Who is Ron DeSantis? Flash Uganda Media looks at his biography, age, wife, family, tribe, achievements, and relationship with Ronald Daniel DeSantis, Karen DeSantis, Christina, Mansur Ahmad Saad al-Dayfi, Jeanette Nez, the early life and education of current Florida’s 46th governor as of 2019.
Ron DeSantis is an American politician, attorney, and military personnel having served as a lieutenant commander.
He is currently serving as Florida’s 46th governor as of 2019.
From 2013 to 2018, he represented Florida’s 6th congressional district as a Republican in the United States House of Representatives.
In 2024, DeSantis plans to run for President of the United States.
Early Life and Education
Ron DeSantis also known as Ronald Dion DeSantis was born on September 14, 1978, in Jacksonville.
He is the son of Ronald Daniel DeSantis and Karen DeSantis (née Rogers) and his middle name, Dion, was given to him in honour of the artist Dion DiMucci.
His mother’s grandfather adopted the surname Rogers when he emigrated from Italy. During the initial Italian diaspora, DeSantis’ great-grandparents all emigrated from Southern.
His grandparents, parents, and siblings were all raised in Western Pennsylvania and Northeast Ohio.
His father was a builder of Nielsen TV rating boxes, while his mother was a nurse. They met in the 1970s while attending Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, and then moved to Jacksonville, Florida.
After visiting Orlando, Florida, DeSantis’ family moved to Dunedin in the Tampa Bay region of Florida when he was six years old.
Christina, his younger sister, died in 2015 from a pulmonary embolism at the age of 30.
After attending Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School, he graduated from Dunedin High School in 1997.
DeSantis played for the Dunedin National team in the 1991 Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
After high school, DeSantis entered Yale University to study history. He joined the secret Yale societies St. Elmo and Delta Kappa Epsilon and served as captain of Yale’s varsity baseball team.
He was an outfielder for that club, and as a senior in 2001, he had the highest hitting average on the team (336).
He held a number of jobs while attending Yale, including that of an electrician’s assistant and a baseball camp coach.
In 2001, DeSantis graduated from Yale with a B.A., magna cum laude.
Ron DeSantis’ Family life
Ron DeSantis and Casey Black originally met on the golf course at the University of North Florida.
Casey Black served as a news anchor and television journalist at WJXT before becoming a Golf Channel host.
On September 26, 2009, they were united in marriage in a chapel at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort & Spa since DeSantis was Catholic.
The couple lived on Ponte Vedra Beach, near St. Augustine, before being absorbed into the adjacent 4th congressional district.
They then moved to Palm Coast, which is located north of Daytona Beach and remains in his district (the 6th).
DeSantis and Casey are parents of three children.
Career and Professional Work Experience
Military Career
After Yale, Desantis spent a year coaching and teaching history at the Darlington School in Georgia.
DeSantis subsequently attended Harvard Law School, where he received his Juris Doctor, cum laude, in 2005. While at Harvard, he worked as the business manager for the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.
While in his second year of law school at Harvard, DeSantis was commissioned as an officer in the United States Navy. After that, he was posted to the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG).
In 2005, he graduated from Naval Justice School. Later that year, as a prosecutor, he reported to Naval Station Mayport’s JAG Trial Service Office Command South East.
In 2006, he received a promotion from junior grade to lieutenant.
DeSantis began working with prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility when he joined Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) in the spring of 2006.
His service in the Navy was disclosed to the public, but the Navy censored certain information because of a personal privacy exception to the Freedom of Information Act.
Mansur Ahmad Saad al-Dayfi, a captive at Guantanamo, claimed that DeSantis was in charge of forcing food on prisoners in 2022.
As a member of SEAL Team One’s legal team, DeSantis reported to the Naval Special Warfare Command Group in Coronado, California, in 2007.
He later travelled to Iraq as part of the troop surge in the fall of that same year. Dane Thorleifson, the SEAL Commander of the Special Operations Task Force-West in Fallujah, used him as his legal counsel.
DeSantis was reassigned to the Naval Region Southeast Legal Service upon his return to the United States in April 2008.
He was chosen to work as a special assistant U.S. attorney at the Middle District of Florida’s U.S. Attorney’s Office. Until his honourable release from the active military in February 2010, DeSantis served as a trial defence attorney.
In addition, he received a reserve position as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Reserve’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps.
With the rank of lieutenant commander, he left the Navy Reserve in February 2019, one month after taking office as governor.
After-Navy career
Together with two other law school buddies, DeSantis established LSAT Freedom, a test preparation business that advertises itself as “the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates”.
Prior to deciding to run for Congress in 2012, DeSantis additionally worked as a litigator at the Miami-based Holland & Knight law firm.
Political Career
DeSantis won the Republican primary for Florida’s 6th congressional district in 2012 after defeating six opponents.
He then defeated Democratic contender Heather Beaven in the general election. In 2014 and 2016, he won the re-elections.
DeSantis declared his campaign for the Florida U.S. Senate seat in 2016 in May of that year.
Due to his 2016 presidential campaign, Marco Rubio first decided not to file to compete for re-election, so he took over that seat. The fiscally responsible Club for Growth organization of the Koch Brothers supported DeSantis.
DeSantis withdrew from the Senate race and decided to compete for re-election to the House after Rubio halted his presidential campaign and decided to run for reelection to the Senate.
Governor of Florida (2019–present)
DeSantis filed his paperwork to run for governor on January 5, 2018, to succeed Republican incumbent Rick Scott, who had reached the end of his tenure.
DeSantis won the Republican primary over his main competitor, Adam Putnam, on August 28, 2018.
He named state representative Jeanette Nez as his running companion on September 5. To concentrate on his gubernatorial campaign, he gave up his House seat on September 10.
Initial results on election night showed DeSantis winning, so Gillum gave up. On January 8, 2019, DeSantis was elected governor.
Three days after assuming office, on January 11, he posthumously pardoned the Groveland Four, a group of black men who had been wrongfully convicted of rape in 1949.
The same day, he officially fired Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, selecting Gregory Tony to take his place, reportedly due to his answers to the massacres at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Ron DeSantis declared his intention to run for re-election in September 2021. He submitted the required paperwork to formally enter the race on November 7.
On October 23, there was a discussion for governor, and the contenders traded jabs.
It was the highest margin of victory in a Florida governor election since 1982 for DeSantis, who received 59.4% of the vote against Crist’s 40% on November 8.
2024 Presidential Campaign
Ron DeSantis received encouragement to run for president from a number of well-known personalities between the years 2020 and 2023. He, however, referred to the 2024 rumour as “purely manufactured” in September of 2021.
DeSantis came in second place to Trump, who earned 59 per cent of the vote, in a straw poll for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference.
The publication of DeSantis’ autobiography, The Courage To Be Free, and the subsequent book tour fueled the 2024 speculation.
DeSantis formally started his campaign for president on May 24, 2023. It was announced on Twitter with the help of Elon Musk, the company’s owner.
Achievements and Awards
Ron DeSantis received the Bronze Star Medal, the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, and the Iraq Campaign Medal during his time in the armed forces.
DeSantis belongs to both the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He was on Time’s annual list of the 100 most influential persons in the world, the Time 100, in 2022.
He was a founding member of the Freedom Caucus in Congress, a collection of conservative and libertarian lawmakers, in 2015.
DeSantis headed the Committee on Oversight and Accountability’s Subcommittee on National Security during the 114th Congress of the United States.
Along with numerous of its subcommittees, he also served on the Republican Study Committee, Judiciary Committee, and Foreign Affairs Committee.
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