Can Ron DeSantis Displace Donald Trump as the G.O.P.’s Combatant-in-Chief? - The New Yorker
Can Ron DeSantis Displace Donald Trump as the G.O.P.'s Combatant-in-Chief?
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One Sunday afternoon in September, 2020, Jay Bhattacharya, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, was at home in Los Altos when he got an unexpected call. It was Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and he wanted to talk about the coronavirus. In the early months of the pandemic, Bhattacharya had established himself as an outlier among public-health experts. He is one of three scientists who drafted the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued that many governments were doing more harm than good by shutting down economies and schools. The only practical approach, they said, would be to protect the most vulnerable—mainly by isolating the elderly—and allow everyone else to go about their lives until vaccines and herd immunity neutralized the disease. With COVID-19 killing hundreds of Americans every day, the signers of the declaration became pariahs in their profession. "I've lost friends," Bhattacharya told me. "I'm lucky to have tenure."
DeSantis, young and aggressively confident, was similarly convinced that he could find a better way to handle the virus. Talking with him, Bhattacharya was surprised by his command of the research. "He'd read all the medical literature—all of it, not just the abstracts," he told me. The science, though, remained unclear—Did the virus linger on surfaces? Did it travel in droplets or in a fog?—and many politicians found that the most appealing solutions were the ones that fit their ideology. For DeSantis, who espouses a libertarian vision of small government and personal freedom, the ideas in the Great Barrington Declaration resonated. In his view, the government, apart from protecting the elderly and making treatments available, should do almost nothing.
Dexter Filkins discusses the Florida governor on The New Yorker Radio Hour.
Initially, as the virus began spreading in Florida, DeSantis had ordered a statewide lockdown, in accordance with Dr. Anthony Fauci's recommendations. Three weeks later, he changed his mind. "We will never do any of these lockdowns again," he said. After talking to Bhattacharya, he lifted nearly all remaining restrictions—on schools, government buildings, stores, restaurants, and other private businesses—and halted the enforcement of mask mandates.
As the death toll mounted, he was mocked by critics as "DeathSantis" and denounced by the mainstream press. "Any public distrust of this administration has been well-earned," the Miami Herald editorial board wrote. "We can't trust the governor with our lives." A former political adviser with knowledge of the COVID response told me that DeSantis was unfazed: "We were getting crucified, but to him it was just noise." DeSantis revels in defying what he sees as a corrupt and self-satisfied liberal establishment. Those who work closely with him say that he is unique among elected officials in his disregard for public opinion and the press. "Ron's strength as a politician is that he doesn't give a fuck," a Republican consultant who knows him told me. "Ron's weakness as a politician is that he doesn't give a fuck. Big donors? He doesn't give a shit. Cancels on them all the time."
DeSantis's approach to the pandemic gave rise to an entire governing strategy, in which he regularly denounced some outrage, invariably perpetrated by the left, and proclaimed that he was the only one brave enough to stop it. He laced his speeches and press conferences with anger; when he walked, he thrust out his chest like a soldier on parade. He became a regular on Fox News, second only to Donald Trump as a figure of admiration. His aggressive defense of minimal state action, and his denunciations of anyone who disagreed with him, made him a conservative folk hero.
DeSantis faces reëlection later this year, but his ascent has been so dramatic that in a few polls he comes out ahead of Trump in the race for the Republican Presidential nomination; without Trump, he commands a big lead. Both men claim to channel the rage of an electorate that feels sneered at and dismissed by liberal institutions. But while Trump, with his lazy, Barnumesque persona, projects a fundamental lack of seriousness, DeSantis has an intense work ethic, a formidable intelligence, and a granular understanding of policy. Articulate and fast on his feet, he has been described as Trump with a brain.
