The Energetic Executive

In 2011, before his first congressional campaign, Ron DeSantis was just another debut author in search of readers. For months, he traveled across his home state of Florida to Tea Party meetings to hawk Dreams From Our Founding Fathers, his diagnosis of America’s ills and missteps under the leadership of Barack Obama, issued by a local vanity press known mostly for schlocky genre fiction. As the title suggests, the book was meant as a smug rejoinder to Obama’s 1995 memoir; in practice, it was a fairly straightforward recitation of Tea Party talking points, enlivened only by the occasional, feeble potshot at Obama’s personality and background. DeSantis thus revealed himself to be one of those special souls who, after surveying the world and finding it wanting, decides to self-publish a book. Among the many strains of narcissist in existence, this one is among the most deranged—perhaps outmatched only by those egomaniacs who believe that they should be president.

DeSantis, it turns out, qualifies as both. Twelve years and several terms in the House and the Florida governor’s mansion later, he barreled headlong into what veteran GOP strategists have called the “Worst Republican Presidential Campaign Ever.” He ran as “Trump without the baggage,” to the praise of establishment Republicans; some of his volunteers knocked doors and distributed cards that read “DeSantis Solves Problems . . . With No Drama.” But what DeSantis failed to recognize was that enthusiastic Trump voters like the drama and the baggage. To the former president’s supporters, his verbal volatility, unpredictable behavior, and indifference to political norms are not drawbacks, but signs of strength. DeSantis saw the voters he was determined to steal the same way the mega-donors who fed his campaign did: as feeble-minded people who, deep down, wanted to follow a responsible authority figure. He promised them efficiency in manipulating a system that they hoped to see completely destroyed. Trump had found a base that wanted an outlaw; DeSantis offered them an administrator in cowboy boots.

But before DeSantis suspended his presidential bid in January; before his campaign found itself running on fumes, hemorrhaging donors, and polling in the single digits; before he even officially declared his candidacy, he published his second book, this time with a real-deal press. His campaign memoir, The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival (2023), was his pitch deck to the voters who did not ultimately support him and the donor class who did—at least until his stock plummeted. Like all works in its genre, it naturally repels any search for greater insight into its subject’s essential nature. But as the blueprint that it promises to be, it is ruthlessly competent. While DeSantis may have become synonymous with embarrassing hubris, the vision Courage maps out—tediously, yes, and with the same charmlessness and lack of subtlety that cost its author his national reputation—is a coherent and alarming one. The failure of a single vehicle for its expression isn’t enough to kill it off.

Indeed, DeSantis’s flop may have limited his sphere of influence to Florida, but Courage goes to great pains to emphasize that his home state—which he calls “a beachhead of sanity”—could be a prototype for the rest of the country. “Florida has stood as an antidote to America’s failed ruling class,” he writes. “Policies in Florida empower individuals to make the most of their own lives, including by limiting the power and influence of large, politically connected institutions that operate in accordance with leftist ideology.” For DeSantis, of course, “empowering individuals” means undercutting the workings of democracy to increase the influence of his supporters and allies, and “limiting the power of institutions” amounts to attacking any people or body that would undermine this goal. And, just as Courage suggests, the ultra-reactionary laws that have accomplished these aims in Florida have often prompted copycat bills across the country. The state has also become a welcome environment for the national chapters of far-right groups like Moms for Liberty and a breeding ground for white nationalists; the anti-democracy Claremont Institute launched its newest office in Tallahassee last February, a month after DeSantis set in motion the right-wing takeover of New College of Florida, a small public liberal arts college once known as a bastion of progressivism and a haven for queer students. All of this remains relevant to the lives of Floridians even after DeSantis was laughed out of the presidential race, and it threatens to become increasingly relevant to the lives of other Americans, too. As DeSantis put it when he suspended his campaign, “The mission continues. Down here in Florida, we will continue to show the country how to lead.” Reading Courage now—on the precipice of a likely second Trump term, which analysts warn promises to be more ideologically organized than the first—one is inclined to take the threat seriously.

As with any marketing ploy, Courage sells a brand, casting DeSantis as the kind of down home “regular guy” that is ubiquitous in American politics—a kind of guy that he clearly is not. Early in the book, we are told that while DeSantis was “geographically raised in Tampa Bay,” his “upbringing reflected the working-class communities in western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio” where his parents were from. To anyone familiar with Pinellas County, where DeSantis grew up, this is laughable. It’s the same county, as it happens, where my parents—Philadelphia transplants—raised my brother and me, and it’s the kind of manicured and sheltered suburban community that gets parodied in movies like Edward Scissorhands (which was filmed in nearby Lutz). During DeSantis’s childhood, the area was becoming inundated with high-tech manufacturing companies and financial firms. His father worked for Nielsen Media Research, whose local headquarters were in his hometown of Dunedin; his mother was a nurse. Though he wasn’t raised with outsized wealth, he grew up in the kind of insulated and atomizing place that encourages intolerance, even contempt, for anything that doesn’t fit its mold.

