The Secret to Ron DeSantis’s Success? Ignore Donald Trump—and Attack Business Instead

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Two days before the midterm elections, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis sauntered onstage at a boisterous rally in an airplane hangar in Sarasota and, as Donald Trump likes to do, began tossing baseball caps to the crowd. The similarities with the 45th president didn’t end there. DeSantis mimicked Trump’s braggadocio, touting his own 2018 victory as “probably the most consequential governor’s election in the history of the state of Florida.” He even channeled Trump’s predilection for claiming that unnamed supporters routinely approach him weeping with gratitude for the unswerving strength of his leadership in the face of elite liberal hostility. As usual, it involved his skeptical response to the Covid-19 pandemic. “Sometimes,” DeSantis told the crowd, “people will just start crying, saying, ‘My business would just have gone under if you had not stood up for me.’ ”

Trump famously reoriented Republican politics away from Reaganesque optimism and toward a fed-up populist aggrievance that had far more power than anyone realized until his run for president. DeSantis may be his best student. His public persona is built on projecting truculent contempt toward the people the MAGA masses despise most, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Dr. Anthony Fauci. And like Trump, he has a gift for sensing what people are primed to get mad about. In Sarasota and other stops along his Don’t Tread on Florida Tour the weekend before the midterms, he rattled off a lengthy list of oppressors: liberal politicians who refuse to enforce immigration laws, school boards “teaching kids to hate our country,” government bureaucrats demanding mask and vaccine mandates and job-killing shutdowns, and “woke” ideologues instituting radical ideas about gender and sexuality. DeSantis said he was striking back against the last group when he signed a controversial law in March restricting public school teachers from discussing gender identity and sexual orientation in the classroom. Critics dubbed it the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

But the enemy that drew the loudest applause in Sarasota was one that, until very recently, ranked as perhaps the GOP’s greatest ally: corporate America. DeSantis is at the fore of a growing crowd of conservatives who insist that big business has fallen under the sway of perfidious liberal social reformers. He recounted how he went after Walt Disney Co., one of Florida’s largest employers, when it criticized the Don’t Say Gay law. DeSantis didn’t just strip Disney of its special tax status. He also publicly demonized the company, claiming it had aligned itself with left-wing politicians bent on “teaching a first grader that they could change their gender.” He added, “Sexualizing these young kids is wrong.”

The lusty booing this remark elicited testified to DeSantis’s skill at inciting new grievances. Disney’s firing of Chief Executive Officer Bob Chapek two weeks later only enhanced DeSantis’s aura in conservative circles. “He’s made business and the financial markets into the new playing field in the culture wars,” says Andy Puzder, who was briefly Trump’s nominee for secretary of labor and has advised the DeSantis administration in his current job leading an investment firm.

But though DeSantis’s pugilistic style and even his mannerisms owe an obvious debt to Trump, and he probably wouldn’t be governor if Trump hadn’t endorsed him in 2018, DeSantis rarely mentions the man. After months of stewing over this perceived ingratitude, Trump finally attacked him as “Ron DeSanctimonious” at a rally right before the midterms—not his best effort, but not entirely off the mark. DeSantis ignored him.

As his national profile has risen, DeSantis has been described by mainstream media outlets as “Trump with discipline” and “Trump with a brain.” But what really distinguishes him is his judgment. Even as he whipped up populist furor in Sarasota, he avoided the issues Trump harps on most: He didn’t question the 2020 election results, or suggest that voting machines were hacked or spout QAnon conspiracy theories. It took another 48 hours for the importance of this distinction to fully register.

On election night, the Republican “red wave” never materialized. Candidates Trump had backed fared especially poorly. In the 13 races in battleground states where an election denier ran for governor, secretary of state or attorney general, every one of them lost. DeSantis, on the other hand, won reelection in a landslide. And he didn’t merely crush his Democratic opponent—he won voters Republicans weren’t seriously expected to compete for, carrying a majority of Hispanic votes and winning in places such as deep-blue Miami-Dade County, which Hillary Clinton took by 30 points in the 2016 presidential election. In the process, he swept the GOP to supermajorities in both houses of the Florida legislature, ensuring that he’ll be one of the most powerful governors in the country in 2023. When DeSantis called the results “the greatest Republican victory in the history of the state of Florida,” it wasn’t just Trump-style hyperbole.