In February, DeSantis appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference, held at the Rosen Shingle Creek Hotel, a sprawling resort near Orlando. The convention halls were filled with the Party's new vanguard, which was, on the whole, poorer and angrier than the bankers and golfers who led the G.O.P. a generation ago. The panels ranged from outraged to vengeful. A health-care panel was called "Obamacare Still Kills." A discussion of COVID-19 policy was titled "Lock Downs and Mandates: Now Do You Understand Why We Have a Second Amendment."
From the main stage, DeSantis flashed a smile and tossed baseball caps into the crowd. In a twenty-minute speech, he described an America under assault by left-wing élites, who "want to delegitimize our founding institutions." His job as governor, he said, was to fight the horsemen of the left: critical race theory, "Faucian dystopia," uncontrolled immigration, Big Tech, "left-wing oligarchs," "Soros-funded prosecutors," transgender athletes, and the "corporate media." In Florida, he said, he had created a "citadel of freedom" that had become a beacon for people "chafing under authoritarian rule"; he cited disgruntled citizens of Australia, Canada, and Europe. (He didn't mention the Russian invasion of Ukraine.) "We're not letting Florida cities burn down," DeSantis told the crowd. "In Florida, you're not going to get a slap on the wrist. You are getting the inside of a jail cell." He offered no new policies, though he did mention that he was requiring high-school seniors to pass a civics exam.
DeSantis is not a charismatic speaker, but he is dogged and precise, and the crowd was inflamed. Trump, the ostensible star of CPAC, was scheduled to speak later, but DeSantis didn't mention him. ("Their relationship is complicated," a lawyer close to DeSantis told me.) And, while DeSantis used Florida as a touchstone, he sounded as if he had all of America on his mind. "In times like these, there is no substitute for courage," he said. "We need people all over the country to be willing to put on that full armor of God." As the crowd burst into cheers, he vowed, "We have only begun to fight."
From a remove—onstage at a conference, or pressing an argument on Fox News—DeSantis seems constructed for political success. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood, went to Yale and played on the baseball team, graduated from Harvard Law School, served in the military in Iraq. His family is ready made for a campaign brochure. "He's good-looking," John Morgan, a lawyer in Orlando who has worked with DeSantis, told me. "His wife is really good-looking. His family is beautiful. They look like they're from central casting."
In person, he often comes across differently. "Ron is at his best on paper," a Florida political leader who knows DeSantis told me. "Then you meet him and you say, 'Oh, my gosh.' " People who work closely with him describe a man so aloof that he sometimes finds it difficult to carry on a conversation. "He's not comfortable engaging other people," a political leader who sees him often told me. "He walks into the meeting and doesn't acknowledge the rest of us. There's no eye contact and little or no interaction. The moment I start to ask him a question, his head twitches. You can tell he doesn't want to be there." (DeSantis's office declined requests for comment.)
Nearly everyone I talked to who knew DeSantis commented on his affect: his lack of curiosity about others, his indifferent table manners, his aversion to the political rituals of dispensing handshakes and questions about the kids. One former associate told me that his demeanor stems from a conviction that others have advantages that were denied to him. "The anger comes more easily to him because he has a chip on his shoulder," she said. "He is a serious guy. Driven."
In February, I drove to Dunedin, Florida, a city of thirty-six thousand near Tampa, where DeSantis spent most of his youth. His old neighborhood is typical of those built before the boom years began, in the nineteen-seventies; the houses are modest and close together, and the city, once dotted with open lots, is overrun by traffic. DeSantis's street is quiet, though; many of the houses have screen doors and jalousie windows and sprinklers attached to garden hoses. American flags and Trump signs mark the lawns, including the one at the house where DeSantis's parents still live.
When I knocked, the Governor's father, also named Ron, came to the door. He was dressed in a Florida State University T-shirt and shorts, and there was a day's stubble on his face. "I'd rather not talk to you," he said. "You might be a good guy, but, if I tell you something, somebody—maybe not you—will twist it around." Then he stepped outside and started to talk. The F.S.U. T-shirt, he said, came from his daughter, Christina, who earned bachelor's and master's degrees there. "When my daughter graduated from F.S.U., I thought it was the last time I'd ever have to make the drive to Tallahassee—two hundred and thirty-one miles," he said. In fact, his wife, Karen, who is a retired nurse, was in Tallahassee that day to visit their son at the governor's mansion; Ron, Sr., had stayed home alone.
