Florida

Friday

Cockburn

Tate brothers threaten to tilt Florida governor race

Who could have predicted that a pair of (accused) sex-trafficking British-born brothers could cause such a stir in the Sunshine State? The brief return of manosphere influencers Tristan and Andrew Tate to Florida has become a flashpoint in state politics. Governor Ron DeSantis has directed his attorney general, close ally James Uthmeier, to investigate the brothers. DeSantis is thought to favor his wife Casey as a potential successor when he leaves office in 2026, as opposed to Congressman Byron Donalds, who served as a Trump campaign surrogate.

Tuesday

Ben Domenech

Casey DeSantis is clearly running for Florida governor

Palm Beach, Florida Casey DeSantis is running for Florida governor. That is simply a matter of accepted knowledge for the West Palm Beach denizens gathered at the Flagler Museum on a breezy evening among the palm trees. But it's still astonishing to see how quickly she adapts to the role and inhabits it in a bright pink pantsuit. The far more telegenic half of the gubernatorial team, who benefits from a Myers-Briggs score that begins with "E" instead of "I," delivered a speech last week that put a strong emphasis on "we" at every juncture — what "we" accomplished for Florida, how "we" pushed back against Joe Biden's foolishness and how close "we" believe the loss of Florida's model could be should Democrats prevail in the state her husband helped turn bright flaming red.

casey desantis

Friday

The Spectator

What’s next for DoGE fever?

Washington, DC has been struck with DoGE (Department of Government Efficiency) fever — just as everyone started getting over the bugs they all caught at from Trump’s inauguration. Elon Musk and his gang of twenty-something whiz kids are making their mark across the federal government, starting with USAID, which Musk has repeatedly criticized in strident terms as being the core of the corruption he’s seeking to root out.

Wednesday

Zack Christenson

Trump hails new ‘golden age’ in Palm Beach victory speech

At just before 2:30 a.m. ET, President-elect Donald Trump took the stage in West Palm Beach to declare victory as the 47th president of the United States. "This will truly be the golden age of America," Trump said. "It will make America great again. There was no other path to victory. We will make you proud of your vote." After thanking his family, his youngest son Barron towering over him and Melania, he went through a litany of shoutouts and thank-yous to his inner circle, including Elon Musk, who he praised as "a genius we must protect" after giving a detailed rundown watching a SpaceX rocket land after a launch; and Dana White, who he invited to the stage to offer thanks to a roster of podcasters including Theo Von and the Nelk Boys.

donald trump victory

Monday

Tyler O'Neil

The Florida abortion question that could shape national policy

Lorien Hershberger checked every box: she grew up in poverty, was pregnant just out of high school and her boyfriend wasn’t interested in being a father. She had an abortion at twenty. When Vice President Kamala Harris talks about abortion, Lorien is not just the exemplar of reproductive freedom — she is the audience. Perhaps that is why she has received so many robocalls and text messages from Amendment 4 campaigners looking to enshrine abortion up until the moment of birth as a right in the Florida state constitution. They are mistaken. “This is a business,” Hershberger, now a pro-life activist, tells The Spectator. “That’s the most disgusting part of it to me. They do come [in] under the banner of, ‘We’re about women and we’re protecting women.

abortion

Friday

Caroline Calloway

Caroline Calloway: my hurricane diary

I promise I’ll get to the hurricane stuff, but first I just want to take a moment to appreciate how rare it is that I’m even writing this — and how special it is that we can gather together like this inside my sentences, in The Spectator, a place that is famously way more boring and more well-respected than my social media or my books. (Although the Washington Post DID call Scammer “a masterpiece” and the New Yorker DID say “Scammer is funny, engaging, and full of genuine insight,” which is what I would like my tombstone to say when it finally is my time to go!) There’s a lot of writing in print and online about me and comparatively none at all by me. This is by choice. I’m not complaining!

caroline calloway

Wednesday

Dave Seminara

Weathering the storm: on the ground in hurricane-ravaged Florida

Fort Lauderdale, Florida I’ve lived in seven US states and five countries, but when I arrived in St. Petersburg, Florida in 2019 I knew it was my last stop. There is no such thing as paradise on earth, but for me, St. Pete is as close as it comes. But every year during hurricane season, we’re on pins and needles hoping the big one won’t come and wipe us off the map. Our homeowner’s and flood insurance rates are insane, but I still don’t know anyone who feels like their policies are comprehensive enough to sleep easy when the Weather Channel vans prowl our streets like hungry hyenas looking for viral footage during hurricane season.

