Altered State: For Trump, DeSantis, the road to authoritarianism runs through Florida | Opinion

This is the first of a series of editorials examining the race between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis for the Republican presidential nomination.

In 2017, Donald Trump described Ron DeSantis as “a brilliant young leader, Yale and the Harvard Law, who would make a GREAT Governor of Florida.”

Six years later, after DeSantis had the audacity to challenge Trump for the GOP nomination, the ex-president issued a retraction. Asked if he regretted the endorsement, Trump said: “Yeah maybe, this guy was dead. He was dead as a door nail. … I might say that.”

America might well be wondering how much of Florida is suffering similar regrets. We elected DeSantis by a narrow margin in 2018 and then by a wide margin in 2022. But his tenure as governor has been a nightmare for anyone who values independence of thought or human rights or pretty much any basic tenet of democracy. He has turned free-wheeling Florida into a place of repression and intolerance, adopting Trump’s authoritarian sympathies and attitudes and then taking them further in his pursuit of the presidency. All the while, he has been gaslighting us, too, insisting this is the “free state of Florida.”

His second term has been an exercise in repugnant extremes, even more than his first. And though there are encouraging signs his ultra-far-right approach has stopped working — he has begun driving away the very college-educated Republicans who were supposed to support him as a saner, more-disciplined version of Trump — that hasn’t changed his approach much beyond unveiling an economic plan that slams the “elites.” DeSantis, like Trump, remains bent on imposing his will on the population, first in Florida and now across the nation.

If, under Republican leaders, the United States is on the road to authoritarianism, then that road runs right through Florida.

Authoritarians use the power of the state to crush their foes. They are anti-free speech. They undermine faith in institutions, especially in elections, and point to themselves as the only solution to our grievances and problems.

DeSantis, like Trump, has done all those things and more.

Among them: Rewriting how Florida’s Black history is taught to diminish the evils of slavery, trying to seize control of universities and attacking corporations that dare to criticize his laws. He has crusaded against masks and COVID vaccines, taken away the bodily rights of women and targeted vulnerable groups with a relentlessness that has been chilling to witness.

Undermining elections

DeSantis may not have incited an attempt to overturn a legitimate election, but he’s done plenty to sow doubts about Florida’s voting system by establishing an election police force and making it harder for minorities and felons to vote. He created a personal militia in all but name, one that reports only to him. In June, he announced that he had organized a coalition of some 90 sheriffs in the Southwest — a group of armed law enforcement officers far beyond Florida — who would support his border-security plans, which he said might include shooting drug dealers “stone-cold dead” if they cross into the United States.

These are hallmarks of a dangerous authoritarian.

“I used to call him a mini-Trump,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University professor and author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” Now, she said, “he has gone all out to kind of impose this authoritarian style of leadership in Florida — and clearly wanted to make Florida a model that could be scaled up.”

DeSantis may — or, increasingly, may not — be a threat to Trump as he seeks the nomination. But both men are threats to the country, as they’ve made clear through their actions in office. Authoritarians today rarely seize power in an instant. They tear down democratic institutions gradually, as Viktor Orban has done in Hungary. The prime minister’s warmly received speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference last year, an address he delivered shortly after saying that Hungary must not become a “mixed race” country, centered on defeating “woke culture” and “progressive elites.” Trump and DeSantis seem determined to take us down the same path.

We must stop this slide toward authoritarianism. And that starts with calling it out, plainly and in detail.

DeSantis, like so many in his party, was emboldened by the existence of a president like Trump. As a little-known congressman from North Florida, he got noticed when he called for Republicans to back Trump as the unlikely GOP nominee for president in 2016. Later, he became one of four loyal Trump “warriors” in the House and defended the president on Fox News during the Justice Department’s Russia investigation.

Then came the presidential tweet endorsing him for Florida governor. (Trump, perhaps embellishing, recently said that DeSantis begged him for an endorsement with “tears coming down from his eyes.”) That was followed by DeSantis’ now-notorious campaign ad in which he urged his small daughter to stack cardboard blocks — “Build that wall” — and pretended to read to his son from Trump’s book, The Art of the Deal. “You’re fired! I love that part.”

And in his first gubernatorial victory speech, DeSantis said Trump was “going to get tired of me calling you” and that they would have “a great partnership.” A year later, when Trump changed his residency to Florida, DeSantis was onstage with him at the big “homecoming rally.”

There were signs, though, of things to come. When the crowd cheered the governor, Trump said DeSantis “better not be more popular in Florida than me.”

Threat grows

An authoritarian with an ego like Trump’s can’t stand a challenge to his leadership, and the pandemic laid the groundwork for DeSantis to do just that. DeSantis tapped into people’s frustrations with COVID restrictions. Suddenly, he was being talked about as a presidential contender. And though he delivered Florida to Trump in the 2020 election — good thing, too, since Trump had “joked” that he would “fire” the governor if he didn’t win Florida — DeSantis was a growing threat.

By the time DeSantis won reelection, Trump had bestowed the “Ron DeSanctimonious” nickname. There were snide remarks about the governor’s “loyalty and class” when he refused to rule out a presidential run, and suggestions he lacked personality. Recently, Trump said DeSantis ought to go home and deal with Florida’s growing insurance crisis. Apparently, the country isn’t big enough for two authoritarian presidential wannabes.

DeSantis’ responses have been mostly muted, with an occasional flash of temper. He once jabbed at Trump’s indictment on charges related to a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, saying, “ I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair.” On Twitter Spaces, he said it’s time to “end the culture of losing that has infected the Republican Party in recent years.”

It’s clear he doesn’t want to alienate Trump’s followers, so he’s in a delicate position. On July 21, he said on Russell Brand’s podcast that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the one Trump incited and then watched unfold on TV for hours without trying to stop it, “was not an insurrection” but a “protest” that “devolved into a riot.”

And that, in the end, is the most telling thing he could have said. A peaceful transfer of power is a critical component of a democracy. Neither man seems capable of committing to that idea. Nor are they interested in governing all of the people, one of the most difficult but essential concepts of democratic rule. Trump and DeSantis may have parted ways but they remain in lockstep when it comes to their desire to seize control of government at the expense of freedom for the many who disagree with them.

If democracy is to survive in this country, that terrible impulse to acquire power at all costs — in Trump, DeSantis or anyone else — has to be defeated. If it’s not, Florida stands to earn a shameful place in history: the state where American democracy went to die.