To pretty much everyone’s surprise, the midterm election results showed Trump’s solipsistic brand of politics to be a much diminished force. For the third cycle in a row, Republicans underperformed in an election that revolved heavily around him. No one was more enhanced by the latest drubbing than DeSantis, who polls show has emerged as Trump’s main rival for the 2024 GOP nomination—if, as expected, he opts to run.

Experience has taught that writing off Trump is unwise, and governors who seem headed for the White House on a rocket ship often blow up on the launchpad. Even so, DeSantis’s showing offers a glimpse of what successful post-Trump Republican politics might look like: still combative and polarizing, still consumed with grievances, but less centered on Trump and more animated by issues and enemies that resonate beyond the MAGA base. What DeSantis has done as governor, and what he’s aiming to do in Florida’s upcoming legislative session, could have a lot more influence on Republican politics than Trump’s next controversy or legal travail.

As DeSantis moves toward a possible presidential bid, he’s expanding his fight against corporate America, this time going after big asset managers and Wall Street banks. In an attack over the summer he declared, “Masters of the Universe are using their economic power to impose policies on the country that they could not do at the ballot box.” He returned to the theme in his swaggering victory speech on election night. “We will fight the woke in corporate America,” he said. “Florida is where woke goes to die.” Conjuring up a distant, shadowy financial elite and vowing to fight it on behalf of the little guy is textbook populist politics—and another move borrowed from Trump, who made big banks and famous financiers into useful villains in his 2016 presidential campaign. DeSantis is betting he can generate enough resentment about “woke capital” to keep his momentum going. If he’s right, he may go from emulating Trump to succeeding him.

Even before his midterm triumph, DeSantis had pulled ahead of other Republican White House aspirants by figuring out how to build an independent profile in a party that centers almost entirely on Trump. During his presidency, Trump redefined what constitutes being a Republican in good standing. Where it once meant embracing certain policy commitments, Trump changed the definition to whether or not one supported him personally and fed his alpha male self-image. Because his popularity with Republican voters was almost absolute, most lawmakers complied.

But this created a problem for politicians hoping one day to replace him. Every Republican presidential hopeful understood that the quickest way to gain attention and build a national following was to jump into the big, loud, messy culture fights that constitute most Fox News programming and excite grassroots conservatives. The problem: Most of these fights revolved around Trump. That forced ambitious Republicans fearful of him to spend their airtime vigorously defending Trump against whatever outrage was driving the news cycle, while simultaneously fluffing his ego. And doing consigned them to the dreaded role of “betas,” neutering the credibility of any future break with Trump that might prove politically advantageous.

The Republican landscape is littered with casualties of this dynamic. Mike Pence’s book tour, clearly meant to reintroduce him before 2024, has been a succession of cringeworthy interviews in which the former vice president tries to project an image of strength and fortitude while ducking questions about the pro-Trump mob that almost killed him on Jan. 6, 2021. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is campaigning by subtweet, issuing cryptic pronouncements that appear intended to distance him from Trump without risking blowback by mentioning his name. (After Trump dined with notorious antisemite and White supremacist Nick Fuentes in November, Pompeo tweeted, “Anti-Semitism is a cancer. As Secretary, I fought to ban funding for anti-Semitic groups.” There was no mention of the evening’s host.) Rather than attempt this awkward straddle, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a tireless Trump booster, announced he would forgo a run entirely.

Back in 2018, when DeSantis was still just a gubernatorial candidate, he, too, frequently defended Trump on Fox, usually against special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Trump rewarded him with a coveted endorsement, vaulting DeSantis past the front-runner in the Republican primary, Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, and landing him in Tallahassee. Then DeSantis did something radical: He quit defending Trump. Yet he still managed to get plenty of TV time. “Ron is very good, and has always been very good, at knowing the things that are going to trigger the media,” Brad Herold, a former DeSantis campaign manager, said in a recent podcast interview. “He knows what is going to push people’s buttons.” (DeSantis declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Covid was early proof of this. DeSantis cast himself as the scourge of liberal do-gooders and government health-care bureaucrats, juxtaposing what he called the “Free State of Florida” with the strictures in place almost everywhere else. In April 2020, only weeks into the crisis, he began lifting the statewide lockdown. By September he’d eliminated many state restrictions and issued an executive order prohibiting local governments from enforcing mask mandates. No Republican besides Trump was more prominent during the pandemic.

