COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa — Wall Street billionaires, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, venture capital giant Black Rock, Big Sugar, and the defense industry came under attack at the rally ahead of the Iowa caucuses, and the rally was for the most conservative Republican running for president.
Ron DeSantis will not be the populist candidate in the GOP field this year, as Donald Trump will wear that crown. But DeSantis is probably the party’s most ruthless critic of Big Business.
“We beat Disney by standing up for the innocence of our children and making sure that transgenderism is not allowed in our schools,” DeSantis said in his rally here in Western Iowa Saturday morning. In his stump speech, DeSantis comes back again and again to his battles with Disney, a corporation that has long enjoyed rafts of corporate welfare from the state and local governments.
Attacking Disney is another opportunity for DeSantis to point out that he won where the liberal media said he could never win. It’s also a good culture-war flash point. But it’s also part of something bigger: Ron DeSantis is running against corporate America.
DeSantis’s attacks on Nikki Haley, for instance, are mostly populist. He attacks her for “running on her donors’ issues.” In Council Bluffs on Saturday morning, DeSantis predicted the horrific winter weather would help him over Haley because “I don’t think this Wall Street billionaires are going to knock on doors in Iowa in the middle of January.”
Even his attacks on the press have an anti-corporate edge to them. He doesn’t call them the “liberal media” as much as the “corporate media.”
In his Saturday morning rally, DeSantis brought up his initiative in Florida to reimport drugs from Canada. Drug reimportation was long a liberal priority, which conservatives and the drug industry long opposed. But Big Pharma has spent more than a decade earning conservative ire, from its relentless support for Obamacare to its implication in government vaccine mandates during the pandemic.
DeSantis also went after multinational corporations as the presumed beneficiaries of environmental, social, and governance standings imposed by financiers on farmers. Family farmers can’t afford these sorts of rules, while Big Business can, DeSantis said.
This isn’t brand new for DeSantis, who first came to Congress in the Tea Party era when the Wall Street bailouts and the healthcare sector’s support of Obamacare were at the front of conservatives’ minds.
When DeSantis won the 2018 Republican nomination for Florida governor, he had to beat Adam Putnam, a darling of the agriculture industry. DeSantis attacked him as the “errand boy for Big Sugar,” which has long been a dominant player in Florida Republican politics, relying on all sorts of corporate welfare.
Sure enough, when DeSantis came to office, he did take on Big Sugar.
DeSantis proxy Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) spoke about “healthcare freedom,” which he defined as the fight to “free up the healthcare system from the stranglehold of big corporations — Big Hospitals, Big Pharma, Big Insurance.”
Roy partly blamed the Washington establishment’s misguided foreign policy on the defense industry.
But this is Iowa, so one species of crony capitalism almost always wins out — regardless of how environmentalist, free-market, or anti-corporate a candidate is. As a congressman, DeSantis opposed the Renewable Fuel Standard, also known as the ethanol mandate.
Now that he’s trying to win the Iowa caucuses, DeSantis has followed the path of dozens of politicians before him and vowed to leave in place ethanol’s federal favors. When asked if he would try to end the ethanol mandate as president, DeSantis said no and explained that he now sees this policy, forcing refiners to blend ethanol into their gasoline, as key to energy independence.
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But even here, DeSantis gets attacked by Donald Trump and Nikki Haley as insufficiently pro-corporate welfare.
“I have not only taken on woke corporations, we have defeated woke corporations,” DeSantis said on Saturday morning. Returning to Haley, he said, “She would cave to woke corporations, no question about that. She really represents kind of a warmed-over corporatist strain of the Republican establishment, which really has not served this country well.”