Can Ron DeSantis' Antiwoke Warrior Reputation Win Him The White House?

Yale-educated governor is the highest profile Republican seeking to dethrone Donald Trump, writes John Bowden

-  John Bowden

When Ron DeSantis took his first steps into the professional world in 2001, he probably didn’t forsee himself on a path leading to a showdown with a hotel magnate who in three years would go on to host The Apprentice on network television.

But, in many ways, Mr DeSantis’s role in the national spotlight seemed almost predetermined, even all those years ago when he was little more than a junior Navy officer bound for his first assignment. The Yale-educated DeSantis, 44, now finds himself the face of a surging faction in the Republican Party that seems as eager to move on from its party’s past as it is to pick fights with America’s new cultural norms — a direct evolution of the previous iteration of the GOP which saw its credibility hemmhorage due to the failure of the Bush administration to prove any of the claims that led the US into war with Iraq.

Born to Ronald and Karen DeSantis in 1978, the man who would become Florida’s current governor was one of the first Republican leaders to emerge in Washington with his politics primarily tempered by the War on Terror. A graduate of Yale and later Harvard’s law school, Mr DeSantis was commissioned into the Navy three years after the attack on 9/11 at a time when America was beginning to reckon with the fact that its investment of military force in the Middle East was not to be a short-lived excursion.

The young DeSantis was immediately thrust right into the middle of that reality: two short years after his commissioning, he would find himself assigned to legal observational duties at America’s infamous Guantanamo Bay military prison, where both battle-hardened al-Qaeda fighters as well as those with no proven connections to terror groups endured some of the US’s most extreme methods of interrogation and incarceration.