When Ron DeSantis took his first steps into the professional world in 2001, he probably didn’t forsee himself on a path leading to a showdown with a hotel magnate who in three years would go on to host The Apprentice on network television.
But, in many ways, Mr DeSantis’s role in the national spotlight seemed almost predetermined, even all those years ago when he was little more than a junior Navy officer bound for his first assignment. The Yale-educated DeSantis, 44, now finds himself the face of a surging faction in the Republican Party that seems as eager to move on from its party’s past as it is to pick fights with America’s new cultural norms — a direct evolution of the previous iteration of the GOP which saw its credibility hemmhorrage due to the failure of the Bush administration to prove any of the claims that led the US into war with Iraq.