Sunday

Juan P. Villasmil

Man in custody after foiled Trump assassination attempt

One man is in custody after shots were fired at former president’s Donald Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida Sunday afternoon. At the time of the shooting, the former president was golfing. The FBI is investigating the incident as an assassination attempt.  The former president's website sent out an "alert from Trump" shortly after the incident that reads: “There were gunshots in my vicinity, but before rumors start spiraling out of control, I wanted you to hear this first: I AM SAFE AND WELL!” Law enforcement sources have identified the would-be shooter as Ryan Wesley Routh. The FBI said in a statement that it “has responded to West Palm Beach Florida and is investigating what appears to be an attempted assassination of former president Trump.

trump

Wednesday

Cockburn

Where will Melania Trump live in her husband’s potential second term?

Melania Trump might not return to DC full-time for Trump’s possible second term, according to Axios. The article is predicated on a survey of a “handful of Melania-ologists,” because a spokesperson for Melania didn’t respond to Axios’s request for comment. As the article mentioned: “Melania does what Melania wants” — and Cockburn doesn’t blame her one bit. In February, when asked if Melania would be on the campaign trail much, Donald Trump said: “She was a very successful model, very, very successful, and yet she was a private person. She’s going to be out a lot. Not because she likes doing it, but she likes the results.” The former first lady, however, has not been in attendance at most of Trump’s campaign events.

melania trump

Thursday

Juan P. Villasmil

Biden should stop appeasing Venezuela, says Salazar

Venezuelan presidential hopeful María Corina Machado had filed a claim in December, arguing to the country’s highest court, that a ban prohibiting her from holding office was unconstitutional. The verdict came last week — and the ban was upheld. As south Florida congresswoman María Elvira Salazar told The Spectator, the conclusions reached by the “Chavista-controlled” tribunal were “unfortunate but not surprising.” The upholding of the ban comes after months of negotiations, where the Biden administration eased sectoral sanctions in pursuit of a “path to democracy.” This approach riled up Florida Republicans, a state with a vast Venezuelan-American population.

salazar

Tuesday

Cockburn

DeSantis breaks the Trump truce

Although they called a ceasefire on Sunday, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are already back in the trenches. Just one day after dropping out of the Republican primary and endorsing Trump, DeSantis announced his intention to block a Florida House bill that would give financial support to the former president’s legal woes. So much for Republican unity... The “Freedom Fighters Fund,” which was introduced by Florida state senator Ileana Garcia on January 5, would have provided up to $5 million for Floridian presidential candidates facing legal actions. The bill didn’t name anyone in particular, but Cockburn can only think of one Sunshine State resident currently running for president and embroiled in a lawsuit — four actually.

ron desantis

Tuesday

Ryan Girdusky

What I told Ron DeSantis and his team about their campaign

Over the last few weeks, about half a dozen reporters told me they were getting ready to write the obituary on DeSantis’s campaign and wanted to include comments I made in off-the-record meetings. I had no intention of ever sharing these comments with the media, but seeing how they would come out anyway, I felt it necessary to get the story straight from my mouth.  For months, I warned Governor DeSantis and his team about their campaign strategy; everything from the super PAC to his message seemed wrong, and I made it known. So here’s what happened. On May 10, I boarded a Delta Airlines flight to Tallahassee to meet the governor, his wife and his campaign team.

ron desantis

Tuesday

Lewis M. Andrews

The real reason people are flocking to red states

It’s no secret that Americans are moving from blue states to red ones. According to recently released Census Bureau data, the five with the largest population loss to other states between July 2022 and July 2023 were California (-338,371), then New York (-216,778), Illinois (-83,839), New Jersey (-44,666), Massachusetts (-39,149) and Maryland (-30,905). The five states with the largest overall increases during the same period were Texas (473,453), Florida (365,205), Georgia (116,077), South Carolina (90,600) and Tennessee (77,512). The most frequently cited reason for this ongoing blue-to-red migration is taxes — or, more correctly, the opportunity to pay less and fewer of them.

