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On Balance | Is Florida governor Ron DeSantis a Donald Trump clone – or viable alternative for 2024?
- DeSantis deserves some credit for his handling of the Covid-19 crisis, keeping numbers in control while avoiding economically crippling lockdowns
- Though seen as a potential alternative to Trump in the 2024 presidential election, he is giving mixed signals as to whether he wants to appeal to the majority or Trump’s hardcore base
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As America celebrates its birthday amid a steady decline in coronavirus infections, let’s give Florida governor Ron DeSantis some credit for his foresight during the pandemic.
He was portrayed as a villain a year ago for allowing restaurants and bars to reopen shortly after the first wave of US infections, which turned New York City into something akin to a sci-fi horror flick.
The Republican ally of Donald Trump probably did reopen too early as he was forced to reimpose restrictions when cases in his state began surging, but Florida managed to avoid the kind of algorithmic spread that overwhelms hospitals while enacting fewer restrictions than most states throughout the past year.
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As we’ve learned from the experiences of Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China, the mix of closed borders, lockdowns, testing, quarantining and contact tracing cannot be a long-term solution when uneven application of these measures globally gives the virus the ability to mutate around our defences. Even with the global roll-out of vaccines, the virus will continue to circulate and we need to learn how to keep businesses open regardless.
In the spirit of Independence Day unity, let’s give DeSantis the benefit of the doubt that he understood this epidemiological reality and wasn’t simply pandering, solely as a political manoeuvre, to Americans hostile to any measures meant to curb the spread even when social distancing was the only tool understood to stop the tsunami of death.
That distinction is important because he’s showing viability as a potential alternative to former president Donald Trump in the next general election. But we’re getting mixed signals from him in terms of whether this early leader in the 2024 race wants to appeal to the majority or stick with Trump’s hardcore base of white supremacists, conspiracy theorists and climate change denialists, a widely overlapping group.
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