Ron DeSantis won Round 1 against the Walt Disney Co. Then the Florida governor made a rookie mistake: He assumed the match was over.
It wasn’t over, and Disney, more schooled in strategic planning than DeSantis, slyly counterattacked. It won Round 2 in what DeSantis calls his “war on woke business,” and Disney may be on its way to neutering DeSantis in a fight he never should have picked in the first place.
DeSantis is clearly trying to distinguish himself as a Republican hero and leading contender for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination. Like Donald Trump, DeSantis hopes to wage culture wars as a way to rally the support of alienated conservatives who feel threatened by the rise of minorities and alternative lifestyles. Unlike Trump, DeSantis thinks he can climb the political ladder by highlighting his governing chops as the leader of the nation’s fastest-growing state.
But the Disney fiasco reveals poor judgment and weak execution for a state leader hoping to climb higher. DeSantis went after Disney last year when the entertainment giant publicly opposed a new Florida law that limited what schools can teach young kids about sex and gender issues. Opponents dubbed the measure the “Don’t Say Gay” law and pressured Florida companies to lobby against it. Disney initially took no stance, which angered some Disney employees. The CEO at the time, Bob Chapek, then apologized for the company’s silence and said Disney would work to overturn the law.
An angry DeSantis sought retribution by working with the state legislature to revoke a special self-governing status Disney has enjoyed near its Disney World theme park since 1967. Instead of managing its own municipal affairs, Disney would have to answer to a five-person board staffed with DeSantis allies.
But Disney outsmarted DeSantis. Before the new board took over in February, Disney engineered a legal deal that limits what the new board can do for decades, thwarting DeSantis and effectively retaining all the self-governing authority it had before. The new board didn’t even learn about the subterfuge until late March of this year, more than a month after it happened.
DeSantis insists the fight isn’t over. He has asked for an investigation, and his spokesman vowed, “you ain’t seen nothing, yet,” as if DeSantis simply won’t rest until he has personally ruined the state’s largest taxpayer and one of its biggest employers.
Could this be any more amateuristic? In his new book, “The Courage to be Free,” DeSantis devotes a chapter to how he stood up to Disney, climaxing in his signing of the law that stripped Disney’s municipal autonomy. “This was the Florida equivalent of the shot heard ‘round the world,” DeSantis boasts of the moment he signed the bill. He even bragged about Disney losing $63 billion in market value within six weeks of opposing the Florida education bill, as if shareholders of a storied multinational company rushed to sell because of an education dispute in Florida.
A Mickey Mouse move? Florida Governor Ron DeSantis at a book tour visit to the Adventure Outdoors gun shop in Smyrna, Georgia. REUTERS/Alyssa Pointer ·Alyssa Pointer / reuters
DeSantis’s publisher needs to start issuing errata with the book, given that Disney knocked down the shot heard round the world. When the paperback comes out, maybe DeSantis can revise the story to explain how he, um, lost. Maybe he’ll just delete the chapter altogether.
Yet DeSantis seems to think he needs the war on “woke capitalism,” or politically correct corporate behavior driven by liberal ideals, to fire up the populist hordes who will send him to the White House. That alone is doubtful. More Americans have a positive view of the term “woke” than a negative one, and a lot of people don’t even know what “woke capitalism” refers to. It’s hard to rally people to your cause when they don’t know what the cause is.
DeSantis also seems to relish bullying, with the usual blind spot of failing to know when he’s gone too far. He has brandished his hyper-conservative credentials by exploiting the defenseless, as when he sent unauthorized migrants to liberal enclaves. He found a soft target when he took over New College, an artsy liberal-arts school he wants to culturally straighten out. Disney is in another league, and DeSantis erred by overestimating his own abilities while underestimating those of his opponent.
The opposition is on to DeSantis, and unfazed. Bob Iger has returned for a second stint as Disney’s CEO, and he’s far more sure-footed than his predecessor, Bob Chapek. Iger said recently that DeSantis’s war on [woke] capitalism is “anti-business” and “anti-Florida.” That’s a sign that other Fortune 500 CEOs will put DeSantis in his place as he tries to go national with his cultural tirades against companies that, for the most part, are trying to satisfy customers and employees who are more evolved than the status quo of 30 years ago—and want their companies to evolve with them.
At the national level, this could play out in a variety of ways, assuming DeSantis does run for president. Big companies are grappling with a variety of touchy issues such as environmental policies, diversity and gender representation, family-friendliness and many others. They don’t always get it right, but they do lumber forward in a manner that resembles progress. If DeSantis wants to go toe-to-toe with every big company he could plausibly charge with wokeism, he's going to go through a lot of shoes.
DeSantis isn’t a candidate yet. He’s testing ideas and may be smart enough to ditch the ones that don’t work by the time the 2024 campaign arrives in earnest. But successful politicians learn to fight the battles they can win and avoid the ones they can’t.
DeSantis will never be friends with everybody. But he doesn’t need enemies everywhere, either.
Editor's note: This story has been corrected to indicate that Disney retained its municipal powers in a deal that took place in 2023, not 2022.