red states

Monday

Amber Duke

Revealed: how Disney hijacked Reedy Creek to become its own government

A soon-to-be-public audit of Disney’s special governing district in Florida details the “shocking” ways in which the nearly $200 billion company was effectively governing itself for half a century. Investigators described the Reedy Creek Improvement District as Disney’s “creature” that maximized company profits at the expense of Floridians, according to a copy of the report obtained by The Spectator. Disney placated Reedy Creek employees with millions of dollars' worth of special park passes, significant discounts on cruises, food and merchandise and handpicked leadership through shady land deals to ensure that Reedy Creek would do its bidding.

disney reedy creek

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

Why Trump’s rally mattered more than the GOP debate in Miami

Do you believe in coincidences? I used to. But like Macbeth I have just “supped full with horror.” That is, I have been flipping back and forth between the glitzy but pointless Republican debate in Miami and Donald Trump’s rally in nearby Hialeah, Florida.  And here’s Exhibit One in my brief against coincidences: my office reading group is just now, as I write, reading Dante’s Inferno. Yes, could there be any more apposite reading?  I am going to take a page here from that priest W. H. Auden talked about who advised the people who came to him for confession to “be brief, be blunt, and be gone.” An admirable imperative which I intend to obey.

debate

Tuesday

Ben Domenech

Why the Kim Reynolds endorsement of Ron DeSantis matters

Iowa governor Kim Reynolds endorsed Florida governor Ron DeSantis yesterday. While endorsements don’t typically matter, this one could be the exception — both because of what it says about the Republican Party, and what it says about Donald Trump. When DeSantis decided to take the plunge into the presidential race, Team Trump has tried to depict him primarily as one of two things. First, they framed him as a fraud — a faux conservative establishment type, a Jeb Bush acolyte beloved by the donor class, a secret neocon with zero charisma.

kim reynolds iowa

Friday

Matthew Foldi

Could Kevin McCarthy return as speaker?

There’s an easy way out of the chaos in the House, led by a Florida man who’s leaning on lessons learned in his decades as a firefighter and basketball player: Representative Carlos Giménez, the general leading the Only Kevin charge. For some in Congress, the literal Only Kevin pins they wore back in January were as ephemeral as a Nancy Mace promise. But for Giménez, it’s about refusing to reward bad behavior and about loyalty to the man who recruited him to run for his current job. “There was an injustice done” in Giménez’s eyes, he tells me in his Capitol Hill office. “I think that the 96 percent [of House Republicans who voted to keep McCarthy last week] bent to rule of the 4 [percent]. Everybody talks about the majority here.

carlos giménez

Tuesday

Tim Benson

Jimmy Buffett invented the Florida of our dreams

It was once said by somebody, and then repeated ad nauseum, that Brian Wilson invented California. Or, at least, the California of our dreams: sunshine, surf, cars, girls, rock ’n’ roll; the bronzed surfer boy, cradling his longboard in one arm and his sun-kissed, golden beach bunny in the other, getting ready to drop in on some tasty swells at Doheny or Rincon before throwing on a Pendelton and cruising down to the hamburger stand in his flathead deuce coupe or ’62 Impala SS with the 409-cubic inch scalloped head W-series. (Or perhaps, her T-Bird.) In much the same way, Jimmy Buffett invented Florida. Or, at least, the Florida of our imaginations: rum, sand, humidity, boats, weed, weirdness.

jimmy buffett

Thursday

Stephen L. Miller

Florida versus California is the election we should be having

National elections should be about contrast and choice — and those choices should offer the clearest opportunity for parity in the candidates and the parties. If the polls are to be believed, the 2024 election as it stands now, before any debates or primaries, does not offer that. Instead the country currently faces the prospect of two senior citizens clashing, both with low approval ratings, personal and legal baggage and questions of mental acuity.

gavin newsom california 2028

Monday

Cockburn

Ghislaine Maxwell is a prison Karen 

You can take the girl out of high society but you can’t take the high society out of the girl — even if you throw her in a Tallahassee prison. According to a report in the Daily Mail, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell has filed a whopping 400 complaints since arriving at the federal prison in July. "Max is the prison Karen. She can file a grievance over anything — she has over 400 of them," a source told the Mail. "She complains about the food, the bedding, when they cancel temple because of bad weather or are late setting up her legal calls." It was also reported that the prison's vegan menu was “insufficient” for Maxwell’s needs.

ghislaine maxwell