Ron DeSantis book announcement a clear sign of presidential ambition
In the clearest signal yet that Ron DeSantis is preparing a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, it was announced on Wednesday that the rightwing governor of Florida will publish a campaign-style book, mixing memoir with policy proposals.
The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Renewal, will be published by Broadside Books, a conservative imprint of HarperCollins, on 28 February.
The governor, his publisher said, will offer readers “a first-hand account from the blue-collar boy who grew up to take on Disney and Dr Fauci”.
DeSantis has not announced a 2024 run, but he is widely reported to be considering one. His victory speech after a landslide re-election this month met with chants of “Two more years!”
The cover of the governor’s book shows him smiling broadly in front of a US flag.
With Donald Trump under fire over disappointing midterms results, looming indictments and a controversial dinner with a white supremacist, possible Republican opponents are rapidly coming into focus.
Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president, has released a campaign-focused memoir, seeking to balance appeals to Trump’s supporters with distancing himself from the violent end to Trump’s time in office.
Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, will release a book in the new year. Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador who released a memoir in 2019, is also edging up to the starting line.
Announcing DeSantis’s book, HarperCollins signaled a focus on the culture-war issues and theatrically cruel policy stunts that have propelled the governor to the front rank of potential candidates, alongside Trump in polls and sometimes ahead, prompting the former president to lash out.
DeSantis clashed with Disney, a large employer in Florida, over legislation regarding the teaching of LGBTQ + issues in schools, which was branded “don’t say gay” by critics.
DeSantis’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, through which Anthony Fauci has advised two presidents, remains highly controversial. Florida has recorded nearly 83,000 deaths, third among US states in a national death toll approaching 1.1m.
HarperCollins said DeSantis would “reveal” how he “accomplished more for his state” than any other “American leader”. Citing DeSantis’s graduation from Yale and Harvard, service in Iraq – as a navy lawyer – and election to Congress in 2012, the publisher said “in all these places, Ron DeSantis learned the same lesson: he didn’t want to be part of the leftist elite.”
“Since becoming governor of the sunshine state, he has fought – and won – battle after battle, defeating not just opposition from the political left, but a barrage of hostile media coverage,” it added.
The announcement – which echoed numerous rightwing talking points on hot button social issues like Covid-19 and education – echoed DeSantis’s strident speech in Tallahassee earlier this month, after his easy win over the Democrat Charlie Crist, in which he proclaimed Florida the state “where woke goes to die”.
HarperCollins also promised to “deliver something no other politician’s memoir has before: stories of victory”.
That might seem to some a curious claim, given, for just one recent example, the publication just two years ago of A Promised Land, Barack Obama’s memoir of his rise to the presidency, significan legislative victories and preparations for his second presidential election win.