DeSantis told me that he'd brought his family to Dunedin from Jacksonville, where Ron was born, in 1978. He had a job with Nielsen, the television-ratings company. For years, he traversed neighborhoods, asking people if they would agree to have a Nielsen box attached to their television. "It's incredible how many people would just let me into their houses, even though they didn't know me," he said. "I'd be there until eight o'clock installing the thing."
I asked what Ron was like growing up. "He was stubborn," DeSantis said. "If he set his mind to something, you couldn't shake him." DeSantis pointed into the street, where he and his son used to play catch; there were ball fields nearby, where he had coached Ron's Little League teams. "I tried not to favor him, and Ron didn't like that," he said. Early on, his son had read "The Science of Hitting," by Ted Williams, the baseball great, who advised young hitters to take care in choosing pitches to swing at. "I must have thrown a half million pitches to Ron, and I think he swung at about five hundred of them," he said. "I wish he would have never read it." In 1991, when DeSantis was twelve, his team made it to the Little League World Series.
The young DeSantis attended Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School and then Dunedin High, where he was a star outfielder. He was focussed and motivated, his father said, adding, "He didn't get that from me." DeSantis scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on his SAT and was accepted to Yale, his father said: "It's still the thing I'm most proud of." But he didn't like to make too much of it. "Everybody wants to brag about their kids, and people ask me about Ron. I try to be modest."
At Yale, DeSantis majored in history and played on the baseball team, in the outfield. In the Yale tradition, the team never had a winning season while DeSantis was there. ("Pretty sure we were the worst team in Division One," one of his teammates told me.) In his senior year, he was among the best hitters, batting .336, and was elected captain. His former teammates' recollections are sharply divided, but nearly everyone I spoke with remembered him as singularly focussed, with little time for parties or goofing off; he worked several jobs to help pay his tuition. "Ron was a bit of a loner, not a social butterfly," Dave Fortenbaugh, a former teammate, told me. "He spent a lot of hours in the library."
Some recalled that DeSantis was so intensely focussed that he wasn't much of a teammate. "Ron is the most selfish person I have ever interacted with," another teammate told me. "He has always loved embarrassing and humiliating people. I'm speaking for others—he was the biggest dick we knew." But the same teammate praised DeSantis's intellect. "This is the frustrating part. He's so fucking smart and so creative," he said. "You couldn't even plagiarize off his work. He'd take some angle, and everyone knew there was only one person who could have done that."
After graduating, with honors, DeSantis taught history for a year at the Darlington School, a private institution in Rome, Georgia, before enrolling at Harvard Law School; a friend told me that he'd been inspired by the movie "A Few Good Men." In the film, Tom Cruise plays a judge advocate general—a Navy attorney—who defends marines accused of a deadly assault at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. With the war in Iraq still raging, DeSantis, too, became a judge advocate general. He was posted to Naval Station Mayport, near Jacksonville, and also to Guantánamo, where he dealt with detainees. A colleague who served with DeSantis remembered, "Ron was a voracious worker, and he worked at phenomenal speed. He was a superb writer, especially for his age." Even then, his ambition seemed consuming. "Ron's a user," the former colleague told me. "If you had utility to him, he would be nice to you. If you didn't, he wouldn't give you the time of day."
In 2007, DeSantis deployed to Iraq as a lawyer for SEAL Team One, which was conducting operations in Ramadi. The SEALs have a reputation for being secretive and insular, but DeSantis enjoyed their company, his father told me: "He worked out with them." DeSantis briefed the SEALs on rules of engagement—when they could shoot, how they should treat prisoners. "Of course we were worried about him," his father said. "Ron told us he was just in one place, in Ramadi, but afterwards we found out that he'd been moving all around the area, from city to city, with the SEALs. It really upset my wife."
