by Maria Maloof
In light of the recent US midterm elections, DeSantis, who is 44 years old, celebrated his election as governor of Florida for a second term; a Republican politician and former member of the US House of Representatives, and who has obtained a large percentage of the votes, his star shone in the Republican Party as a strong competitor to former President Donald Trump to win the 2024 US presidential election ticket.
Ron DeSantis has gained increasing popularity thanks to his policies during the Corona epidemic. He rejected closure decisions and opposed the mandates to wear masks and vaccination against the virus in the name of freedom, in addition to achieving economic success.
Ron DeSantis is a right-wing conservative similar to Trump and other Republican politicians. American websites describe him as a Catholic, and he has built an image for himself as a fighter against the liberal agenda represented by the Democratic Party.
Ron DeSantis first won the US House of Representatives in 2012 and was re-elected in 2014 and 2016. Ron DeSantis studied history, and after that, he looked to Harvard Law School, from which he obtained a diploma in 2005. Additionally, DeSantis served in the US Navy between 2004 and 2010. He was sent to Iraq in 2007, and he remained there for a year, during which time he worked as an advisor to the command of the naval forces in Anbar Governorate, Western Iraq. After his return to the United States in 2008, the US Department of Justice appointed him as a federal prosecutor in the Public Prosecution Office of the Central District of Florida. At the start of 2019, Ron DeSantis became the 46th governor of Florida after winning by a narrow margin. At that time, his candidacy for the position was supported by then-President Donald Trump, and he was the first Republican governor since 2002 to win the governorship of Florida, which is the most populous state in the United States.
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s subsidiaries are beginning to skew away from former US President Donald Trump in favor of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
And as Murdoch’s media companies began to deviate away from Trump towards DeSantis after his victory and re-election as governor of the state and shed light on his political path and achievements, DeSantis’ accomplishments shine through frequently and remarkably as a politician and a strong competitor to Trump in monopolizing the US Republican nomination for the 2024 US presidential election. They pave the way for DeSantis towards the White House in light of the significant decline in the popularity of Biden and his administration for many reasons. DeSantis may be a dark Republican horse during the upcoming election race to the White House because he has many successes in his arsenal on various levels during his term in office in Florida. And if DeSantis comes to power in the United States of America, his administration will be more assertive towards the Iranian nuclear file, as the Republican politician opposed the nuclear agreement concluded by the major powers with Iran in 2015, describing it as bad, saying that this agreement would threaten US national security. After the 2015 Paris attacks, he said that what he described as Islamic extremism should be considered an enemy of the United States.
In October 2017, he spoke at a conference of an American far-right group and said that devout Muslims could not be loyal Americans. Since he was elected a Republican in the House of Representatives in 2012, he has chaired the National Security Subcommittee. Under Trump’s presidency, he submitted a draft resolution to classify the Muslim Brotherhood as a “terrorist group.”
It appears that DeSantis has excellent chances as a potential candidate for the US Republican Party during the presidential elections after two years, given his re-election by a vast majority as governor of Florida, at a time when his shares rose within the framework of the Republican Party. Many Republicans and the media began to see him as a potential and strong candidate instead of the former president Donald Trump. Opinion polls after DeSantis’s big victory showed that many Republican supporters preferred him over Trump.
On the other hand, his Democratic rival, Charlie Crist, in the 2022 gubernatorial elections, described him as “the most dangerous and extremist candidate.” Before the midterm elections, DeSantis described what was being said about the possibility of him entering the competition for the Republican nomination card for the 2024 elections as “fabricated speculation”. Still, he did not publicly rule out this possibility, and if he ran for the next US presidential elections after two years, he could win many votes from some voters from the rival Democratic Party. Given his rebuke of Trump’s supporters storming Congress on January 6, 2020, he introduced a bill that toughens penalties for those involved in political violence, potentially gaining him favor among independents and some Democrats.