Luke Bryan responds to criticism after Gov. Ron DeSantis appears at concert in Florida in September 2019.
After a year-and-a-half of public squabbles, the former “American Idol” contestant and longtime Republican politician Ron DeSantis is now the governor of Florida. While the decision to launch his political career by winning the Republican gubernatorial primary in 2018 was a clear response to the “Trump effect” and his own rise to national celebrity, the rest of history is about to catch up with him: the governor is running a scandal-plagued administration and is facing calls for impeachment, as well as the inevitable accusations of hypocrisy. In his first weeks in office, DeSantis has already been sued, fined, forced to resign from his job as an emergency management director, and is being lambasted online for making racist remarks about black protesters in Sanford, Florida.
When he took office in January, DeSantis said his top priority in office was protecting the people of Florida from “the consequences of globalism.” This is an admirable goal, one DeSantis has worked on for decades as an anti-communist lawmaker in the Florida House. Since 2010, when he first ran for office, DeSantis has been one of the most vocal critics of President Donald Trump and his administration’s policies. DeSantis, a native of the Florida Panhandle who still speaks with a soft “f” after his first name, has repeatedly called for Trump’s impeachment, accused both Trump and his party of harboring an anti-Christian agenda, and warned Trump against trying to take power in 2020. This is not the DeSantis who campaigned in the 2012 gubernatorial primary, who attacked the state’s economic development agency for cutting jobs and for working to lure new companies like Tesla to the state. Indeed, DeSantis made more money as a lawmaker working for the American Legislative Exchange Council. Now governor, he is just as devoted to corporate influence in the state as he was then.
In 2018, DeSantis spent a large part of his campaign and campaign email blasts attacking the “illegal, out-of-state special interest groups” who ran the Republican Party in the election. These special interest groups, he pointed out, were responsible for the Florida Senate vote to convict Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel and a number of other Republican senators on corruption charges. It was a vote that was, in