Back in Florida, DeSantis started dating Casey Black, a television news reporter for WJXT, in Jacksonville; in 2010, they were married. Not long afterward, a seat opened up in the Sixth Congressional District, south of Jacksonville Beach. In 2012, DeSantis entered the race.
DeSantis campaigned on smaller government and lower taxes, arguing to overturn Obamacare and eliminate entire federal agencies. "My mission was largely to stop Barack Obama," he told a crowd later. As the campaign got under way, DeSantis published a book titled "Dreams from Our Founding Fathers"—a swipe at the President's memoir. For a campaign book, it's unusually wide-ranging, with carefully argued sections on the Federalist Papers, the Progressive Era, and the leftist theoretician Saul Alinsky. The basic contention, though, would have been familiar to followers of Barry Goldwater: "The conceit that underlies many of Obama's policies and his allies is that virtually any issue, from the waistline of children to the temperature of the earth, is ripe for intervention of expert (and progressive) central planners." DeSantis's book was largely ignored—he once told a crowd that it was "read by about a dozen people"—but his message resonated in the Sixth District, one of the most conservative in the state. He won the election, and was reëlected twice by wide margins.
In Congress, an institution where seniority matters, DeSantis had little time to make a substantive impact. Theatrically, though, he created an impression. He helped found the Freedom Caucus, an invitation-only club of hard-right conservatives, and he was among the Republicans who took the government to the brink of default by refusing to raise the national-debt ceiling. Many people worried that the move would harm the government's credit rating and the country's economy. Even John Boehner, the House Speaker, opposed it. In response, DeSantis joined a group of Republican congressmen who threatened to remove Boehner from his post. "There were governing conservatives and shutdown conservatives," David Jolly, a congressman from Florida who served with DeSantis, told me. "Ron was a shutdown conservative."
Many of DeSantis's colleagues remember him as remote. A former member of the Florida delegation told me, "He always had his earbuds in, to keep people away." Others, like Jolly, had a more temperate view. "He's a little reclusive, a bit of an odd duck," Jolly said, "but he's just incredibly disciplined."
DeSantis's colleagues say that he was less interested in drafting legislation than in positioning himself for higher office. In his first term, he started courting leading conservative donors, including the Koch family and Sheldon Adelson, and money began to flow. "It's not easy getting those meetings," Jolly told me. "But Ron did it, and he convinced them that he was one of their friends."
In 2018, two years after Trump carried Florida in the Presidential election, DeSantis declared his run for governor. His opponent in the primary was Adam Putnam, the state commissioner of agriculture. Putnam was the sort of Republican that Trump had swept away in the primaries: a staid, moderate product of the establishment.
DeSantis's record in Congress had put him at the libertarian edge of his party; he earned one-hundred-per-cent ratings from the Heritage Foundation and Americans for Prosperity. He was ideologically consistent, even when it cost him. Twice, DeSantis voted to cut price supports for sugar, pitting himself against one of Florida's most powerful interests, which receives tens of millions of dollars in state subsidies a year. The industry funded Putnam's campaign generously, and its allies financed several attack ads against DeSantis.
For much of the campaign, DeSantis trailed Putnam. But, in 2017, he started appearing regularly on Fox News, railing against the investigation of Russia's role in helping Trump get elected. On Laura Ingraham's show, he said that the special counsel Robert Mueller's efforts had criminalized ordinary political behavior. "This is actually taking a bias and basically saying you're gonna use the machinery of government to prevent the American people from making a choice," he said. (Mueller's team indicted or took guilty pleas from thirty-seven people and revealed more than a hundred contacts between Trump's campaign and agents of the Russian state.)
