DeSantis takes victory lap with Donalds and presses him to continue his policies

TAMPA — There’s no question Ron DeSantis has been one of the consequential governors in the United States during his nearly eight-year run in Tallahassee.

Tuesday night, he made sure everyone knew that — and attempted to ensure Republican leadership in Florida will maintain his policies and political philosophy when he’s term limited out of office in January.

The governor served as emcee in what was billed as a “Leadership Forum,” spending more than 90 minutes interviewing four Republican men running for statewide office in November, including for the first time in this election cycle his potential successor, U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds of Naples.

Donalds-DeSantis

The main attraction Tuesday night was the first public appearance by DeSantis and Donalds together this election cycle.

DeSantis made it clear after Donalds entered the governor’s race in February 2025 that even though President Donald Trump was backing him, he was not, saying Donalds “just hasn’t been part of any of the victories that we’ve had over the left these last years.”

Some considered that a curious explanation, given those legislative victories happened in Tallahassee, whereas Donalds left the Legislature in 2020 when elected to Congress. There was also the possibility at the time that the governor was saving an endorsement for his wife, Casey, who never entered the race.

Since he’s been on the campaign trail, Donalds has essentially said he’d cleave to policies DeSantis has enacted since 2019. And Tuesday, that included backing the governor’s call that if the proposed property tax constitutional amendment on the November ballot is approved, he will make sure the state’s rural and fiscally constrained counties have resources to fund essential services like law enforcement. If approved, the property tax measure would reduce funding for local governments.

DeSantis proposed a dedicated trust fund to secure operating revenue for smaller, rural counties as part of his broader property tax cut proposal in June. But Republican leaders rejected that provision when they put the measure on the ballot. The governor asked Donalds Tuesday whether he would be willing to “do at the state level what needs to be done to be able to make this land properly, not only for taxpayers but for public safety?”

“Of course,” Donalds responded, putting him at odds with comments by incoming House Speaker Sam Garrison that he doesn’t want to use state dollars to “backfill” local budget gaps.

DeSantis praised Donalds for being one of a minority of House Republicans who voted against the 2018 school safety bill passed soon after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public High School in Parkland that left 17 people dead.

The bill passed with support from most Republicans in the Legislature and was signed into law by Republican Gov. Rick Scott. DeSantis called it a “kind of knee jerk reaction to go after Second Amendment rights.”

“When we saw the bill, we could clearly see that this was an infringement on the Second Amendment,” Donalds said.

Joining Donalds in fielding questions from the governor were the three Republicans who serve on the Florida Cabinet and are on the ballot his November: Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, Attorney General James Uthmeier, and Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia.

DeSantis appointed the latter two to fill vacancies and they face voters for the first time in those positions.

Uthmeier frequently makes news hosting press conferences regarding actions his office is undertaking, but he hasn’t spoken much about his Democratic opponent, former Miami-Dade state Sen. José Javier Rodríguez.

Uthmeier Tuesday night called Rodriguez as “far-left radical as it gets.”

Ingoglia, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, said it doesn’t matter who any of the Republicans are running against, since “the Democratic Party is the Democratic Socialists of America right now. The DSA is the Democratic Party.”

Florida Republicans employed similar rhetoric when they met for their summer convention in South Florida in late June, days after three DSA-backed members won congressional primaries in New York City. Since then, Jacksonville state Rep. Angie Nixon surprised the Florida political world when she defeated Alex Vindman in the Florida Senate Democratic primary last month. Nixon, a longtime progressive, joined the DSA in June, but her opponents are targeting her because of that association, as Ingoglia did Tuesday.

“The DSA has infiltrated the Democratic Party at all levels of government and has never been more apparent than here in the state of Florida, with the election of Angie Nixon for U.S. Senate,” he said. “It has never been more apparent that the Democratic Party of Florida is the DSA.”

Sharia law?

Speaking to a solidly Republican audience, the candidates criticized Democrats as supporting men competing against women in sports and having “boys sharing bathrooms with girls,” in the words of Uthmeier.

However, the biggest cheers from the hundreds in attendance came toward the conclusion of the evening, when DeSantis mentioned he’d signed legislation (HB 1471) banning use of Sharia law in Florida. The legislation also grants a handful of government officials the power to designate domestic terrorist organizations in Florida.

The law declares the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Brotherhood, and Antifa as such groups. (CAIR is challenging the law in court.)

DeSantis warned against “the fusion of socialism and Islamicism,” or what he called a “Red-Green alliance.” He asked Donalds and the Cabinet members whether he was right to enact the anti-Sharia bill.

“We are going to fight this every single day, because what the radical left and what radical Sharia wants is that they want the end to the American way of life and constitutionalism in this country,” Donalds replied. “You cannot have a radical governing legal structure, which is what Sharia is operating, within the confines of the state of Florida or the United States of America, so we are going to fight that tooth and nail every single day.”

“I will use as attorney general every tool of the legal office I can to combat this evil and fundamental challenge to a Republic form of government,” Uthmeier said, adding, “If you are a school teaching Sharia law and receiving vouchers, we are going to take that away.”

“It’s disheartening for a group of people to come in and think that they can rewrite our laws and be above our laws and have a separate law,” Ingoglia added.

Hiba Rahim, executive director of CAIR Florida, told the Phoenix in April that the bill was positioned as a an “anti-Sharia measure” but only one sentence contains the word “Sharia.”

“Our courts already do not allow any foreign law to supersede the Constitution of the land,” she said.

“That protection is already there, my brothers and sisters, and no Muslim from the people to the pulpit advocates bringing Sharia to America. So, why do they focus on that? Because it’s a distraction. What this actually is is an anti-free speech law. It’s an anti-due process law. It’s an anti-First Amendment law.”

Protests

During the evening, five protesters at separate times began shouting at the speakers, prompting the audience to jeer as they individually were removed from the room.

Video clips of DeSantis denouncing one demonstrator by saying George Soros “isn’t paying you enough because you’re not very good at this” were making the rounds on the internet on Wednesday.

Later he lamented the quality of the protests.

“Listen, you should be respectful. You should listen, this is part of the civic process and do that. But if you’re not going to do that, do a better job of protesting, please?” he said to applause.

Beating the left ‘better than any other state’

The governor spent a fair amount of time congratulating himself about how he made Florida the place “where woke went to die,” celebrating policy victories that he claimed were some of the biggest for conservatives nationwide.

“We beat Dr. Fauci on COVID! We beat Disney on parents’ rights! We beat Big Tech on online censorship! We beat Big Sugar by restoring the Everglades! We beat Big Pharma by banning vax mandates! We Beat George Soros on crime! We beat the left on election integrity! We beat Biden on illegal immigration. … We beat the school unions on school choice. And on and on it goes,” he boasted at one point during his opening eight minute-plus monologue.

“These are enduring successes, and there’s not been a state in our country during our lifetimes that has more thoroughly beaten the political left than we have over these last seven-and-half-years,” DeSantis said.

Looking back on his tenure at another point, the governor said the 2023 legislative session included “the most conservative policy victories in the history of the modern Republican Party, and it happened here in Florida during my tenure.”

“I don’t even think that’s disputable,” he added. “If you look at all of what we’ve done on all of these things and getting ahead of some of these things, and we have the biggest supermajority in the Florida House right now than we’ve ever had in the history of Florida.”

Describing his political philosophy, he said his approach is simple: “We win and they lose. We need to beat the left, and we have beat the left better than any other state in the modern history of this country.”