Ron DeSantis has praised former US president Donald Trump for his “unique star power”, derision of the media as “the enemy of the American people” and decisive role in helping DeSantis win election as a state governor.
The flattering comments appear in DeSantis’s book The Courage to Be Free, obtained by the Guardian prior to publication. They are likely to disappoint Republicans urging the Florida governor to jump into the 2024 Republican primary race soon so he can aggressively take on the former president.
Instead DeSantis, 44, who has already drawn fire from the ex-president – earning the nickname “Ron DeSanctimonious” – expresses support for Trump’s “Make America great again” (Maga) agenda and pulls punches where they differ.
And whereas the former vice-president Mike Pence’s memoir offered a detailed account of his break with Trump over the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, DeSantis makes no mention of the deadly insurrection in his 288-page tome.
Democrats are likely to seize on the book as evidence that potential Republican candidates are still wary of assailing Trump directly because of his power over the party base. Last week Nikki Haley, a former US ambassador to the UN, entered the primary with a speech that mentioned Trump by name only once and did not rebuke him.
DeSantis, who has styled himself as a culture warrior and recently imposed sweeping restrictions on books in public schools, uses his own volume to take aim at critical race theory, “woke” ideology and entrenched elites, including those that ruled the Republican party. He scorns the George W Bush foreign policy that led to the Iraq war and genuflects before Trump and his outsider campaign in 2016.
“Trump also brought a unique star power to the race,” he writes. “If someone had asked me, as a kid growing up in the eighties and nineties, to name someone who was rich, I – and probably nearly all my friends – would have responded by naming Donald Trump.”
He adds: “Some DC commentators have opined that Donald Trump’s nomination represented a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. But this analysis gets it exactly backward.
“Since Ronald Reagan flew back to California on January 20, 1989, the GOP grass roots had been longing for someone who rejected the old-guard way of doing business and who could speak to their concerns and aspirations. Trump supported policies that appealed to the base in a way that GOP leaders in the DC swamp had been either incapable of doing or unwilling to do.”
DeSantis recalls knocking on doors while running for re-election in the House, after Paul Ryan, then speaker of the House of Representatives, pulled his endorsement of Trump in the wake of an Access Hollywood tape in which the celebrity businessman boasted about grabbing women’s private parts. Many voters were “very upset” at Ryan, he writes, and felt that the Republican establishment was “locking arms” against Trump.
DeSantis, known for his pugnacious approach to reporters, quotes Trump as saying that the media are “the enemy of the American people” and comments that national legacy press outlets “spent the next four years proving Trump right”.
For example, DeSantis dismisses the allegation that Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia as the work of Democrats and their “media armies” after Hillary Clinton’s defeat. “Their joint goal was to kneecap Trump’s presidency any way they could and to drive him out of office entirely.”
The author states with apparent pride that he was one of the earliest opponents in Congress of the Russia investigation. “While the hysteria about Russia collusion consumed much of Trump’s presidency, at the end of the day, Russia collusion was little more than a tall tale, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
The special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between members of the Trump campaign and Russians. But a bipartisan Senate report affirmed the US intelligence community’s conclusions that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in an influence campaign aimed at helping Trump win the White House.
Trump announced his third consecutive run for president late last year and has already jabbed at DeSantis, claiming that it was his backing that made all the difference in the Republican primary for Florida governor in 2018. He told NewsNation recently: “I got [DeSantis] the nomination. He didn’t get it. I got it, because the minute I made that endorsement, he got it.”
Few will be surprised if Trump continues to make this claim to argue that DeSantis is now trying to stab him in the back. The governor’s book again declines to pick a fight over the issue, acknowledging his debt to Trump for an endorsement that he was aware would “enhance my name recognition”.
He writes: “I knew that a Trump endorsement would provide me with the exposure to GOP primary voters across the State of Florida, and I was confident that many would see me as a good candidate once they learned about my record.
“I had developed a good relationship with the president largely because I supported his initiatives in Congress and opposed the Russia collusion conspiracy theory.”
As opinion polls show Trump and DeSantis as the early frontrunners in the Republican primary, one clear bone of contention is the coronavirus pandemic. The governor has railed against lockdowns and reversed his support for vaccines. But The Courage to Be Free does not exploit even this issue as much as might be expected.
DeSantis does make clear that he disagreed with Trump’s decision to extend lockdown guidelines beyond the initial 15 days, and to sign a $2.2tn coronavirus relief bill passed by Congress. His sharpest rebuke, however, is reserved for infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci, who, DeSantis contends, spoke “irresponsibly”.