Trump saw DeSantis on television and found him appealing: a combative conservative and a former athlete. "The President loves athletes," the former DeSantis associate, who is also close to Trump, explained. Soon afterward, Trump endorsed him on Twitter and then appeared with him at a rally in Tampa. DeSantis shot upward in the polls, and beat Putnam in the primary.
DeSantis began mimicking Trump's characteristic gestures in campaign appearances and paying tribute to him in television ads. In one, DeSantis reads to his son, Mason (" 'Then Mr. Trump said, "You're fired!" '—I love that part.") and plays blocks with his young daughter, Madison, exhorting her to "build the wall!" The ad was tongue in cheek, but it succeeded in linking DeSantis with the President. "It was the dumbest, most effective ad in Florida history," Kevin Cate, a media consultant for DeSantis's opponent, said.
DeSantis had an advantage in the general election: his opponent, Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee and the first Black candidate for governor, was running as a progressive in a not particularly progressive state. Gillum was also dogged by an F.B.I. investigation into whether he had accepted gifts from lobbyists. Still, DeSantis began the campaign with a disastrous gaffe, saying on television, "The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up" by electing Gillum. DeSantis insisted that there was no racial motive behind the statement—"He uses a lot of dorky phrases like that," one of his former colleagues told me—and the outrage didn't endure. But his tone deafness created a disadvantage. "We were handling Gillum with kid gloves," the lawyer close to DeSantis told me. "We can't hit the guy, because we're trying to defend the fact that we're not racist." DeSantis won by about thirty thousand votes, less than half a per cent of the ballots cast.
In a recent phone interview, Trump took credit for DeSantis's victory, saying, "If I didn't endorse him, he wouldn't have won." The campaign was managed by Susie Wiles, a veteran political strategist who had helped Trump win the Presidency in 2016. But, after the election, DeSantis abruptly broke off his relationship with Wiles. A longtime Tallahassee lobbyist told me that DeSantis became angry that her lobbying firm—Ballard Partners, one of the most powerful in the state—was taking over the process of appointing officials. "There was a confrontation in a meeting, and it all fell apart," he said. DeSantis told the firm that its clients would not be welcome in his office as long as they retained Wiles. (Brian Ballard, a founding partner, denied this as "totally false.") Wiles left, and Trump hired her to run his 2020 campaign in Florida. Trump told me that DeSantis complained about the move, but that he replied, "If you have a manager who wins the World Series, you keep the manager."
In office, DeSantis took steps that suggested he intended to govern closer to the center. He buoyed environmentalists by forcing out the nine-member board of the South Florida Water Management District, political appointees who were considered hostile to environmental interests. He named a commission to tackle algae blooms, which befouled rivers and lakes in the southern part of the state. And he appointed several Black jurists. At his inauguration, DeSantis asked the Reverend R. B. Holmes, the pastor of a predominantly Black church in Tallahassee, to lead the prayer. "I was encouraged," Holmes told me.
For decades, the Democratic Party had commanded a majority of Florida's registered voters. But the state was changing, as Trump's election helped energize a shift in political affinities. The Republican Party's rank and file became increasingly radical, and G.O.P. leaders appeared only too happy to follow them. "There was always an element of the Republican Party that was batshit crazy," Mac Stipanovich, the chief of staff to Governor Bob Martinez, a moderate Republican, told me. "They had lots of different names—they were John Birchers, they were 'movement conservatives,' they were the religious right. And we did what every other Republican candidate did: we exploited them. We got them to the polls. We talked about abortion. We promised—and we did nothing. They could grumble, but their choices were limited.
"So what happened?" Stipanovich continued. "Trump opened Pandora's box and let them out. And all the nasty stuff that was in the underbelly of American politics got a voice. What was thirty-five per cent of the Republican Party is now eighty-five per cent. And it's too late to turn back."
