Donald Trump has a rival for Republican affections

Being publicly identified as a culture war enemy by Democrats confirms Ron DeSantis’s rapid ascent to the status of the most popular Republican in the US - after You Know Who.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis greets people in Surfside, Florida. Picture: AFP

This week the government of California added Florida to the list of places to which travel funded by the state is forbidden. With a few exceptions, no bureaucrat, teacher or other state employee may visit Florida on the public dime.

You might think this is some new ultra-cautious pandemic measure designed to stop Californians bringing back the Delta variant from a state that has been notably more permissive over lockdowns in the last year. But you’d be wrong. Florida has become a no-go area for Californians because, in the words of Rob Bonta, the Golden State’s attorney-general announcing the ban, Florida has been guilty of “a co-ordinated attack on fundamental civil rights”.

Florida’s offence, in the eyes of its west coast rival, was to enact a recent law that forbids transsexuals from participating in girls’ sports at school and college. The measure puts the Sunshine State in breach of a California law designed to protect LGBTQ rights. There are now 17 states California’s residents may not use public money to visit, between them comprising about a third of the entire US population.

Former US President Donald Trump. Picture: AFP

The prospect of losing Californian dollars at teachers’ conventions or college sports events doesn’t faze Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor. For one thing, whatever minor financial cost the ban may represent to the state is more than offset by the flood of businesses and individuals relocating to Florida. The number of California residents alone moving to Florida this year is on pace to grow by more than a third compared with 2019, according to state driving licence data for the four months of 2021. Florida’s relatively attractive personal income tax rate - zero per cent compared with California’s top rate of 14 per cent - seems to outweigh whatever moral qualms Californians may have about the state’s supposedly vicious repression of female high school girls who were once boys.

DeSantis celebrated the latest attempt by left-wing politicians to demonise Florida as a badge of honour. “Congratulations to California for somehow finding a new way to politicise its bureaucracy,” said Christina Pushaw, his press secretary, herself a refugee from California.

If you’re an ambitious Republican politician, being publicly identified as a culture war enemy by the increasingly off-the-charts Democrats of the people’s woke republic of California is about as high an accolade as you can get. It merely confirms DeSantis’s rapid ascent to the status of the most popular Republican in the country - after You Know Who.

In the past year DeSantis has emerged as the new hero of Republicans everywhere. The Covid pandemic, with its raging debates over masks and lockdowns, has been the most potent front in the culture wars and the governor has been a veritable Joan of Arc.

His decision to keep Florida largely open except for a short period early in the pandemic earned him searing opprobrium from much of the national media, who predicted unimaginable mayhem and death. But Florida has been one of the success stories. Its death rate has been much lower than many states that locked down almost completely, such as New York, in part because it focused on protecting vulnerable communities while letting others continue life as normal.

That decision also meant the state’s economy has been among the most buoyant: unemployment is 4.9 per cent, well below the national average, and just 1.5 percentage points above where it was pre-pandemic. New York’s rate of 7.8 per cent is four percentage points higher than it was before Covid.

DeSantis, 42, has been quick to grasp that his status as the media’s second-favourite Republican bogeyman is a gift to him. The Yale and Harvard-educated former lawyer and teacher is typical of mainstream Republicans who embraced Trump’s populism. He regularly derides the elitists who portray conservative Floridians as red of neck and white supremacist of politics. Events seem to conspire to keep him in the public eye. Throughout the past week he has been nationally visible, helping direct rescue efforts after the collapse of an apartment building in Miami.

With soaring approval ratings and a status as spear carrier for so many Republicans, what could possibly go wrong? The answer lies with Florida’s most famous resident. DeSantis has so far been carefully - some would say cravenly - loyal to Donald Trump. When he was elected governor in 2018 his campaign seemed at times an exercise in abject sycophancy to the then president.

But an eventual separation may be looming. As Trump publicly muses about another presidential run in 2024, the question for DeSantis is whether to wait or start laying the path for his own presidential ambitions and risk incurring the Trumpian wrath.

Trump’s myriad legal problems may deepen this week with the expected decision by New York prosecutors to charge the Trump Organisation and its chief financial officer with tax fraud. However Trump remains popular and his supporters will doubtless see legal action as political in origin and martyring in consequence.

There are faint indications though that Republicans may be ready to move on. In an unscientific online poll for the Western Conservative Summit, organised by Colorado Christian University, DeSantis actually edged out the former president. The signs are that the governor is garnering wider appeal within the national party. Venturing outside his home state last month he headlined a succession of highly lucrative fundraisers from big-money donors - in California.

The Times