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(Trends Wide) — “DeSantisland” probably wasn’t the happiest place on Earth this Thursday.
As Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis prepares for an expected leap into the 2024 presidential race next week, his powerful adversary Disney has trampled on his pre-campaign enthusiasm by canceling a $1 billion plan. for an office campus that could have created 2,000 jobs in the State.
The move was the latest twist in a bitter dispute between DeSantis and one of Florida’s largest corporations, rooted in a political clash over the Republican governor’s hard-line conservative ideology that will become his address to Florida voters. the Republican primaries. And he raises the question of whether Floridians are paying a high price for their political ambitions.
Disney’s power play showed CEO Bob Iger wasn’t lying when he asked last week if Florida wanted the company to “invest more, employ more people and pay more taxes.” The timing of Thursday’s announcement seemed calculated to hurt the governor ahead of the most important week of his political career to date, when he is expected to launch his White House bid and make the all-important sale to fundraising providers. . Disney did not specifically blame DeSantis for the move, in part citing “changing business conditions.” But the message was clear.
“When you’re involved in a situation like this, it doesn’t happen very often that events like this are random or coincidental,” said Mark Johnston, a professor of marketing and ethics at Rollins College’s Crummer School of Business in Winter Park, Florida.
Disney’s latest hit on DeSantis triggered multiple political fallout. He provided a great opportunity for former President Donald Trump and other Republican presidential candidates to argue that DeSantis is misguided in an ill-conceived battle with the corporate giant and accuse him of wasting jobs and businesses in pursuit of higher office.
The Trump campaign gleefully declared that DeSantis was “caught in the mouse trap” after predicting weeks ago that the governor would lose his showdown with Mickey Mouse. (In that same statement, the campaign claimed that the GOP frontrunner, while in office, was known as the “labor chair.”)
The fact that some of the new jobs on the Disney project were expected to be transferred from California also undermined a central narrative of the DeSantis platform that businesses and citizens are fleeing liberal areas for a dynamic state dubbed “DeSantisland.” ” by his supporters and what he calls “the free state of Florida.”
More fundamentally, the latest sign that DeSantis has been outmaneuvered by Disney threatens to highlight the damaging perceptions that Trump and other critics are trying to plant about his candidacy: that, despite his resounding re-election victory in November, DeSantis lacks skills. basic policies and strategic sense. This issue has gained traction after a series of missteps by DeSantis, who for months was seen as a serious threat to Trump while preparing his campaign. His clash with Disney also calls into question whether the bullying persona the governor adopted to appeal to a conservative base is grounded in reality.
In other words, has DeSantis chosen an enemy, who after decades of dominating social currents and protecting his image in court, is tougher and better at politics than he is? If so, what might this portend about his ability to thrive in an upcoming showdown with a candidate who is as wild as Trump?
DeSantis may have found an opponent who is just as tough as he is.
In a series of moves over the last year, DeSantis created the “mouse trap” for himself. He recently criticized Disney during a visit to South Carolina, a key Republican primary state where he declared: “They may have run Florida for 50 years before I came on the scene, but they don’t run Florida anymore.”
The dispute between the governor and Disney stems from the firm’s objections to legislation DeSantis signed last spring that restricted the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, dubbed by the critics like the “Don’t Say Gay bill.”
The move is part of his focus on cultural issues and his campaign against “woke” diversity, equity and inclusion policies. The strategy is calculated to appeal to conservatives who believe that America’s traditional values are under attack from a more diverse and inclusive society. But the governor’s clash with Disney, a huge company that draws millions of mainstream Americans and has sought to become more inclusive in recent years, could indicate the difficulty DeSantis might have selling such policies to more moderate voters in a general election.
DeSantis claimed in his recently released autobiography that Disney had been pressured by “leftist activists” to take a position that alienated Floridians, including parents and children, and had nothing to do with its core business. He justified his subsequent effort to seize control of a special taxing district that gave Disney broad autonomy by saying he had stopped acting in the interest of Florida. “The Walt Disney Company had decided to bite the hand that had fed it for over fifty years,” he wrote.
Disney, in response to the governor’s actions, has accused DeSantis of violating his right to free speech and launched a lawsuit that could cast a shadow over his presidential campaign.
In keeping with his political persona, DeSantis reacted defiantly to Disney’s announcement that it would halt the office project. Jeremy T. Redfern, a spokesman for his office, said: “Disney announced the possibility of a campus in Lake Nona almost two years ago. Nothing ever came of the project, and the state wasn’t sure if it would come to fruition.” Redfern also lashed out at the entertainment empire: “Given the company’s financial difficulties, falling market capitalization and falling share price, it’s no surprise that they restructured their business operations and canceled failed companies.”
DeSantis’ rivals attack
Whatever the economic background to this dispute, it has huge political implications, as can be seen in the quick reactions of some of his main potential Republican rivals.
The Trump camp issued several statements, including one that boasted that “President Trump is always right” and reiterated his earlier prediction that DeSantis would be “absolutely destroyed by Disney.”
The situation is beneficial to Trump: it allows him to portray DeSantis as weak and politically naive and also to criticize an impressive economic and political record in Florida that the governor is using as the basis of his campaign. Trump has long portrayed himself as a famous dealmaker, and while this may not be justified by his years of questionable investments and business failures, he remains powerful among Republican primary voters and could help him drive home his attacks on DeSantis’s business.
“Ron DeSantis’ failed war against Disney has done little for his limping shadow campaign and is now doing even less for Florida’s economy,” the Trump campaign said in a statement.
Another possible Republican primary candidate, former Vice President Mike Pence, also took advantage of the Disney ad to criticize DeSantis. He argued that the governor should have simply won the legislature victory over teaching gender issues in schools.
“I like Walt Disney,” Pence said on Fox Business. “I just don’t think it’s in the interest of the people of any state for a government to essentially go after a business they disagreed with over a political issue.”
Democrats also weighed in, foreshadowing the general election attacks they could make against DeSantis if he wins the Republican nomination.
“Governor DeSantis is more interested in running for president than running the state of Florida” and is trying to “out-beat Trump” in the Republican primary, Florida Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost told Trends Wide’s Wolf Blitzer on “Situation Room.” ”.
“And now the people of Florida are paying the price,” he said.
Given his political exposure at Disney and the combative political image that is central to his White House hopes, DeSantis likely has no choice but to further escalate the confrontation.
“He wants Republicans to know that ‘I’m not going to give in just because someone called it out, because the winds have changed,'” said Scott Jennings, a George W. Bush White House veteran and Trends Wide political commentator.
So the feud with Disney is unlikely to end while DeSantis is a presidential candidate, though it could eventually end up hurting both the well-known entertainment giant and the state that hosts Disney World, and which he calls home.
“I think there’s a growing sense of how does this end in a positive way?” said Johnston, the Rollins College professor. “It’s not that Disney has to lose and the state has to win or vice versa. It’s how we do this so both parties can walk away from this and we can get back to a great relationship between Disney and the state of Florida.”
