Florida

Four years ago this week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis presciently warned in his first inaugural address that big-spending, high-taxing states were inspiring “productive citizens to flee.” DeSantis came into office with a flimsy mandate of just four tenths of one percent at a time when Florida had 257,175 more registered Democrats than Republicans. Republicans now outnumber Democrats in the state by more than 356,000 and, in the wake of his resounding twenty-point win in November, DeSantis's inaugural address last Tuesday felt like a warm-up for the 2024 presidential campaign. In his 2019 speech, DeSantis spoke to Floridians, but he seemed to be addressing all Americans, urging us to reconsider Florida as a model rather than as the butt of Florida Man jokes.

Long before he became a darling of the right and the left’s second favorite villain, Ronald Dion DeSantis was just a Florida kid they called “D” who played baseball, worked at a grocery store and dreamed of becoming president of the United States. Florida’s audacious forty-four-year-old governor earned legions of fans — and plenty of enemies — for keeping his state open during the pandemic. And he’s become a national figure since – a reinvented Florida Man – by playing offense on issues ranging from parental rights in education to illegal immigration to Critical Race Theory to fighting woke corporations.

“America’s comeback starts right now,” declared former and possibly future president Donald J. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club and private residence on Tuesday evening. Speaking for over an hour in uncharacteristically measured tones, Trump sounded downright businesslike, laying out the achievements of his first term, his aspirations for a possible future term, and the demerits of his once and likely future opponent Joe Biden. “President Trump’s tone,” Bryan Leib, a former Pennsylvania congressional candidate and executive director of Iranian Americans for Liberty, messaged me from the floor, was “calm, confident, and unifying.” About 18 minutes in, Trump matter-of-factly pronounced what everyone was waiting to hear: that he is a candidate for president in 2024.

“Floridians’ lives are in danger,” tweeted Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s rapid response director Christina Pushaw as Hurricane Ian bore down, “so of course CNN is rooting for the hurricane.” Pushaw was responding to CNN reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere, who had earlier admonished DeSantis for having “put himself at odds with many local government officials” and “looking for fights with a president he may end up running against.” The governor was “playing politics,” suggested Dovere’s colleague Steve Contore, who covers Florida politics for CNN, surmising that “he is urging residents to heed advice from the same local leaders” whom DeSantis supposedly said to “ignore during COVID.

There's only one season that can ever trump election season (and tragically it isn't football season). It's hurricane season, now in full swing. And already it's caused the unthinkable to happen: CNN has cut into its wall-to-wall coverage of Republicans destroying democracy in order to report on the weather. It isn't just CNN. Anytime a hurricane enters the Caribbean, an alarm goes off over at Weather Channel headquarters. TV meteorologists then slide down a pole and dash off to the nearest affected beach or lakeside resort, donning their slickers and prepping for their liveshots as rain slices through the air behind them and palm trees bend at worrying angles. And what a public service is this immersion journalism. Without it, how would we know what wind looks like?

The biggest question for the future of the Republican Party is not whether Donald Trump runs for president in 2024 — he will. It is whether Ron DeSantis chooses to challenge him, or jumps the shark instead. Henry Olsen, the esteemed election analyst and Washington Post columnist, has a new column arguing that the overall lesson from the midterm primaries that have played out over the last several months is that the appetite for Trumpian populist candidates exists almost everywhere. The GOP electorate doesn't just want the policy priorities of populists — they want the style and attitude Trump brought to bear against the media and the Republican establishment.

More mischief this week from Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor along with his Texas counterpart Greg Abbott have been busing illegal immigrants to blue states that have declared themselves sanctuaries for migrants. Last night, DeSantis escalated this strategy by flying dozens of Venezuelans to the posh and isolated Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard, home to the Obamas. Now, the GOP guvs have kicked it up another notch. Cockburn hears that two buses of immigrants have arrived at the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, home to Vice President Kamala Harris. The result has been a scene of chaos on the residence's lawn as migrants disembarked and journalists showed up to film the spectacle.

Cockburn is no stranger to chaos, in fact, his career depends on it. But even he wasn't prepared for the clusterfuck that ensued during Florida’s primary elections this week. The last few years have been a testament to the fact that anything can happen in US politics, but Cockburn was shocked to hear that Laura Loomer, the conspiracy theorist who claimed that mass shootings in Parkland and Santa Fe were staged, lost to Dan Webster by a mere six points. Running in the Republican primary for Florida’s 11th congressional district, it seems that Loomer gained traction with the gerontocracy. But does the retirement community and Republican stronghold really know who they endorsed? I mean, Loomer makes Alex Jones look sane.

What is a classified document? Donald Trump seems to have lots of them — and the FBI sure wants them back. In the wake of my first book critical of the State Department’s Iraq Reconstruction program, Diplomatic Security began a deep dive into my life in an attempt to find something over which to prosecute me. A colleague passed on a bit of personnel gossip via his official email to my Yahoo! Account — and the chase was on. Diplomatic Security claimed I was in possession of “classified” material at home and referred my case to the Justice Department. The email in question was simply labeled “For Official Use Only,” or FOUO, a standard tag then automatically applied to all email sent by State in the unclassified system.