It’s been a tough few days for Florida. Hurricane Ian blew through the Sunshine State, wreaking havoc on Cape Coral, leveling houses in Fort Myers Beach, flooding Naples and other nearby towns, and killing at least 80 people. Natural disasters happen.
According to critics, however, it’s all the fault of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). A CNN reporter asked DeSantis whether he had responsibility for the death toll because people didn’t evacuate. “Do you stand behind Lee County’s decision to not have that mandatory evacuation until the day before the storm?” they asked.
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DeSantis responded with some simple facts. “[Lee County officials] were following the weather track. They had to make decisions based on that. But you know, 72 hours, they weren’t even in the [hurricane path projection] cone — 48 hours, they were on the periphery.”
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Still, a trending Twitter hashtag, #DeSantisDestroysFlorida, has 13,000 tweets as of this writing. Here’s one example.
Journalist and Miami resident Lesley Abranavel tweeted that “the Governor is a soulless sociopath.”
DeSantis made the right choice to keep his head down before the storm and instead focus on logistics. He was right to ask for federal aid ahead of time. Following the storm, he has been present in communities that were struck the hardest. Of notable credit: Every time DeSantis communicated to the public, he did so with facts, not feelings or partisan politics. He focused simply on the information Floridians needed to make decisions.
In other words, the governor offered what one might reasonably call “good leadership.”
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Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She is an opinion columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