A more recent example is a DeSantis-orchestrated stunt in which 48 asylum seekers from Venezuela were promised jobs and tricked into boarding a state-contracted charter flight to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, where they were then abandoned. A study conducted by Media Matters for America for found that over the next month, Fox News ran at least 148 segments that mentioned DeSantis’s nasty trick. Here was the DeSantis formula in a nutshell: create a cultural imbroglio that outrages liberals and that is Trump-adjacent but features himself, not Trump, in the role of alpha male.

As DeSantis looks ahead to a possible White House run, there are growing signs his fights with business could give him the most traction. The idea has caught fire with congressional Republicans, who plan to haul “woke” chief executives to Capitol Hill for grillings during the new session of Congress. It was hardly an obvious turn for a Yale University-educated Republican with political roots in the libertarian House Freedom Caucus.

Born to a working-class family in Jacksonville in 1978, DeSantis was a star athlete and student at Dunedin High School and became captain of the Yale baseball team. He went on to earn a law degree at Harvard University and served in Iraq with the US Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps. In 2012 he won an open congressional seat in Florida’s sixth district, running as a doctrinaire small-government conservative, though one plainly bursting with ambition. (To launch his bid, he wrote a book, .) When he got to Congress, DeSantis co-founded the Freedom Caucus. But his sights were set elsewhere. “You could tell from the moment he got here that he had his eye on bigger things,” a former Freedom Caucus colleague recalls.

In 2018, DeSantis entered Florida’s Republican gubernatorial primary, and his charmed career smacked into a big obstacle: sugar. “The sugar industry was probably more in for Adam Putnam than they’d ever been for any politician,” says Peter Schorsch, publisher of the newsletter . “He was their golden child.” DeSantis, on the other hand, had voted against sugar subsidies as a congressman. As one of the state’s most powerful industries pounded him with millions of dollars in negative ads, many funded by dark-money groups, DeSantis struck back, branding Big Sugar as a major polluter and aligning himself with the Everglades Foundation, a conservation group co-founded by the billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones, who became a major campaign donor. DeSantis won plaudits for standing up to sugar—the dubbed him “the green governor,” despite his 2% rating from the League of Conservation Voters—and after dispatching Putnam, he narrowly won the governor’s race. Then he exacted revenge by forcing everyone on the South Florida water board, which was known for doing the industry’s bidding, to resign.

His battles with business didn’t end there. DeSantis’s feel for the Trump gestalt had made him a vocal proponent of measures to curb illegal immigration, and he moved to follow through on a campaign pledge to require all public and private employers to screen workers’ legal status through the federal E-Verify program. This move threatened not only sugar but also two other major Florida industries that rely on immigrant labor: tourism and construction. The state Chamber of Commerce complained that employers would be “unduly burdened” by the new requirement, but DeSantis plowed ahead anyway, condemning the use of “cheap foreign labor.” Although he won accolades on Fox, his victory was limited. The collective forces of the corporate opposition watered down the legislation so only public employers and their contractors, but not private employers, were required to use E-Verify.

DeSantis seemed to take this opposition personally. His grudge intensified after the pandemic struck and many Florida corporations refused to endorse his controversial Covid policies. In October 2021, without notifying his own party, he held a press conference to announce a special session of the legislature devoted to penalizing companies that required their workers to be vaccinated. This only deepened the rift. “We’ve always been against government mandating what business can do and can’t do,” complained the executive director of the Florida Chamber of Commerce.

DeSantis was once against mandates like this, too. “The bullying of private industry,” he wrote in , “was part and parcel of the modus operandi of the Obama administration. Under Obama, the federal government exercised a roving review authority over the business decisions of a number of large companies.”

A few days later, DeSantis was the keynote speaker at the chamber’s annual meeting in Orlando. In a remarkably obstreperous speech that was met mostly with silence, he blasted “the rise of woke capitalism” and issued an unvarnished threat to the state’s business elite. “If you’re using your power as a corporation and you’re leveraging that to try to advance an ideology,” he warned, “I think it’s very dangerous for this country—and I’m not just gonna sit idly by.”

