TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — In his new book to be released on Tuesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis describes what he thinks it takes to govern America in an era of grievance politics and partisan polarization, but what the Florida governor leaves out of his 256-page telling is often as interesting as what he includes.
“The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival” is the requisite precursor to a likely 2024 presidential campaign, which DeSantis is expected to announce this spring.
For readers who have followed his numerous news conferences and political rallies, there are no new themes in the book. He heaps scorn on the “administrative state,” “medical authoritarianism,” the Democratic Party, “woke corporations,” Big Tech companies, “corporate media,” and most American universities.
But for a politician whose advisors are encouraging him to become more personable and approachable, there are some new tidbits of detail for his origin story as a working-class baseball star from Dunedin with brains enough to get him into Yale University undergrad and Harvard University law.
DeSantis describes how he worked summers at a local electric company to pay his college tuition, how he felt like an outsider when he arrived on the Yale campus “wearing a T-shirt, jean shorts, and flip-flops” and how his family roots in steel country in Ohio and Pennsylvania “made me God-fearing, hard-working and America-loving.”
He notes how his parents met at Youngstown State University, how his father worked for the Nielsen television ratings company and his mother was a nurse. But he makes no mention of his only sibling — Christina DeSantis, who was seven years younger and died in 2015 at age 30.
DeSantis describes how he met his wife, Casey, hitting golf balls at a Jacksonville driving range: “She was dressed in classy golf attire and was generating an impressive amount of clubhead speed.”
The couple courted while DeSantis was in his first year of active duty in the Navy in 2006, and married at Disney World in 2009 because his wife’s family was “a family of Disney enthusiasts.”
The governor’s biggest rival, former President Donald Trump, gets a few mentions. DeSantis talks about how after three terms as a back-bench congressman, he decided to run for Florida governor in 2017 and asked Trump if he could “send out a tweet touting me as a good candidate for Florida governor.”
The president obliged, DeSantis recalled, convinced that Trump was rewarding him for his willingness “to speak out publicly in defense of the president when it came to the allegations of the Trump-Russia collusion.”
But in mentioning his likely rival, who is already a candidate for the GOP’s 2024 nomination, DeSantis also uses the citations to elevate himself in the comparison.
Trump stories
In one lengthy anecdote, DeSantis describes meeting with Trump in the Oval Office about increasing federal assistance to the Florida Panhandle after Hurricane Michael, a 2018 storm that left the region devastated. Trump eventually agreed to send the additional funds, the governor wrote, while also demanding that DeSantis let the region’s residents know he was responsible for the money.
But after the meeting, Trump’s then acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, warned DeSantis not to announce the funding, according to the governor, saying the president didn’t understand how much extra money he had just committed to sending.
DeSantis wrote: “ ‘Just give me twenty-four hours to run the traps,’ Mick pleaded, as he needed to check for opposition and support for my request. ‘He doesn’t even know what he agreed to in terms of a price tag.’ ” (DeSantis describes Mulvaney, whom he served alongside in the U.S. House, as a “friend.”)
If it bothered DeSantis that Trump’s chief of staff was undermining his funding decision, or if he was concerned the president was unfamiliar with the details of an expensive policy decision, the governor did not let on — as with most of the anecdotes in the book, the governor doesn’t share any personal observations about the meeting, even if he does recall the exchange in exacting detail.
DeSantis recounts another meeting with Trump, held before the governor took office in Tallahassee, when he asked Trump to help with the Army Corps of Engineers management of Lake Okeechobee. Trump agreed to look into it before making a request of his own.
“As I started to leave the Oval Office, I heard the president bark to me,” DeSantis wrote. “ ‘Ron, you better make sure I win Florida!’ ”
In another chapter, DeSantis takes credit for nudging Trump to move the U.S Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and goes into detail about the worrisome elements of a Trump candidacy in 2016 that led to what he describes as the reason “the Republican party hierarchy was, unsurprisingly, almost universally opposed to Trump during the primaries.”
But DeSantis’ book omits the most consequential Trump tweet of the governor’s first campaign, when the president on June 22, 2018, tweeted that DeSantis “will be a Great Governor & has my full Endorsement.”
Although the tweet is widely seen as helping catapult DeSantis past the favorite, Republican Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam in the GOP primary, DeSantis credits the June 28, 2018, debate with Putnam as the turning point.
Anecdotes and Omissions
DeSantis uses much of the book to defend his often-combative approach to managing the state’s response to COVID-19, and to detail his disdain for Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The governor’s account, however, is devoid of the backroom battles, legal challenges, and policy compromises related to the vaccine mandates and other issues that shaped much of his term — including the Disney dispute and the E-verify immigration rules.
For example, DeSantis writes that as he battled with the CDC over COVID-19 protocols in November 2021, he called a special session of the Florida Legislature “so that we could enact protections for workers who did not want the shot.”
