With his new memoir, “The Courage to Be Free,” slated to publish on Tuesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis reflects on the many culture war skirmishes he’s engaged in over the past few years — including championing a Florida law that restricts discussions about sexual and gender identity to young school children, which drew the ire of Hollywood and led to a confrontation with Disney.
DeSantis is expected to enter the Republican presidential primary later this year, and his new book lays out what will likely be the issues he would base his campaign on. In addition to his forays into ‘culture war’ issues, DeSantis also tries to strengthen his conservative bona fides by laying out his objections to government bureaucracy and pointing to his record in Congress.
A Freedom Caucus Founder
As one of the founders of the House Freedom Caucus in 2015, DeSantis worked alongside conservative Congressman Raul Labrador, a BYU graduate who is now Idaho’s attorney general, and other GOP lawmakers who wanted to limit the size of the federal government. In his book, DeSantis says the caucus laid the foundation for many of former President Donald Trump’s policy accomplishments.
Although he says the House Freedom Caucus was “not able to bend the DC swamp,” he says it identified “the shortcomings of the modern Republican establishment” that ultimately “paved the way” for a Trump presidency.
DeSantis on Mitt Romney’s 2012 Campaign
DeSantis also weighed in on why he thinks Utah Sen. Mitt Romney failed to capture the presidency in 2012, distinguishing his observations from what he says the “GOP establishment” took away from that election. Romney lost his presidential run the same year DeSantis was first elected to Congress, and the reelection of former President Barack Obama over Romney appears to have been an inflection point for DeSantis on how he views the rest of his party.
Following the defeat of their candidate, the “Republican intelligentsia,” DeSantis writes, believed the party should embrace “amnesty for illegal aliens” to win national elections.
“GOP insiders believed — wrongly — that Mitt Romney’s lackluster performance with Hispanic voters against Barack Obama during the 2012 election was because he was too tough on immigration,” he says.
DeSantis writes that he believed the opposite to be true but had a difficult time convincing Republican leadership to hear him out. He says he suspected they had a different objective serving “corporate interests” by “facilitat(ing) more cheap labor.”
DeSantis and Trump
On his relationship with Trump, DeSantis is not shy on commenting about their past working relationship. The two are the top contenders in recent 2024 GOP presidential primary polls. While Trump announced his campaign last November, DeSantis has said relatively little about the upcoming race. Many political observers expect him to announce his campaign in the coming months.
In the book, DeSantis highlights what he has in common with Trump, and says he believes his work in Congress helped lay the path for what he considers some of the former president’s biggest accomplishments — including building sections of a wall at the Southern border and moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
The closest DeSantis comes to criticizing Trump is when he points out the differences in how Florida handled the pandemic compared to the federal response.
At the beginning of his memoir, DeSantis lists what he believes are the “bold stands” he’s taken as governor: “fighting partisan media and entrenched bureaucrats by keeping Florida free during the coronavirus pandemic, battling Disney to protect young children in Florida, and standing against powerful interests to safeguard the state’s natural resources.”
The COVID-19 Pandemic
DeSantis recounts his decision to refuse to close schools and businesses in the Sunshine State during the COVID-19 pandemic, which he says gave individuals greater responsibility to make their own assessments about their health risks.
“People throughout our country and across the globe looked to Florida as a citadel of freedom in a world gone mad,” he says.
He says that while the rest of the world dealt with economic stagnation due to COVID-19 policies, Florida flourished during and after the pandemic.
Yale, Harvard, the Navy, then Congress
The memoir includes biographical details about how DeSantis worked his way through college at Yale and Harvard Law School, as well as his time serving in the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, where he completed tours of duty in Iraq and the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba.
He says his first run for Congress in 2012 was a “long-shot,” but he credits his wife Casey for its ultimate success. Throughout the book, his wife is portrayed as a close confidante and advisor as he discusses his policy agenda.
DeSantis says he declined a congressional pension and stopped trading stocks once elected because he believes in a “citizen legislature” and not a “professional ruling class,” which he criticizes Congress of becoming.
Florida Governor
DeSantis credits Trump for helping him win his first Florida gubernatorial run in 2018. A Twitter post by the former president appeared to help him secure the office, he writes.
DeSantis describes how he dealt with several issues, including banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory in Florida classrooms, and his decision to go toe to toe with the Walt Disney Corporation when they criticized his support for a bill prohibiting the discussion of sexual identity with students in kindergarten through third grade.
He reveals that originally the new Disney CEO Bob Chapek didn’t want to weigh in on the political issue because it was “irrelevant to the company and its businesses.” But DeSantis suggests that the then-former — now current — Disney CEO Bob Iger’s public advocacy opposing the bill put pressure on the board to “assuage its liberal employees in Burbank.”
Although he says he warned Chapek in a private call to “not get involved,” the company publicly lobbied against the bill. DeSantis says he continued to support the bill despite the “leftist media and activist pressure.”
DeSantis’ memoir ends with him saying his at-times controversial approach to governing was affirmed by the people of Florida when they reelected him in 2022 by nearly 20 points. The governor, and potential 2024 presidential candidate, suggests his accomplishments are “a winning blueprint for patriots across the country,” and a path toward American “revival.”