Former aides and allied strategists say DeSantis was driven by more than personal pique. His popularity in Florida, particularly among independents, was steadily rising. And nationally, Republican voters were becoming more attuned to corporate behavior. “Like Democrats, they’ve begun choosing brands that align with their values and morals,” says Matt Oczkowski, a former Trump campaign strategist and co-founder of Hum_n Behavior, a consumer intelligence company.

A conservative backlash against corporate America had been brewing since at least 2019. That summer the Business Roundtable, the national association for CEOs of major corporations, issued a statement signed by the chief executives of Apple, BlackRock, Disney and dozens of other big companies declaring that the purpose of the corporation was no longer simply to generate returns but also to “respect the people in our communities and protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses.” Many conservatives were aghast at what they saw as the nation’s top business leaders abdicating the single-minded pursuit of profit, which they believe is the basis of US capitalism.

But what really seemed to supercharge Republican animosity toward CEOs and businesses was the corporate response to the murder of George Floyd a year later. The public expressions of solidarity with protesters and support for Black Lives Matter, along with Trump’s condemnation of these moves, dramatically altered Republican attitudes toward corporate America. Last year a Gallup Inc. tracking poll found that Republicans’ unhappiness with the influence of major corporations almost doubled in the year and a half after Floyd’s killing, from 36% to 68%, while Democrats’ views remained largely unchanged.

So when DeSantis went after Disney a few months following his chamber speech, he wasn’t simply striking back at an employer critical of his administration; he was seizing a leading role in a national drama that’s become increasingly central to Republican politics.

By normal political standards, a governor attacking his state’s marquee employer would be an act of unimaginable recklessness. But DeSantis had read the landscape correctly. “As corporations have gotten bigger and bigger, their local ties have weakened,” says Brad Coker, a pollster in Florida. “It used to be if you were a corporation based in Pittsburgh, even if you weren’t a steel company, you had your finger on the pulse of what Pittsburgh voters cared about. Now that’s gone. The big secret about Disney is that Floridians don’t go to Disney World. They see Disney as a California corporation.” When Coker went into the field with his survey team, he found no drop in DeSantis’s poll numbers: “It hasn’t hurt him at all.”

Quite the contrary. In late October, the Florida Chamber of Commerce gathered once more for its annual meeting in Orlando—held this year, by awkward coincidence, at Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort. This time, DeSantis didn’t show up. He didn’t have to. “Everybody here is talking about him,” Schorsch said at the event, pausing between panel discussions. “They’re all scared s---less. Everybody’s operating theme is ‘Keep your head down and don’t be the next Disney.’ ”

DeSantis’s attacks on business didn’t dent his ability to raise enormous sums of money, either. His reelection campaign and its aligned political action committee generated more than $200 million. Donors included at least 42 billionaires or members of billionaire families, including titans of finance such as Ken Griffin and Thomas Peterffy. One Republican strategist describes the core of DeSantis’s donor network as “financial guys who don’t like the cultural direction America is going in.”

His landslide victory two weeks later only substantiated this state of affairs. The contrast with Republicans’ woeful performance elsewhere, and the sense that DeSantis’s arrival on the national stage could mean Trump’s star is finally beginning to fade, shifted attention to the other topic that had been on everyone’s mind at Coronado Springs: what DeSantis will do next.

Unlike Trump, DeSantis is deliberate about how he picks his fights. When he vowed to go after “woke capital,” he wasn’t making an abstract threat—he had something specific in mind. In late July, flanked by Florida’s Republican leaders, DeSantis introduced proposed legislation beneath a banner emblazoned with the slogan “GOVERNMENT OF LAWS NOT WOKE CEOs.” He laid out how his initiative would “protect” Floridians from Wall Street’s “perversion of financial investment priorities under the euphemistic banners of environmental, social, and corporate governance and diversity, inclusion, and equity.” ESG, as it’s known, refers to a set of standards that measure a company’s adherence to socially conscious investing goals and encompasses a product market worth at least $8 trillion in the US alone.

