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These are challenging days for Florida governor Ron DeSantis, the man who would have been king. Barely two and a half years since his landslide re-election and anointment as “DeFuture” of the Republican party in a fawning New York Post cover, he stands isolated from the national political stage, feuding with his once blindingly loyal Florida legislature, and limping towards the finish line of his second term with an uncertain pathway beyond.
It has been, in the view of many analysts, a fall of stunning velocity and magnitude. And while few are willing to completely rule out a comeback for a 46-year-old politician who was the darling of the Republican hard right until he dared to challenge Donald Trump for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination, it is also clear that everything has changed.
“He’s completely crashed to the ground at this point and is certainly being treated like a more standard, average governor now,” said Aubrey Jewett, professor of political science at the University of Central Florida.
“He’s lost the ability to push things through. He’s lost that luster he had that at one time seemed like he could do no wrong in Republican conservative circles. He’s definitely come back down to earth and some of it is his own doing because if you govern with an autocratic style, that doesn’t usually make you a lot of allies.”
DeSantis’s once vise-like grip on Florida’s lawmakers has weakened, replaced by open dissent, bitter hostility and a hurling of slurs over a number of issues as the two Republican dominated legislative chambers try to reverse six years of passivity and reestablish themselves as a co-equal branch of government.
DeSantis, in the words of Republican House speaker Daniel Perez, has begun to tell “lies and stories that never happened”, and has become increasingly prone to “temper tantrums”.
The governor, meanwhile, hit back at what he sees as a “pathetic” agenda being pursued by the majority. He has also lashed out at their investigation of a charity scandal enveloping his wife Casey as she mulls whether to run in next year’s election to succeed him when he is termed out of office in January 2027.
Some Republicans, including Perez, want to know how $10m of a $67m legal settlement intended for Florida taxpayers ended up channeled through Hope Florida, a non-profit that Casey DeSantis founded, to political action committees operated by her husband’s allies to help quash ballot amendments last year on abortion and marijuana.
“At one point Casey looked like she was going to be the heir apparent to Ron DeSantis and she was going to run, and he certainly seemed like he was trying to position her to do so,” Jewett said.
“That would extend his legacy and help keep him around for some more years, he can be the first husband and people would say he’s an equal partner or whatever. That would take away some of his lame-duck status.”
It is that drift towards political irrelevance, particularly on the national stage, that stings DeSantis the most, some analysts believe.
If events had transpired differently, he could be sitting in the White House. Instead, the influence of the one-time prince of Maga (Trump’s make America great again movement) is limited to regular guest appearances on Fox News, and “press conferences” he hosts around Florida almost on a daily basis to assail judges whose rulings displease him and expound his hardline positions on immigration enforcement, higher education and drag show performers.
More galling, Jewett says, is that DeSantis has seen himself eclipsed by rising newcomers in Trump’s firmament, notably vice-president JD Vance and Marco Rubio, the former Florida senator and current secretary of state, both named by the president this month as potential successors.
“It’s notable that when Trump was asked who might follow him, he didn’t mention DeSantis at all,” Jewett said. “When DeSantis challenged Trump for the presidential nomination, it ticked Trump off and it ticked off a lot of Trump supporters, who up until then generally liked him.
“It came out while he was running that he doesn’t have the great personality that a traditional politician has. He just didn’t seem well suited for shaking hands, eating hot dogs and kissing babies, the kind of typical American political things. It destroyed his air of invincibility.”
Other observers see the same aloofness and confrontational manner behind DeSantis’s fallings out with Republican erstwhile allies in Florida, and a reason why many are rushing to support Trump-endorsed congressman Byron Donalds for governor even before Casey DeSantis has made a decision to run.
“I don’t know that they necessarily think Donalds is the greatest thing since sliced bread – I think it’s, ‘Well, we got to block Casey from getting in’,” said Michael Binder, professor of political science and public administration at the University of North Florida.
“The DeSantis-Trump feud appears to have mellowed but there are absolutely people in both camps, on both sides, that have not forgotten and will not forget. DeSantis’s political style in some ways is similar to Trump in that he makes a lot of enemies. The difference is Trump can make amends with enemies when it benefits him – think of Marco Rubio.
“With Ron DeSantis you don’t see that. Once you’re on the outs with DeSantis, you stay on the outs. They burn those bridges.”
DeSantis’s office did not respond to a number of questions submitted by the Guardian about the remainder of his term in office, or plans thereafter.
His predecessor as governor, Rick Scott, successfully challenged Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson for his US Senate seat in 2018 and remains an influential Republican voice in Washington. Such a pathway appears blocked for DeSantis, a former congressman who in January appointed Florida’s former attorney general Ashley Moody to Rubio’s vacant Senate seat for the duration of his term.
DeSantis would need to challenge a close ally who has already filed to defend it in the 2026 election.
Still, Jewett said, the final chapters of DeSantis’s political career are yet to be written.
“It doesn’t look good and his political prospects are definitely more dim than they were, his road seems that much more difficult right now,” he said.
“But you just never know. One big wild card is how people view Trump in another year. It’s a decent assumption the Maga movement will continue and if Trump really falters then maybe DeSantis’s distance from Trump actually ends up being a positive in the longer run.
“Even if he doesn’t get too much more accomplished in the next year and a half, he had a five-year run that was unprecedented in pushing through a very conservative agenda and changing Florida from the most competitive battleground to a heavily Republican state. So yeah, he’ll remind everyone of all the things he did that they liked on the Republican side.”