In April, 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, DeSantis travelled to the convention center in Miami Beach to appear with Dan Gelber, the city's mayor, to discuss the state's response. Gelber, a Democrat, is a former minority leader in the Florida House who teamed up to pass legislation with such Republican leaders as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio; he told me that he is still friendly with both. "I don't agree with Jeb on a lot of things, but I have a deep and abiding respect for him," he said.
Appearing with Gelber, DeSantis outlined the steps that his administration had taken. He had ordered a statewide lockdown. He'd ordered nursing homes sealed off and told the elderly to quarantine; at the time, many states, including New York, were still sending virus patients into nursing homes, which ended in thousands of deaths. Florida had established the first of hundreds of testing centers and set up a Web site that detailed the virus's trajectory. Most notably, it had ordered millions of masks for health-care workers; DeSantis said that he was fighting to get more. "Having a mask on, I think, would be something that could potentially ward off infections for the most vulnerable," he said. At numerous public appearances, the Governor wore a mask himself.
DeSantis regarded these efforts as a kind of baseline. "If some folks want to do things more, then they can do more in certain situations," he said. "We want to work with the local folks." Under Gelber's leadership, Miami Beach, a destination for visitors from abroad, had imposed a mask mandate and aggressively ticketed violators. Gelber told me that he urged DeSantis to establish a robust program of contact-tracing. "The Governor was supportive of everything we were doing," he said.
But DeSantis soon seemed to lose faith in the scientific establishment. Early in the pandemic, Scott Rivkees, the state surgeon general, convened a conference call of many of Florida's leading public-health experts; at the end of the meeting, he announced that it would be the last. Among those boxed out was Glenn Morris, an epidemiologist whom the University of Florida had recruited in 2007 to set up a center that would help guide the state though the next pandemic. "We spent years preparing for this moment," Morris told me.
The Governor's aides say that he was intent on his own research, poring over scientific data and medical journals. He also began to consult a small circle of experts from out of state, who saw the virus as essentially uncontrollable. In April, 2020, he began lifting the statewide lockdown—in keeping, he said, with guidelines set forth by Trump's White House. The former political adviser with knowledge of the COVID response told me that DeSantis sympathized with the state's working class, who weren't able to work remotely and typically didn't have much in savings. "The people who were criticizing the Governor for keeping everything open tended to be people who had the luxury of working at home," he said.
Florida quickly posted some of the country's highest totals of virus cases. In Miami-Dade County, according to records provided by a local official, the number of hospitalizations for COVID rose from about six hundred in an average week to more than two thousand. DeSantis carried on; in July, his education commissioner ordered schools to fully reopen. "Fear does not help us combat the virus," DeSantis said. At times, though, he seemed to be discouraging a clear picture of COVID's progress. Florida's contact-tracing program was anemic; that July, Gelber noted, it reached only eighteen per cent of infected people in Miami-Dade, the state's most populous county. DeSantis's aides began ignoring Gelber's requests for city-by-city mortality data.
With cases skyrocketing, the Miami-Dade County Commission imposed a rule requiring masks in any public place. Daily cases declined sharply, in some places to lockdown levels. "The numbers speak for themselves," Gelber said. Across the state, at least nineteen counties followed suit.
Similar mandates were taking effect around the country, but Bhattacharya, the Stanford epidemiologist who advised DeSantis, argued that there was little evidence to support them. COVID-19 is transmitted not by droplets—as many contagious diseases are—but by mist, he pointed out. In an analysis of sixty-seven randomized trials, the Cochrane Library, a medical database, found that masks did not significantly slow the spread of influenza, which is transmitted similarly to COVID-19. "Masks are good at stopping droplets, but not aerosols," Bhattacharya told me.
Bhattacharya's views are not widely shared; many scientists I spoke to said that, although real-world data is scarce, research shows that properly worn masks can slow the spread of the coronavirus. The problem, they said, was that what people do in scientific experiments—wear tightly fitting N95 masks—is not what they do in day-to-day life. They wear inferior masks, often incorrectly, and sometimes ignore the mask requirement altogether. "There isn't really a debate on whether masks work—we know that masks work," Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University, told me. "It's theory versus practice. If you go into a crowded bar and take your mask off to drink, a mask requirement is not going to work very well."
