Long before he became a darling of the right and the left’s second favorite villain, Ronald Dion DeSantis was just a Florida kid they called “D” who played baseball, worked at a grocery store and dreamed of becoming president of the United States.

Florida’s audacious forty-four-year-old governor earned legions of fans — and plenty of enemies — for keeping his state open during the pandemic. And he’s become a national figure since – a reinvented Florida Man – by playing offense on issues ranging from parental rights in education to illegal immigration to Critical Race Theory to fighting woke corporations. Americans know him as a perpetually-in-the-news flamethrowing politician, but few know much about him beyond the headlines and his résumé, which includes degrees from Yale and Harvard and distinguished service in the military.

To better understand the man who could be our next president, I decided to spend some time in the Tampa suburb where DeSantis spent the bulk of his childhood to see what I could learn. And so, on a glorious Friday morning in late October, I set off for Dunedin with no agenda other than to walk in DeSantis’s footsteps.

[Be sure to read it all. It’s a lengthy and entertaining piece. — Ed]