The Rise of the Ronald

Ron DeSantis is the polished, competent, Fox-loving, lib-owning successor-in-waiting to Donald Trump's MAGA nation. Is it any wonder they're locked in a 2024 cold war?

- By Gabriel Sherman

On the afternoon of august 19, several hundred conservative activists streamed into the ballroom at the Wyndham Grand hotel in downtown Pittsburgh. The grassroots event was billed as a Unite and Win” rally for Doug Mastriano, the Donald Trump-backed Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate who was campaigning on Trump’s big lie, that Democrats stole the 2020 election. But Mastriano was only the warm-up act for the headliner, who had drawn me and members of the national press corps to Pennsylvania: Ron DeSantis.

The first-term Florida governor strutted onstage in a boxy suit and red tie, flinging white Ron DeSantis” baseball caps into the sea of unmasked faces. The sound system blasted Sweet Florida,” a country tribute anthem the Lynyrd Skynyrd-adjacent band Van Zant wrote for him. The music wrapped and the crowd quieted. DeSantis gripped the lectern. He offered cursory praise for Mastriano and then uncorked a grievance-fueled stump speech that sounded like it had been written by AI plugged into Fox News. In DeSantis’s telling, the honest people of Florida were besieged by a vast array of liberal scourges: big tech, IRS agents, George Soros, the Biden administration, the corporate media, illegal immigrants, Anthony Fauci, police defunders, Disney, China, communism, cancel culture, critical race theory, and woke gender ideology. Only Ron DeSantis was brave enough to confront these malign forces.

“I'll tell you this. The state of Florida is where woke goes to die!” he vowed, to thunderous applause.