Florida Governor and 2024 Republican Presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis looks on during a news conference near the Rio Grande River in Eagle Pass, Texas, on June 26, 2023. DeSantis engaged with voters and residents in border-adjacent communities during a campaign event. (Suzanne Cordeiro, AFP, Getty Images/TNS)
WASHINGTON (Tribune News Service) — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis repeatedly vowed during his presidential campaign to send troops to the U.S. southern border, authorize lethal force against migrants attempting to cross between ports of entry, and even consider firing missiles into Mexico — an extraordinary use of U.S. military power that has since been endorsed by President-elect Donald Trump.
Now, DeSantis may have a chance to fulfill that promise, among other controversial proposals, should Trump ask him to lead the Pentagon.
The Republican governor is said to be in discussions with Trump and his transition team about replacing Pete Hegseth, a Fox News television personality plagued by sex and drinking scandals, as his nominee for defense secretary.
It would be a political turnabout for DeSantis, who was Trump’s chief rival in the early days of the 2024 Republican presidential primary and remains a source of ridicule and distrust among some in the president-elect’s orbit. Last month, shortly after Trump’s election victory, DeSantis said he had no intention to leave the governorship to join the new administration.
And yet, if he were to do so, DeSantis’ presidential run would provide the Senate with ample material in his confirmation hearings to determine how he would run the Defense Department.
At one of the GOP primary debates, DeSantis said he would declare a national emergency and send troops to the southern border to deploy lethal force against drug cartels attempting to smuggle drugs into the country.
Throughout the campaign, DeSantis was repeatedly pressed to explain how the military would determine whether individuals crossing the border had any connection to the drug trade.
“I am gonna declare a national emergency, I’m not gonna send troops to Ukraine but I am gonna send them to our southern border,” he said. “When these drug pushers are bringing fentanyl across the border, that’s gonna be the last thing they do. We’re gonna use force and we’re gonna leave them stone-cold dead.”
In another exchange during the primary, DeSantis told CBS that he would consider all available military options — including using force in Mexico itself — to combat the illegal drug trade.
“The tactics can be debated,” he said, asked whether he would fire missiles into Mexico. “That would be dependent on the situation.”
DeSantis has also spent millions of dollars in recent years supporting Texas in deterring migrants from entering the country through state-led border security initiatives.
Florida aided in some of Texas’ efforts that have come under scrutiny, including reports that officers were ordered to push small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande.
DeSantis, as governor, has already demonstrated a willingness to deploy state troops under his control for unconventional purposes, often unrelated to the immediate needs of the state.
He sent members of the Florida State Guard to aid Texas’ state efforts to police the border— despite questions over their coordination with federal border patrol — and, in 2020, sent 500 Florida National Guardsmen to Washington in response to protests following the death of George Floyd.
National Guard personnel can be deployed across the country in a host of contingencies, and were already sent to the southern border by Trump in his first administration. But a law passed after the Civil War, called Posse Comitatus, limits the president’s ability to deploy active duty federal troops to perform law enforcement functions on U.S. soil.
Project 2025 — a hyper-conservative think tank initiative written during the 2024 campaign, whose authors are entering the nascent administration — declared the situation at the U.S. southern border a national emergency that could create exceptions to Posse Comitatus. It also proposed that the president could override Posse Comitatus and deploy active duty troops within the country by invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows a president to deploy troops in the event of significant civil unrest.
During the end of the general election race, Trump floated the prospect of deploying the military against domestic political opponents he referred to as “the enemy within.”
“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump told Fox in an interview. “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
DeSantis also promised to purge the military of “woke” policies, such as highlighting diversity, equity and inclusion and allowing transgender personnel to serve as their preferred sex, claiming the policies were undermining military effectiveness and suppressing recruitment.
“It is time to rip the woke out of the military and return it to its core mission,” DeSantis said during the campaign. “We must restore a sense of confidence, conviction, and patriotic duty to our institutions — and that begins with our military.”
A 2021 study commissioned by the Pentagon on recruitment strategies found that “wokeness” did not register among the top 10 reasons why Americans were enlisting at record low numbers.
“Our research shows that the top barriers to service are concerns about death or injury, PTSD, emotional issues, and leaving friends and family — not political issues,” a Pentagon official told McClatchy last year. “Concerns about vaccines and ‘wokeness’ are among the least to be raised as reasons not to join the military.”
DeSantis is a veteran himself, having served as a military legal advisor to Navy SEALs and in overseas deployments to Guantanamo Bay and Iraq. His service earned him multiple commendations, including a Bronze Star, a National Defense Service Medal, and service medals for the Iraq Campaign and the Global War on Terrorism, according to service records obtained by McClatchy.
On the campaign trail, DeSantis also frequently questioned the value of sending financial and military support to Ukraine to help it defend itself against Russia. He opposed its membership bid to NATO and questioned the mission of NATO itself during the primary, calling on the transatlantic alliance to focus on the growing threat from China.
“I think NATO was fine for the Cold War. It made sense,” he said. “Now we’re in a situation where a lot of those countries aren’t doing their fair share in terms of their defenses, and yet we’re supposed to provide blanket security for that, where our interests may diverge around the world.”
At one point, DeSantis called the war between Ukraine and Russia a “territorial dispute.” He quickly changed his message after facing criticism and said that Russia was wrong to invade Ukraine and Putin was a “war criminal.” Ukraine, DeSantis added, has a “right to that territory.”
“If I could snap my fingers, I’d give it back to Ukraine 100%,” DeSantis told the New York Post’s Piers Morgan in March 2023. “But the reality is what is America’s involvement in terms of escalating with more weapons, and certainly ground troops I think would be a mistake. So, that was the point I was trying to make, but Russia was wrong to invade. They were wrong to take Crimea.”
Miami Herald reporters Ana Ceballos and Claire Healy contributed to this story.
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