finest man, with whom he had simply spent two weeks in St. Barts.
And who would that be? Mike Tyson.
I blinked just a few occasions, earlier than my mind provided the mandatory clarification: Florida.
![section break illustration with 3 palm trees](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/OlWSXomiZ5TapNQH8-PniViz-g4=/665x96/media/img/posts/2023/03/WebsiteSections_palms_01/original.png)
On January 3, DeSantis was sworn in as governor for a second time, on the steps of the capitol in Tallahassee. The ceremony was scheduled to start at 11 a.m., however at 10:20, the general public seating space was full, and stragglers needed to watch on a large tv display screen on South Monroe Road, which had been renamed “Ron DeSantis Means” for the event. (Different elected officers had been assigned smaller facet streets of their honor.) Once more, I felt inescapably British: We wouldn’t let our legislators get carried away like this.
Within the press pen, an enthusiastic livestreamer broadcast his hope that Pfizer, Moderna, and the media can be held accountable for his or her crimes, then emitted an audible “Ooh” of appreciation when Casey DeSantis stepped out in a mint-green caped gown, with elbow-length white gloves. Her husband took a seat on the dais, splay-legged, his palms disconcertingly locked right into a diamond in entrance of his crotch.
That is what it appears prefer to grow to be the Chosen One. The previous Fox host Glenn Beck had lent DeSantis his uncommon Bible for the swearing-in. The podcaster Dave Rubin, beforehand torn between the Florida governor and Trump, tweeted {a photograph} from the bleachers—not the VIP part, I famous—and later produced a YouTube video praising the “one line in DeSantis’ speech that made the gang go nuts.” (I had been led to imagine that Floridians going nuts would contain some mixture of gasoline, swimming trunks, weapons, pythons, golf carts, alcohol, and an unexplained fatality. Right here, they simply stood and clapped.) The donors and the occasion hierarchy had been prepared to maneuver on from Donald Trump; so, it appeared, had been the partisan media.
The speech drew on the darkish Bannonite power of the right-wing on-line ecosystem, name-checking “entrenched bureaucrats in D.C., jet-setters in Davos, and firms wielding public energy” and breezing by way of the compulsory geographic shout-outs, “from the House Coast to the Solar Coast,” to Daytona, Hialeah, and the remaining. “Freedom lives right here, in our nice Sunshine State of Florida!”
The remainder of the 16-minute speech was a tour by way of the best hits of his marketing campaign, adopted by the predictable elevating of his eyes to the horizon of larger ambitions. DeSantis wished to supply a Florida Blueprint to the remainder of America; this was a spot that was preserving the “sacred hearth of liberty” that had burned in Independence Corridor, at Gettysburg, on the D-Day seashores of Normandy, and that had impressed a president to face in Berlin and declare, “Tear down this wall.” Sure, the speech stated, I could also be at the moment accountable for freeway upkeep and appointments to the board of chiropractic drugs, however I’ve a lot extra to provide.
![section break illustration with 3 palm trees](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/OlWSXomiZ5TapNQH8-PniViz-g4=/665x96/media/img/posts/2023/03/WebsiteSections_palms_01/original.png)
The central query about DeSantis is that this: Is he a company tax-cutter or a conspiratorial frother? Is he nearer to Mitch McConnell or Marjorie Taylor Greene? The nice DeSantis innovation has been to appreciate how a lot cowl calculated outrage offers for rewarding cronies—and that the extra you preach “freedom,” the extra you may get away with authoritarianism.
Though the Sunshine State solid DeSantis, he’s not a real Florida Man. Some 400 miles away from Tallahassee, at Mar-a-Lago, you may get the total sugar rush of Trump, a born performer who finds his causes by sniffing the wind, then road-tests potential strains on Fact Social and stay audiences, feeling the crackle of a palpable hit. DeSantis gives an artificial, lab-grown various. He’s Candy’N Low.
Through the inauguration, the Pledge of Allegiance was learn by Felix Rodríguez, a paramilitary CIA officer in the course of the Bay of Pigs incident and a current winner of the governor’s Medal of Freedom. The 81-year-old stumbled over the phrases, and I spotted immediately what a pure politician—Invoice Clinton, Tony Blair, Ronald Reagan—would have achieved: stroll over, take Rodríguez’s arm, and create a viral second of human connection. DeSantis stood inflexible and stern. Given a 15-hour run-up and a spotlight group, he may need gamed out some great benefits of a small, public act of kindness. However he couldn’t get there on his personal.
Nothing is extra damning of the trendy Republican Get together than the truth that DeSantis must flaunt his authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, and informal cruelty to court docket its base. Even then, the routine falls flat. DeSantis lacks the weirdness, effervescence, and recklessness that makes his residence state so compelling. A real Florida Man doesn’t grasp paperwork and use his powers of patronage to reshape establishments in his picture. A real Florida Man doesn’t make the trains run on time. A real Florida Man tries to soup up his boat with a nitro exhaust and unintentionally burns down the unlawful tiki bar he inbuilt his yard. Some are born Florida Males, some obtain Florida Manhood, and a few have Florida Manhood thrust upon them by the calls for of right-wing politics.
This text seems within the May 2023 print version with the headline “The Magic Kingdom of Ron DeSantis.”