He does not explain, however, that the governor wanted to include a provision to hold employers legally responsible if an employee who was asked to take the COVID-19 vaccine subsequently got sick from it. The state’s largest business lobbying organizations and the GOP-led Legislature fervently opposed giving employees a cause of action to sue employers who mandated vaccinations.
Businesses worried that the governor’s proposal would prevent employers who had underlying health conditions from being able to keep their workplaces safe. Lawmakers dropped the penalty provisions and the governor declared victory anyway.
“If there was one reason why people started calling us the Free State of Florida, it was because we stood up for individuals against medical authoritarianism,’’ DeSantis wrote.
Mentioned less often than Trump in the book was DeSantis’ Republican colleague, Rick Scott, who served two terms as governor before DeSantis took office.
In a chapter about the early days of his administration, DeSantis refers to a decision from his “predecessor as governor” to sell all state aircraft once used to transport Florida’s governors, writing that Scott was “wealthy and had his own plane.” DeSantis instead used a converted drug seizure plane from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for official business.
That plane, DeSantis recounts, was forced to make an emergency landing in 2019, after oxygen devices dropped from the ceiling while he and Attorney General Ashley Moody were flying to Broward County.
In a statement, Scott spokesman Chris Hartline defended the then-governor’s decision to sell the state planes.
“Then-Governor Scott sold the state planes and traveled around the state on his own dime while taking no salary, saving the taxpayers of Florida tens of millions of dollars,” Hartline said. “He cares deeply about fiscal responsibility and respect for taxpayer money.”
DeSantis did not use the book to share any frustration with Scott, now a U.S. senator, instead focusing on how he made his way to Broward County later in the day to announce he was suspending Sheriff Scott Israel from duty. Israel’s suspension was one of DeSantis’ first acts in office and the governor accused him of mishandling the response to the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
DeSantis makes no mention of the fact that an investigation by an independent arbitrator ruled that Israel should be reinstated. The Florida Senate, however, sided with DeSantis and refused to give him his job back.
DeSantis is also conspicuously reticent about other politically sensitive issues contained in the book. He declines, for instance, to say specifically why George Floyd died in 2020, writing that the Minnesota man died “while in custody of four Minneapolis police officers.”
Floyd’s death, which sparked national protests about the relationship between police officers and members of the African-American community, was ruled a homicide by local authorities, after a law enforcement officer kneeled on his neck for multiple minutes. The doctor responsible for the autopsy, Andrew Baker, would later testify in court in 2021 that Floyd’s underlying heart condition and the presence of drugs in his system contributed to his death, but they were not the direct cause of it — testimony that has not stopped some right-wing political figures from insisting that the police were not responsible for his death.
DeSantis writes that after Floyd died, the “left pounced, citing Floyd’s death as confirmation of systemic racial bias in law enforcement across the country.”
The governor does write extensively about how, in his view, the American Revolution “put slavery on the defensive,” seeking a contrast with some political leftists who argue the country was founded to protect the institution of slavery.
“The full promise of the Declaration of Independence was not fulfilled in 1776 for all Americans, but the Founders established a revolutionary project whose ideas changed the course of human history,” DeSantis wrote.
Thoughts on Washington
In the book’s final chapters, DeSantis provides his treatise on government.
He argues that institutions have become “thoroughly politicized” and that many are “actively trying to impose an ideological agenda on society.” He calls for term limits for members of Congress, a balanced budget amendment, and strengthening the powers of the president by making 50,000 employees at-will employees who can be fired by the president.
He also criticizes Congress for not using its “power of the purse to hold the administrative state accountable” and suggests the federal government should follow Florida’s lead.
“Florida has done a much better job than Washington in fostering accountability in government,’’ DeSantis wrote. “For one thing, the Florida Legislature is much more willing to wield the power of the purse to hold the bureaucracy accountable.”
He makes no mention of the 2022 lawsuit accusing DeSantis of violating Florida’s budgeting laws when his administration gave a no-bid contract to a company with close ties to one of his advisors to relocate migrants from Texas to Massachusetts. To end the lawsuit, the Florida Legislature met in special session this month to rewrite the law. It also deemed all previous payments approved without requiring the administration to turn over budget details.
The lone example DeSantis offers to show that the Legislature used its authority “to protect the people against waste in government” is based on the reporting of the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times Tallahassee bureau. In a series of articles, the Herald/Times revealed that the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence had compensated its chief executive officer more than $7.5 million from state and federal funds — including nearly $5 million in cash compensation for “paid time off.”
“When my administration got word that one of the providers of services for victims of domestic abuse had been squandering large amounts of tax dollars, I worked with the Legislature to put a stop to it,’’ DeSantis wrote. He added that the Legislature repealed the sole source contract and withheld further state money from the organization.
A constant theme in the book is DeSantis’ critique of what he perceives is a hostile and biased “legacy media.” But in providing the domestic violence example, DeSantis omits any mention of the fact that it was journalists who exposed the practice after legislators sustained the payments for years.
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(McClatchy Senior National Security and White House Correspondent Michael Wilner contributed to this report.)
