• Mickey Mouse Election vs. Trump's biggest rival for Republican nomination

Ron DeSantis' path to the White House had the most unusual start in the history of his party's primaries. The 44-year-old Republican not only opted for an audio interview on Twitter with an amateur in the field, the South African Elon Musk, but suffered in his own flesh the side effects of the experiment. The technical failures followed each other for more than 20 minutes and the governor of Florida could not utter a word in that period of time, being the subject of a cascade of ridicule. Of course, he managed to leave in the background a catastrophic message about the state of the nation with which he intends to defeat Donald Trump in the primaries.

DeSantis, who has earned a reputation as an iron man around his conservative and Catholic values, spoke of the 'Florida model', which he has implemented in his more than four years in office. "Rebuilding this ship requires bringing sanity back to our society, normalcy to our communities, and integrity to our institutions. Truth must be our foundation. And common sense can no longer be an uncommon virtue. In Florida we showed that it is possible," he said through a video that Fox News exclusively distributed and that DeSantis himself was responsible for retweeting.

The former congressman who swept his re-election bid in 2022 assures that his are deeds and not words. It boasts of having managed to reverse the state deficit and turn it into a surplus based on cuts and of opposing the restrictions imposed by Covid in the rest of the country and in much of the planet. That's when DeSantis became nationally known. He resisted mandatory masks and was lax in forcing citizens to stay home, close businesses and impose vaccination at the state level.

He is also against corporate taxes to combat global warming, does not believe in restrictions on the possession and sale of weapons, has done everything in his power to persecute and expel undocumented immigrants from Florida and is a staunch opponent of abortion rights. In April, he signed the law limiting the termination of pregnancies to the sixth week of gestation.

Famous was also his refusal to allow sexual orientation to be discussed in schools among children aged 5 to 9. The law dubbed "Don't say gay" has been one of the thorniest chapters of his mandate, as was the ban on transgender girls and women participating in school competitions. Disney, which has had amusement parks in Orlando for decades, waged a legal and power battle against the governor in the wake of HB1557.

For all that record he is considered the strongest candidate to defeat the former Republican president in the party's primaries. "Trump is not as invincible as he seemed and DeSantis is a serious contender," Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican strategist, told The New York Times. "There are Republican voters looking for someone who can go beyond Trump, someone who can fight liberals but also win the election. That's the space DeSantis is trying to inhabit."

An important part of his comeback options in the polls will pass through there, which at the moment is very uphill. DeSantis must distance himself from Trump as much as he can so that the electorate perceives him as a viable and less incendiary alternative to that of the New York tycoon, according to analysts. At the moment he has not only criticized the traditional media, as Trump did to the point of exhaustion during his presidency, but he has distanced himself from them by betting on Twitter to launch his candidacy. Although it was a fiasco, with silences, interruptions and technical problems for 25 minutes, it is an attempt to capture a different style from the rest. Ultra-conservative, but different.

  • United States
  • Donald Trump

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Learn more