Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is quickly establishing himself as a frontrunner in the 2024 GOP presidential race. He’s made national headlines by doubling down on the worst of the party’s culture war, attacking trans rights and Black history classes.
But the Florida political machine behind DeSantis’s rise remains largely unknown and undercovered. The Intercept has been digging in — and what we’ve found isn’t pretty.
At The Villages, a famously conservative retirement community sprawling across three Florida counties, the political power of the DeSantis allies behind the development is almost total.
When a local county commissioner took on Florida’s generous taxpayer handouts to The Villages, DeSantis’s political buddies targeted him. And he ended up in jail. DeSantis himself signed the order removing the commissioner from office.
It’s just one example of Ron DeSantis’s corruption and his weaponization of the state to benefit donors and silence critics. The more we look, the more evidence we find of DeSantis’s crony politics.
With Ron DeSantis emerging as a serious contender for the White House — and the media positioning him as an alternative to Donald Trump — our nonprofit newsroom needs your support to stay on the beat and inform the American public about his insider politics before it’s too late.
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My reporting from The Villages exposed how DeSantis cronies took revenge on Oren Miller, a 72-year-old Villages resident and county commissioner who helped mount a rare challenge to powerful developers. Miller ended up in jail on perjury charges.
But this isn’t the first time The Intercept has revealed questionable behavior from DeSantis and his allies. In another investigation, we revealed how major campaign contributors to DeSantis were rewarded with tens of millions of dollars in state contracts.
When DeSantis flew asylum-seekers to Martha’s Vineyard in an attempt to troll liberals over immigration, cable news ate it up and gave him exactly the media coverage he wanted. Intercept reporter Ken Klippenstein revealed that to pull off the stunt, DeSantis handed $615,000 in taxpayer dollars to a major Republican campaign donor to charter the flights.
All of this is in addition to widely reported stories on Florida’s rejection of AP African American Studies as well as books by Black and LGBTQ authors, voter suppression, and the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
It’s clear that Ron DeSantis is on the short list of the people most likely to become the next president of the United States. We need to dig into his record now to give the American people the complete facts they need to judge his record. But as a nonprofit investigative news source, we rely on readers as a critical source of funding.
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