Thursday 10 November 2022 11:29 PM TOM LEONARD: How 'Trump with a brain' wants to make America the place where ... trends now
The Democrat elites who spend their summers on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard had their peace rudely shattered in September by the sudden arrival of 50 Venezuelan asylum-seekers.
The migrants had been assured they could start new lives there, but the horrified local authorities, insisting there was nowhere to house them on an island heaving with empty multi-million-dollar weekend homes, swiftly sent them packing.
Democrats howled with fury when Florida’s outspoken Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, admitted he had flown them there. It might have been an insensitive stunt for the unfortunate Venezuelans, but it was a brutally effective way of exposing the hypocrisy of Left-leaning politicians happy to open America’s borders and declare their jurisdictions ‘sanctuary states’ for illegal immigrants — but less happy when the sanctuaries are on their own doorsteps.
DeSantis' supporters argue he is Trump without the bad bits. The Florida Govenor is pictured speaking at a rally in Orlando before the midterm elections
It’s hard to imagine a Tory MP ever daring to do something similar in the UK — but, then, DeSantis has a reputation for taking no prisoners in his battle against wokery and Left-wing cant.
His critics may deride the 44-year-old as ‘Trump 2.0’: a cynical opportunist and intolerant bully who plays to the crowd by taking on anyone who offends his notions of what America should be about. And in fact supporters happily embrace the ‘Trump 2.0’ nickname — although they point out that what it really means is ‘Trump with substance’.
DeSantis, they argue, is The Donald without the bad bits — the worrying inability to focus on details, the alarming volatility, the shameless egotism and greed, and the tawdry treatment of women.
DeSantis may share many of Trump’s views and policy goals — witness his full-throated denunciations of corporate political correctness, Covid mask mandates, lockdowns and LGBT ‘indoctrination’ of schoolchildren — but DeSantis is simply far more efficient and effective than the chaotic former president.
Even political opponents concede he’s fiercely intelligent, politically clued up, hard-working and disciplined. And right now, more than ever, he looks like the future of the Republican Party, eclipsing the man whose endorsement of his governorship was crucial to his rise.
This week’s midterm elections cemented this reputation. While Trump-backed candidates floundered, DeSantis won a second term as governor in the Sunshine State with spectacular ease.
President Donald Trump greets Florida Republican Ron DeSantis as his wife, Casey DeSantis, looks on during a campaign rally at the Hertz Arena on October 31
When he took to the stage to rapturous applause on election night, with his glamorous ex-TV reporter wife Casey and their three young children — son Mason and daughters Madison and Mamie — in tow. It’s a family that has been described as ‘ready-made for a campaign brochure’.
His victory was in large part testament to his political savvy in avoiding campaigning on two controversial issues that doomed other Republicans: abortion and debunked claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent.
The Democrats and their media allies do their best to portray DeSantis as a robotic ideologue who’s turned his state into a steaming swamp of aggressive conservatism. But DeSantis counters that his Florida is ‘the place where woke goes to die’ and it’s clear many Americans like the sound of that. By August this year, a record number of New York residents — nearly 42,000 — re-registered their driving licences in Florida, which is a telling indicator of people moving south.
The same statistics show people are also pouring in from other Democrat-run states such as California, Illinois and Pennsylvania, with incomers telling estate agents they’re fleeing high taxes and rising crime.
DeSantis’s no-nonsense approach to the latter — he’s had no truck with the post-Black Lives Matter trend of ignoring comparatively minor offences to keep people out of prison — has meant that it continues to fall in Florida even as violent crime soars in Democrat-led cities across the U.S.
He has also been a crusader against what he calls ‘woke gender ideology’ and has pushed through a law banning transgender girls from female sporting events. In April, he made international headlines when he turned his fire on ‘Woke Disney’, whose vast Disney World theme park near Orlando makes it a powerful force in Florida, after its bosses publicly criticised a DeSantis-driven ban on primary schools teaching children aged five to nine about sexual orientation and gender identity.
