Swamplandia
Illustration by Tim Enthoven
Two weeks after Ron DeSantis moved into the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee, Florida, in January 2019, the chair of his political action committee, Susie Wiles, summarized a pair of important goals in a confidential memo to DeSantis’s chief of staff: “It is the governor’s desire,” she wrote, “to fundraise and maintain a high political profile at all times—inside and outside of Florida.” True to Wiles’s word, DeSantis has spent the past four years pursuing these objectives with unrelenting vigor and remarkable success.
His methodical ascent to national political stardom has now taken a quantum leap, thanks to the evident…