The rise of Ron DeSantis

RONALD REAGAN’s tub-thumper for Barry Goldwater in 1964, Barack Obama’s silky-smooth Democratic Convention speech of 2004: the political annals are replete with moments when a significant new talent announced itself. Could it be that in February Ron DeSantis of Florida produced another? The scene was a press conference in Tallahassee. The subject under discussion was the Republican governor’s view that conservatives are discriminated against by social and mainstream media companies. Don’t say it isn’t so, he told the assembled reporters: “You can whiz on my leg, but don’t tell me it’s raining.”

Mr DeSantis’s phrase, now available on a range of conservative merchandise, expressed the dominant Republican view of big tech and the media: both knowing and dismissive. And he was able to utter it with rare authority. Mr DeSantis, who is second only to Donald Trump in popularity among Republicans, owes his rise not only to his record of sticking it to the liberal media but also, more impressively, to his knack of being vindicated almost whenever he has done so.

Having entered the Republican gubernatorial primary as a little-known House member, he launched a campaign so sycophantically pro-Trump that he became a figure of fun for the national media. He proceeded to win the former president’s endorsement and the primary. That put...