For DeSantis, the mandates were a futile, unacceptable intrusion on individual liberties. In September, 2020, as he lifted nearly all remaining government-imposed coronavirus restrictions, he issued an executive order prohibiting local governments from enforcing mask mandates. Gelber responded with a letter, arguing that the order invited needless suffering. "This is a frightening view, especially in a state where the major industry is hospitality and tourism," he said. "It is not merely going to cause additional community spread and sickness but also hamper our efforts to reopen."
That month, Florida recorded nearly a hundred thousand new cases. Patients overwhelmed hospitals, swamping emergency rooms. "It's a free-for-all here," Dr. Bernard Ashby, a cardiologist and internist who works at Lawnwood Hospital, in Fort Pierce, told me at the time. "We don't have any beds. The nurses are exhausted." Ashby said that, early in the pandemic, DeSantis had failed to alleviate the crisis by helping make such treatments as monoclonal antibodies available. "He is either completely ignorant of the science, or he's doing what I suspect, playing politics."
Dr. Aileen Marty, a professor of infectious disease at Florida International University who advised the mayors of several cities, believes that DeSantis was making a conscious choice. "I think the Governor in his heart of hearts is spreading the virus as a way to herd immunity," she said. "He's under the mistaken impression that once you get the disease you're through with it." Seeking herd immunity through natural infection, many scientists say, places a huge proportion of the population at risk of serious illness or death—not just the elderly but also cancer patients and others with compromised immune systems, as well as diabetics and the obese. "It's forty per cent of the population," Marty said.
DeSantis came under furious criticism, accused of putting the forthcoming Presidential election ahead of his citizens' health. "We believe they want schools to open to falsely portray a nation—and the largest swing state—as moving past the virus," an editorial in the Sun-Sentinel, a South Florida newspaper, said. DeSantis assured confidants that he was unmoved by the outrage. The lawyer close to DeSantis told me that he said, "I'm not worried about what the news cycle is saying about me. It's my responsibility to make decisions, and I'll deal with the criticism." But his administration became increasingly intent on controlling its message. At a press conference that April, Surgeon General Rivkees said that people should consider social distancing—for "probably a year, if not longer." After Rivkees sat down, DeSantis's communications director approached and escorted him from the room. Rivkees largely vanished from public view. Last September, he left the administration and joined Brown University.
In appearances, DeSantis adopted a strident tone, dismissing those who questioned him. During a press conference in January, 2021, Rosa Flores, of CNN, raised her hand to ask a question. Vaccines were becoming available, but the distribution was haphazard; reports had spread of elderly people, some of them in wheelchairs and makeshift beds, waiting all night to get inoculated. "Governor, what has gone wrong with the rollout of the vaccine?" Flores asked. "We've seen phone lines jammed, Web sites crashing—"
DeSantis interrupted: "There's a lot of demand." As Flores tried to complete her thought, DeSantis jabbed a finger and added, "You just said, 'What has gone wrong?,' so I'm answering the question." Talking over her, he went on, "You're going to ask how many questions? You get three?" He pointed to other reporters. "They only got one question. Why do you get three?"
When Flores finally finished her question, it was a reasonable one: Why had people been kept waiting for vaccines? DeSantis gave an answer, which was not unreasonable, either: Many hospitals had adopted a first-come-first-served policy. But by then DeSantis had evidently decided that much of the media was not worth trying to convince. His real constituency was elsewhere.
Around the time of the press conference, Meredith Beatrice, a communications aide to DeSantis, sent an e-mail to Bridget Gleason, a producer for "Fox and Friends," the network's premier morning show. Beatrice was offering an "exclusive" story: Florida was about to vaccinate its millionth senior citizen. "Look forward to working with you and the team bright and early tomorrow!" she wrote.
