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Ronald Dion DeSantis (; born September 14, 1978) is an American politician serving since 2019 as the 46th governor of Florida. A member of the Republican Party, he represented Florida's 6th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2013 to 2018. DeSantis was a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, withdrawing his candidacy in January 2024. Born in Jacksonville, DeSantis spent most of his childhood in Dunedin, Florida. He graduated from Yale University and Harvard Law School. DeSantis joined the United States Navy in 2004 and was promoted to lieutenant before serving as a legal advisor to SEAL Team One. He was stationed at Joint Task Force Guantanamo in 2006, and was deployed to Iraq in 2007. When he returned to the U.S. about eight months later, the U.S. attorney general appointed DeSantis to serve as a special assistant U.S. attorney at the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Middle District of Florida, a position he held until his honorable discharge from active military duty in 2010. DeSantis was first elected to Congress in 2012 and was reelected in 2014 and 2016. During his tenure, he became a founding member of the Freedom Caucus and was an ally of President Donald Trump. He briefly ran for U.S. Senate in 2016, but withdrew when incumbent senator Marco Rubio sought reelection. DeSantis won the Republican nomination for the 2018 gubernatorial election and narrowly defeated the Democratic Party nominee, Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum, in the general election by 0.4%. DeSantis was governor during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as Hurricane Ian and Hurricane Nicole. He encouraged the passage of the Parental Rights in Education Act. In the 2022 gubernatorial election, he defeated former governor Charlie Crist by 19.4 percentage points, the state's largest margin of victory for a governor's election in 40 years. On May 24, 2023, DeSantis announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president of the United States, and he continued to serve as governor during the campaign. On January 21, 2024, DeSantis withdrew his candidacy and endorsed Trump. DeSantis has written two books: Dreams From Our Founding Fathers, published before his first campaign for Congress in 2011, and The Courage to Be Free, published in 2023. Early life and education Ronald Dion DeSantis was born on September 14, 1978, in Jacksonville, Florida, to parents Karen DeSantis (née Rogers) and Ronald Daniel DeSantis. His middle name, Dion, honors the singer Dion DiMucci, and his family name has different pronunciations. His mother's family name, Rogers, was chosen by her grandfather (née Ruggiero) upon immigrating from Italy. All of DeSantis's great-grandparents immigrated from Southern Italy during the first Italian diaspora. His parents and all of his grandparents were born and grew up in Western Pennsylvania and Northeast Ohio. DeSantis's mother worked as a nurse and his father installed Nielsen TV-rating boxes. They met while attending Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, during the 1970s and moved to Jacksonville, Florida, during that decade. His family then moved to Orlando, Florida, before relocating when he was six years old to the city of Dunedin in Florida's Tampa Bay area. His only sibling, younger sister Christina, died in 2015 at age 30 from a pulmonary embolism. He was a member of the Dunedin National team that made it to the 1991 Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. DeSantis attended Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School and Dunedin High School, graduating in 1997. After high school, DeSantis studied history at Yale University. He was captain of Yale's varsity baseball team; he played outfield, and as a senior in 2001 he had the team's best batting average at .336. DeSantis was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and of the St. Elmo Society, one of Yale's secret societies. While attending Yale, he worked a variety of jobs, including as an electrician's assistant and a coach at a baseball camp. DeSantis graduated from Yale in 2001 with a B.A., magna cum laude. After Yale, DeSantis taught history and coached for a year at Darlington School in Georgia, then attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 2005 with a Juris Doctor, cum laude. At Harvard, he was business manager for the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Military service In 2004, during his second year at Harvard Law, DeSantis was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Navy and assigned to the Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps (JAG). He completed Naval Justice School in 2005. Later that year, he reported to the JAG Trial Service Office Command South East at Naval Station Mayport, Florida, as a prosecutor. He was promoted from lieutenant, junior grade to lieutenant in 2006. In the spring of 2006, DeSantis arrived at Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO), working with detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. The publicly released records of his service in the Navy were redacted, with the Navy citing a personal-privacy exception to the Freedom of Information Act. Mansur Ahmad Saad al-Dayfi, who was held at Guantanamo, alleged in 2022 that DeSantis oversaw force-feeding detainees and DeSantis acknowledged that he advised the commander of the base about the use of force feeding. In 2007, DeSantis reported to the Naval Special Warfare Command Group in Coronado, California, where he was assigned as a legal adviser to SEAL Team One; he deployed to Iraq in the fall of 2007 as part of the troop surge. He served as legal adviser to Dane Thorleifson, the SEAL Commander of the Special Operations Task Force-West in Fallujah. DeSantis returned to the U.S. in April 2008, reassigned to the Naval Region Southeast Legal Service. He was appointed to serve as a special assistant U.S. attorney at the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Middle District of Florida. DeSantis was assigned as a trial defense counsel until his honorable discharge from active duty in February 2010. He concurrently accepted a reserve commission as a lieutenant in the Judge Advocate General's Corps of the U.S. Navy Reserve. During his military career, DeSantis was awarded the Bronze Star Medal, the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, and the Iraq Campaign Medal. His Navy Reserve service ended in February 2019, a month after his gubernatorial inauguration, with the rank of lieutenant commander. Post-naval career With two law-school friends, DeSantis founded an LSAT test-prep company, LSAT Freedom, that one of the other co-founders billed as "the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates". DeSantis also worked as a litigator at the Miami-based law firm Holland & Knight before running for Congress in 2012. U.S. House of Representatives (2013–2018) Elections DeSantis defeated six candidates in the 2012 Republican primary for Florida's 6th congressional district, and defeated Democrat.... Discover the Ron Desantis popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Ron Desantis books.