From Florida, where he played competitive youth baseball, DeSantis was recruited to play at Yale. It’s at this point, in a memoir relatively light on biographical detail, that the reader receives an uncomfortable glimpse into the governor’s villain origin story. Stepping onto campus, he tells us, triggered in him a disturbing “culture shock.” “Here I was, a blue-collar kid from Tampa Bay,” he writes, “at a university in which a large per­centage of students were from families who were millionaires.” But the hostility he describes—the same hostility that animates Courage and, it seems, his political career—reads less like an awakening to injustice than the resentment of the petit bourgeois. “I assumed doing well at a place like Yale would allow me to move up in what Lincoln called the ‘race of life,’ to advance in America’s meritocracy,” he writes. Instead, he claims to have been stunned by his peers’ “unbridled leftism” and their “wholesale rejection of the basic principles that constituted the foundation of the American experiment: the Judeo-Christian tradition, the existence of Creator-endowed rights, the notion of American exceptionalism.” In other words, rather than feeling welcomed into the fold, swept inevitably into the tide of prestige and opportunity that such an institution had always offered men like him, DeSantis felt rejected.

DeSantis’s many attempts to paint himself as blue-collar—and his tendency to equate having parents from the Rust Belt with having a working-class upbringing—are representative of a discrepancy at the core of the memoir. While DeSantis claims to address the disaffected working class, the pose he strikes in Courage does not seem directed at these voters at all. Instead, it’s perfectly calibrated to validate the assumptions of the wealthy conservatives who he hoped would smooth his path to power: the ones invested in seeing class as a set of values, beliefs, and superficial signifiers rather than a life-shaping relationship to capital. In fact, DeSantis states explicitly that he considers a person to be a member of the elite not by virtue of power or wealth, but rather by “shar[ing] the ideology and outlook of the ruling class,” offering Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as an absurd example of someone who is not an elite “because he rejects the group’s ideology, tastes, and attitudes.” Under this worldview, an adjunct professor is not working-class, but a self-employed electrical contractor with a six-figure salary is. It is the same worldview in which there’s no contradiction between bragging, “In Florida, we beat the elites” and erasing local living-wage requirements, or loosening regulations on child labor laws and heat-exposure pro­tections that keep workers safe.

Those acts of craven deregulation were foreshadowed by DeSantis’s early career in the military. After graduating from Yale and Harvard Law School, he joined the Navy as a prosecutor, prompted, he writes, by his sense that he had an “obligation to serve” his country after 9/11. After a stint as a legal adviser at the infamous Guantánamo Bay detention camp, where he counseled officers that they could force-feed prisoners on hunger strike, he was deployed to Iraq in 2007 as an adviser to the commander of the Special Operations Task Force-West in Fallujah. In this position, he provided legal justifications for reducing the red tape that he felt was forcing every American soldier to operate “with one hand tied behind his back.” (DeSantis writes of the “very low” likelihood that “Navy SEALs—who are perhaps the best-trained war fighters in the world—would intentionally flout the laws of war,” an almost comically obtuse thing to say about a unit that whistleblowers have called “lawless” and described as operating as if they were “untouchable,” and that shielded people like Eddie Gallagher, who was accused of fatally stabbing a detainee in 2017.) “My job is to help you accomplish your mission,” he explained to his commander. “Not to impede it.”

Back home in Florida, DeSantis ran for Congress in 2012—a race he recounts, of course, as an underdog story: “I . . . had virtually no name recognition . . . and I did not have any money or rich friends to support me.” In reality, DeSantis, equipped with his Ivy League connections, raised more than all of his opponents combined; he used the money on massive ad buys attacking the other Republican primary candidates with false claims and distortions. He won by a landslide. Notably, during his time in Congress, DeSantis was not yet trying to cultivate the image of the brutally effective change agent that he would later make his imprimatur. Colleagues described him as “a backbencher” who was “not a very effective member of Congress,” and who, per Politico, “was probably best known . . . for being a standout on Republicans’ congressional baseball squad.” He was a founding member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus but “had a way of ‘dipping out and disappearing’ from meetings if a leadership fight or funding battle was not playing well,” as another senior member told The New York Times. In Courage, the only successful piece of legislation he takes ownership of, after six years in the House, is something called the Puppies Assisting Wounded Service­members for Veterans Therapy Act, or PAWS, which paired veterans with service dogs, and which only passed after he left office. DeSantis blames his disappointing tenure on the dysfunction of Congress itself, which he disparages as beholden to a bureaucratic “expert” class that he calls “a federal apparatus that exists outside the confines of constitutional accountability and draws almost entirely from the coastal, college-educated, self-appointed elite.” He saw himself as fit to exercise greater power than he could garner as just one in a sea of representatives. “I felt that I had the capacity to provide good service,” he writes in Courage, “but only if the position afforded me the opportunity to exercise leadership.”

DeSantis’s disdain for Congress—though arguably warranted by the body’s gridlocked absurdity—hints at his more thoroughgoing skepticism of democracy itself. This suspicion shows up early in Courage, during his time in Iraq, where he became convinced that US intervention had gone against the principles of the Founding Fathers. “The Founders would not have thought of forcibly removing a dictator and then having a society governed by the mere whims of the majority as ‘liberty,’” he writes. “They knew that liberty could be squelched by a runaway majority just as easily as it could be by a single tyrant.” Indeed, upon narrowly winning his race for governor in 2018, DeSantis quickly proved to be untroubled by tyranny as long as the tyrant in question was him. At last, he writes, he “was not just one of many elected to a legislative body, but was the one man elected to lead a state of more than twenty million people”—a line revealing a taste for executive dominance that he acted on almost immediately.