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While the Post Parade Drags On, DeSantis Auditions Through Bold Action

AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell

We have moved into the part of the exhibition season where nothing happens, but everything has meaning. It’s the race before the race, where touts on the rails lean into their bets based on how their preference looks trotting by the bandstand.

Consider:

As well as:

And also this: 

And furthermore:

In short, nothing happens during this pre-New Year’s Eve post-parade that isn’t open to a dozen-times-a-dozen interpretations, and, utterly without penalty, we get to pick the ones (as I just did) that best suit your worldview.

That doesn’t mean there’s neither fun nor usefulness to the exercise. Especially when it comes to eager beavers overrunning facts to pop what they believe are the hubristic bubbles of the influencers’ influencers. There’s been plenty of fun, for instance, pouncing on a gleeful (apparent) misquoting of Rush Limbaugh half-heir Buck Sexton.

Did the radio talker really say — as X/Twitter’s eagerest beavers claim — he’s never met a former Donald Trump supporter who now rallies for DeSantis? That’s easy to debunk, as countless fans of America’s Governor did.

This is merely a representative sample. The queue winds beyond the horizon. Not that it matters much in this time-beyond-meaning, but Sexton claims he was misrepresented.

In other words, in Sexton’s experience, all those newly arrived in the Trump camp aren’t — or haven’t yet — thought better of their alliance. You can believe they’re locked in if you want to. Or you can believe Buck’s bubble is vanishingly tiny. It’s all fodder for the interminable post-parade when we’re still two months from the starting gate.

What’s clearly more interesting than crystal ball gazing, however, is what the guy who’s having all that money spent against him in Iowa is doing at Florida’s top elected official. Those with eyes to see will recognize that when he’s not beefing up his presence in Iowa, or his credentials in New Hampshire, DeSantis is, by deed, auditioning for the White House in his eye-catching governance of the Sunshine State.

During a media presentation at Jacksonville Port Tuesday, DeSantis, accompanied by UK Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch, announced a robust commercial pact between Florida and the United Kingdom. The agreement emerged from DeSantis’ whirlwind around-the-world tour last April that included stops in South Korea, Japan, Israel and London.

“It’ll deepen economic cooperation and trade relations. It’ll help us identify barriers to trade and overcome them together,” Badenoch said. “But it will also foster business links and help unlock new investment opportunities for companies on both sides of the Atlantic. Because at the end of the day, it’s not government that creates economic growth businesses, so we want to help support them to do that.”

Derided at the time by the customary critics, DeSantis springtime global barnstorming has clearly begun to bear savory fruit.

Witness, too, Florida’s tightening alliance with Israel during its war with Hamas in Gaza. Beyond funding flights that retrieved Americans from the Middle East war zone, DeSantis summoned the Legislature into special session specifically to address strengthening Florida’s ties to Israel while also squeezing longtime terrorist supporter Iran.

Monday, DeSantis signed just-passed measures clapping sanctions on the ayatollahs and protecting Jewish institutions in Florida.

Moreover, making certain there are no hints of ambivalence regarding Florida’s official position in the Israeli-Hamas conflict, DeSantis declared during last week’s Republican presidential debate he’d moved to shut down chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine.

“I already acted in Florida,” said DeSantis, who has made strong support for Israel part of his GOP presidential campaign. “We had a group, Students for Justice [in] Palestine. They said they are common cause with Hamas. They said, ‘We’re not just in solidarity. This is what we are.’ We deactivated them. We’re not gonna use tax dollars to fund jihad.”

For the record, those deactivations remain on hold while the affected schools — the University of Florida (Gainesville) and the University of South Florida (Tampa) — seek to understand their legal situations.

That’s all well and good. Meanwhile, unlike the equivocating Biden administration, voters know where DeSantis is willing to invest his political capital, and can judge from there his suitability as president.

As the Man in Black told Princess Buttercup, “I am no one to be trifled with. That is all you ever need know.”

 

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