The Courage to be Free review: Ron DeSantis bows and scrapes to Trump – The Guardian

The latest polls place Ron DeSantis and Joe Biden in a footrace for 2024. Florida’s 44-year-old Republican governor leads the octogenarian president by a whisker. More Americans like DeSantis than otherwise. Whether he can capture the Republican nomination, however, remains an open question. He has not yet declared his candidacy and trails Donald Trump in hypothetical matchups. Then again, no one else comes close.Said differently, Trump and his legacy remain forces for any Republican to reckon with. Nikki Haley, an announced candidate for the GOP nomination, can barely mention his name. She wants to supplant her ex-boss by eliding him. A bold strategy.DeSantis is patient. He will probably wait to announce until late spring, when the Florida legislature adjourns. For the moment, he expects us to be content with The Courage to Be Free, a memoir-cum-288-page-exercise in sycophancy and ambition tethered to a whole lot of owning the libs.It is a mirthless read, lacking even the gleeful invective of Never Give an Inch, the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s own opening shot on the road to 2024. Predictably, DeSantis berates the left as unpatriotic and ruinous, all while prostrating himself before his former patron.“I knew that a Trump endorsement
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