Trump handicapped himself through his inability to surround himself with good people. His staffers were either incompetent or were working against his agenda at every turn. DeSantis keeps tight control over his ship. He has high standards and thus a high turnover, but he understands policy and law — and runs an efficient team and a leak-proof administration. ‘His people will make you a pariah if you are disloyal to DeSantis,’ the Florida commentator John Cardillo says. ‘In Trumpworld it was the other extreme. You only became a pariah if you were loyal to Trump.’ DeSantis takes a similar approach to the media: reward your friends and punish your enemies. Reporters who treat him fairly get access and exclusives. The venomous and biased are frozen out and publicly humiliated. When 60 Minutes dubiously linked Florida’s partnering with Publix for its vaccine rollout to the grocery chain’s $100,000 donation to DeSantis’s campaign, DeSantis managed to have nearly every principal involved in the story speak out on his behalf, including Democrats. ‘Maybe the best way to understand Ron DeSantis — who came out of nowhere for a lot of Americans outside Florida — is to know that he was a longtime Rush Limbaugh listener,’ says David Reaboi, a political communications consultant who lives in Miami Beach. ‘It’s not surprising that the governor has been on the leading edge of things conservatives care about, like Big Tech censorship, the trans issue or critical race theory. Conservatives really get a sense that DeSantis is “one of us”, because he is.’