Nate Monroe: Jacksonville needed a leader. Instead, it got Ron DeSantis

Mar 11, 2024

COMMENTARY | Something remarkable happened Sunday: As his state buckled under crises both rolling and looming, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis briefly suspended his presidential jet-setting in Iowa to face his own constituents in a fraught moment. They showed him — in unmistakable, painful clarity — what he has wrought.

A mourning Jacksonville needed a leader, an empathizer, and a statesman, qualities the divisive, ever-aggrieved Florida governor lacks on his best days. And so in that fraught moment, facing constituents his administration has insulted and disempowered, DeSantis revealed himself to be an utterly spent force — lacking even the vocabulary to speak lucidly about the awful thing took place the day before.

"What he did, what he did, was totally unacceptable in the state of Florida," DeSantis said in a stilted, brief speech during a prayer vigil for the victims of the high-profile hate crime the prior day, in which a shooter entered a Dollar General in Jacksonville's New Town neighborhood and killed two Black men and one Black woman specifically because of their race. Their names were Angela Michelle Carr, 52, Anolt Joseph "A.J." Laguerre Jr., 19, and Jarrald De'Shawn Gallion, 29.

Unacceptable, the governor said — as if this shocking act was some social blunder.

The audience of mourners loudly booed DeSantis, forcing him to stop speaking and prompting Jacksonville City Council member Ju'Coby Pittman, who was originally appointed to the council in 2018 by then-Gov. Rick Scott, to scold the crowd. "Let the governor say what he's going to say, and we're going to get this party started," she said, somewhat awkwardly, of the prayer vigil being held for the victims. It was a moment many politicians might have found a bit humbling if not humiliating, but it's doubtful the arrogant and thin-skinned DeSantis, whose campaign once likened him to an earthly warrior ordained by God himself, found it to be anything other than an unfair — unacceptable? — personal insult.

Some larger context here: DeSantis pressured the Legislature last year to pass a congressional map that, for the first time in decades, wiped out a Jacksonville district that allowed Black voters to elect the candidate of their choice. It was those very constituents DeSantis was directly facing on Sunday, coupled with their pain and outrage over the shooting. New Town and most of the city's majority-Black neighborhoods are now represented by a Republican in Nassau County who has about as much in common with those neighborhoods as a porcupine does a goose down pillow. And this was no mere accident but a deliberate political project by the governor to challenge a provision in the state constitution that is supposed to prohibit the dilution of minority voting power. Pittman's lifeline to the governor was a generous gift, indeed.

Throughout the vigil, and in his prior brief statement, which his campaign recorded from Iowa, DeSantis struggled to marshal the words necessary to describe the racist killing in clear terms. In both sets of statements he could only muster the passion to describe this shocking, racist shooting with that lame "unacceptable" tag. Here's how else he talked about it: "He (the killer) targeted people based on their race." Note: not simply, he was racist. "This guy killed himself rather than face the music ... he took the coward's way out." At the prayer vigil, he called the killer a "major league scumbag." All that language evokes the same sort of faux-machismo affect he and his Republican presidential peers apply to all kinds of situations and political opponents (recall DeSantis's vow to "start slitting throats" within the federal bureaucracy if elected president).

"He wasn't talking to us at all," Jacksonville state Rep. Angie Nixon, who attended the vigil, told me. During a portion of DeSantis' remarks, Nixon, frustrated with his passive, oblique references to the hate crime, called for DeSantis to state the race of the victims and to call the killer a racist.

Characteristically, he did not: "We are not going to let people be targeted based on their race," he said. "We are going to stand up and we are going to do what we need to do to make sure evil does not triumph in the state of Florida."

Compare this with the painful, lucid ways Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters — a DeSantis ally who is every bit as conservative — talked about the shooting and the killer, who left a series of manifestos for the media, his parents and law enforcement. "Portions of these manifestos detailed the shooter's disgusting ideology of hate. Plainly put, this shooting was racially motivated and he hated Black people. He wanted to kill [the N-word] and that is the one and only time I will use that word," said Waters, who is Black.

The sheriff was forthright and clearly pained, and his words, his tone, his raw emotion on display met the moment. What a contrast.

Echoing his insipid words, DeSantis' substance fell short as well. He showed up to Jacksonville to say he was going to earmark more money for security at Edward Waters University, Florida's oldest historically Black college, around which the killer skulked before entering the Dollar General. And that's just fine — the state certainly should robustly fund campus security at Florida's HBCUs. But this killing did not happen at Edward Waters, it happened at a Dollar General, and that is kind of the point here: One can't fortify free society enough when weapons and hate flow like water, as they do in DeSantis' Florida.

DeSantis is not just guilty of a failure of words but of imagination — and of course of introspection. Nixon, the state legislator, has caught flak from Republican critics for her blunt, forceful criticism of DeSantis' administration in the wake of the shooting. "The audacity to be here and to not even own up to his role in this," she told me.

She does not mean — and no one is suggesting — that the governor bears specific, individual responsibility for the shooting or that his personal nature can be equated with that of Saturday's killer. What she is talking about are the dog whistles, like naming a road after Rush Limbaugh; his redistricting ploy, which specifically targeted a constituency of North Florida Black voters for political disempowerment; his incessant, over-the-top criticisms of diversity, equity and inclusion programs and "critical race theory," a far-right catch-all term that seems to describe anything with which Republicans disagree and, by its very nature, always — always — is attached to race. DeSantis has gone out of his way to become a political figure almost uniquely unsuited to display leadership in a time like this.

It's really pretty simple: One can't pack the barn with TNT and then act shocked when it explodes. This very rational logic would trouble a leader burdened with empathy or even a hint of self-awareness.

It was no great surprise, then, that the jeering at Sunday's vigil didn't seem to faze DeSantis at all.

Nate Monroe is a metro columnist whose work regularly appears every Thursday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU.