Governor QAnon
By 
One reason DeSantis has emerged as the most likely alternative if Trump is unable to run in 2024 is that, as someone who his spent his adult life immersed in the wingnut media complex, he’s not merely an exploiter of Q-related nonsense, he’s also a customer:
he’s a q-pilled gen xer the same way trump is basically a fox news grandpa— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) October 22, 2022
With the possible exception of Tucker Carlson, he’s also the single biggest reason that the Republican Party went full-on anti-vaxx even though Trump actually played a a major role in the unprecedented development of the safe and effective COVID vaccines:
But DeSantis has instead repeatedly taken steps to cast doubt on the efficacy of the COVID vaccine itself. He refused to say if he was getting a booster and stood next to vaccine skeptics who denounced the jab at a press conference. DeSantis recruited Joseph Ladapo, an idiosyncratic vaccine skeptic, and made Florida the only state not to recommend the COVID vaccine for children. That is not an expression of opposition to mandates. It is an expression of opposition to the vaccine. He officially declared that the state “recommends against males aged 18 to 39 receiving mRNA COVID-19 vaccines” on the grounds that it is allegedly unsafe. That is an anti-vaccine stance, not an anti-mandate stance.
More recently, Ladapo appeared on the QAnon-supporting program X22 Report, where he called the mRNA vaccines unsafe. “Basic questions about safety have either been spun, ignored, or suppressed,” he charged.
It is worth noting that DeSantis didn’t have a surgeon general on hand who happened to turn crazy on vaccines. He recruited him from out of state specifically because of his crank anti-vaccine beliefs.
DeSantis took these steps, because the anti-vaccine movement is a vocal constituency within his party. Promoting vaccine skepticism wins over support without alienating pro-vaccine conservatives, who continue to justify his position as merely anti-mandate. The asymmetry of willpower between the fanatics and people who are determined to remain their coalition partners has shifted the party’s center of gravity sharply rightward.
Not only have Republicans turned against the COVID vaccine, but they are turning against other vaccines. One survey finds only 22 percent of Republicans have gotten a regular flu shot this fall — as opposed to 49 percent of Democrats.
In a healthy party, pro-vaccine Republicans would be able to fight back. But on this issue, just as has happened with all the others, they have helplessly allowed the fanatics to win.
DeSantis doesn’t just use various crackpot beliefs to get elected; he uses authoritarian means to impose them on his state, which makes him the ultimate refinement of MAGA.