Formally, the legislation amends Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices statute to prohibit what DeSantis says is discrimination against conservatives by big financial institutions through the use of “ESG social credit score metrics.” Colloquially, as Florida’s new House Speaker Paul Renner put it at the rollout, it places the force of law behind DeSantis’s threat “to stop woke financial titans who seek to dictate policy to Floridians” by classifying ESG scores as deceptive trade practices.

People in Tallahassee expect the bill to be the central drama in this year’s legislative session. Politically, it will give DeSantis a new platform from which to attack a fresh lineup of villains who inflame Republican passions: ESG boosters such as BlackRock Inc. CEO Larry Fink and groups such as the Business Roundtable that have fallen out of favor because of their perceived liberal sympathies. It will also create a big new tempest over “corporate wokeness” that’s sure to keep DeSantis in the national spotlight. At particular issue will be who should manage Florida’s $240 billion portfolio of pension and disaster funds. Many of the firms currently handling it are also big investors in ESG, led by CEOs who think of themselves as enlightened stewards of corporate social responsibility. In the past, managing the fund wouldn’t have conflicted with espousing concern for the environment. Florida, like most states, has generally treated its pension fund as an inviolable sanctuary, sealed off from partisan politics.

Now, DeSantis is making it the subject of a national political drama that lets him once again be the aggressor against prominent companies that he alleges have succumbed to liberal social concerns. “Florida has a long history of keeping politics out of its pension fund,” says Brian Ballard, a top Florida lobbyist with ties to DeSantis. “But I think those days are over. And I think the pension fund will become fertile ground for the conservatives’ stance against corporate wokeness.”

DeSantis isn’t waiting around for lawmakers to act. On Dec. 1, Florida’s chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, announced that the state was pulling $2 billion of investments managed by BlackRock because of the company’s use of ESG principles. Patronis called out Fink in his statement. “If Larry, or his friends on Wall Street, want to change the world, run for office,” he said. “Start a nonprofit. Donate to the causes you care about. Using our cash, however, to fund BlackRock’s social-engineering project isn’t something Florida ever signed up for.”

The past few years have demonstrated how nimbly DeSantis can revise his own narrative to suit his political needs. He’s gone from running TV ads in 2018 that featured his baby son in a Trump onesie, to ignoring Trump, to beating Trump in a handful of early (too early!) polls for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination. The question now is whether DeSantis can revise the party’s narrative to allow for a possibility it hasn’t seen for many years: a leader other than the former president.

Presidential hopefuls such as Pence and Pompeo are trapped in the old narrative; they’re programmed for caution, and their Trump credentials would be the basis of their campaign. But Trump himself already fills that lane. DeSantis has set himself apart by choosing targets wisely and baring his teeth, carving out a distinct political identity that doesn’t depend on Trump’s past or future.

His fortunes could ultimately hinge on whether his war against corporate wokeness excites the Republican masses the way Trump once did. “He’s pushed this issue of wokeness to the point where it’s now orthodoxy among Republicans,” Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, says approvingly. But can Larry Fink eclipse “Crooked Hillary” and “Lyin’ Ted” in the pantheon of MAGA villains?

DeSantis will soon find out. He won’t encounter much opposition at home. “The business community, at least in Florida, is no longer the Republican Party’s ally,” says Mac Stipanovich, a veteran Florida lobbyist who quit the party when Trump took over. “They are its servants.” The real challenge, then, will be persuading Republican voters to transfer their loyalty to another prickly, hyperaggressive alpha male who doesn’t apologize for his zealotry and drives liberals to distraction. If DeSantis pulls it off, it would represent yet another unlikely turn in Republican politics—a libertarian congressman who railed against government interference in private business turning around and winning the nomination by using his own governmental powers to bully corporate giants.

But before that can happen, one big obstacle looms: Trump. The next 18 months will show whether DeSantis can make himself into a national figure who inspires the kind of fear and adulation that Trump does (or once did). Eventually he’ll have to stare down the dragon, something that, for all his success, he’s thus far avoided doing. But when he’s ready to make the jump from understudy to leading man, he can point voters to Florida, where his conquest of the Republican Party is now absolute. “All he has to do,” Stipanovich says, “is cock an eyebrow at you and your bowels get loose.”

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