It’s been a week of political whiplash for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who in a matter of days has gone from top foil to the Biden White House to a willing partner with the president and his team.
It was Sept. 20 when the White House was on alert for the potential that DeSantis was organizing a flight of migrants from Texas to President Biden’s home state of Delaware, his latest move to draw attention to the surge of immigrants at the southern border and what he viewed as the responsibility of blue states to share the burden.
One week later, DeSantis was on the phone with Biden in the first of three calls the two men have held this week to coordinate the response to Hurricane Ian as the storm knocked out power, flooded communities and destroyed homes across the state of Florida.
The seesawing between antagonist and partner comes as DeSantis tries to juggle building up his bona fides among conservatives should he decide to run for president in 2024 — potentially against Biden — and leading his state through what he and others have described as a generational storm.
“DeSantis is showing — though the process is ongoing — that he can play both the political culture warrior and the in-charge governor of the entire state,” former Republican National Committee spokesman Doug Heye said, calling DeSantis a “Trump with substance.”
DeSantis has been a thorn in the side of the Biden administration for the last year-and-a-half, eliciting frequent responses from the White House briefing room podium and at one point last year referring to the Biden administration as the “Brandon administration” in a nod to a popular conservative meme mocking the president.
The White House has sparred with DeSantis over his ban on mask mandates in schools; his support for a law that restricts discussion of sexual orientation in the classroom; and most recently his decision to fly migrants from Texas to Massachusetts.
Those migrant flights were dominating headlines as recently as last week, when DeSantis was arguing the outrage over the flights was disproportionate to the lack of outrage over the millions of migrants who had crossed the border illegally since Biden took office.
When DeSantis was reportedly lining up a flight to take another group of migrants from Texas to Delaware, where Biden regularly spends the weekend, the president responded sarcastically.
“He should come visit. We have a beautiful shoreline,” Biden said.
But much has changed in just over one week, as both men have warned that Hurricane Ian, which made landfall Wednesday as a Category 4 storm, poses a grave threat to the residents of much of Florida and could be the deadliest storm in years.
