Get Access to Print and Digital for $23.99 per year.
Subscribe for Full Access
February 2023 Issue [Letter from Washington]

Swamplandia

The money behind Ron DeSantis’s populist façade
Illustration by Tim Enthoven

Illustration by Tim Enthoven

[Letter from Washington]

Swamplandia

The money behind Ron DeSantis’s populist façade
Adjust

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…

Subscribe or to continue reading.

 is the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine. His most recent book is The Spoils of War.


More from

| View All Issues |

October 2023

Close
“An unexpectedly excellent magazine that stands out amid a homogenized media landscape.” —the New York Times
Subscribe now

Debug