The Synergy Meant To Be
Charlie Kirk saw “the future of conservatism” in Ron DeSantis, and regarded him as “America’s Greatest Governor,” high praise that he repeated on a regular basis. Charlie considered Ron a friend, and wanted him “to remain a dominant political player for years/decades to come,” even as polling showed the Florida governor’s 2024 campaign for president was not gaining traction against Donald Trump. (“Charlie Kirk Praises Gov Ron DeSantis’s Leadership in Florida,” YouTube video, May 27, 2022, and X, @charliekirk11, July 17, 2023; July 31, 2023; and January 21, 2024)
Kirk praised the performance of DeSantis throughout the debates, but when DeSantis continued his campaign all the way to the caucuses in Iowa despite distant second-place polling, Kirk lamented the loss of resources which could have served Trump. However, when Ron withdrew from the race after Iowa and reunited with Trump, Charlie was quick to heap praise upon him again:
“President Trump and Governor DeSantis met privately on Sunday.
This is excellent news.
Governor DeSantis has been putting up win after win in Florida since ending his campaign. In just the last couple months:
He signed HB 1451 and HB 1589 which prevents Florida municipalities from accepting ID cards issued to illegals by other jurisdictions and increases penalties for driving without an ID.
He has promoted and signed legislation protecting small businesses.
He’s worked on getting homeless off the streets.
He has sent air and sea assets to stop illegals from flooding the country from Haiti.
He is outlawing DEI in Florida government offices and schools and signed anti-grooming legislation.
He has threatened to expel pro-Hamas demonstrators from Florida public colleges if they set up illegal encampments, while allocating funds to protect Jewish day schools.
He just signed legislation which will include teaching Florida children about the dangers of communism.
Look forward to seeing Trump and DeSantis on the campaign trail together.
Let’s unify and win!” (X, @charliekirk11, Apr 29, 2024)
By highlighting the principles promoted by Charlie Kirk in his courageous quest to restore the greatness of America, and comparing them to the relentless conservative leadership of Ron DeSantis as Chief Executive of the Free State of Florida, this book pleads the case that, were Charlie with us today, he’d be very enthusiastic about another DeSantis run for president, and that it would do Charlie’s legacy a disservice to presume he’d have preferred another candidate who has not championed his convictions and vision as consistently and convincingly as “America’s Greatest Governor.”
Specifically, it would do Charlie’s legacy a disservice to presume he’d have been willing to cast aside core principles to endorse JD Vance over DeSantis as the Republican nominee for president. For Vance is not the man he’s been made out to be. He’s the invention of men moving in the shadows to replace our constitutional republic with an oligarchy, one run by Big Tech AI billionaires hungry for even more power and money than they presently possess.
So, if you’re curious about why Charlie regarded Ron as “the future of conservatism” and “America’s Greatest Governor,” and you’ve yet to explore the remarkable convergence of values between these two great men, then this book is for you; and
If you want to know which of Kirk’s core principles would have confronted his conscience, had he lived to be pressured by powerful forces to endorse a JD Vance run for president, then this book is for you; and
If you believe Kirk’s legacy is destined to be written into the pages of history by “we the people,” and are eager to learn how to shape that legacy into a 2028 campaign that’s truly worthy of him and his mission, then this book is for you; or
If you’re already a Ron DeSantis fan (for any one of a hundred reasons), and want to be part of the growing grassroots movement to put a true champion or ordered liberty and limited government into the Oval Office, then this book is definitely for you, my friend.
* * *
Charlie Kirk and Ron DeSantis embarked on their respective political career paths at the same time, and for precisely the same reasons. They saw that under President Barack Obama, big government had run amok, straying far away from the “first principles” of our Founding Fathers.
When Kirk first incorporated Turning Point USA (TPUSA) in June 2012, DeSantis was in the midst of his first campaign for U.S. Congress. Over the course of the next four years, as set forth in Charlie’s first book—Time for a Turning Point—Kirk worked tirelessly to grow TPUSA into a formidable organization to advocate for free markets and limited government on college campuses across the nation. That organization grew with astonishing speed. “At the date of this writing,” he would proudly proclaim, “Turning Point has a field staff of 83 part-time and 60 full-time paid members. Our 2016 budget is at $5.5 million. At the first CPAC we attended we brought four people. In 2016 we had 300. We have charters for Turning Point on more than 280 campuses, and some form of presence on more than 1000. On Facebook we are reaching 30 million people per week. We have a Twitter army of 10 million. Every number I’m sharing will be obsolete by the time you read this. Our growth is incredible and a result of incredible people, very hard work, and luck.”(Time for a Turning Point, 14)
Meanwhile, a principled patriot, a man who’d passed on the prospect of a lucrative legal career in Major League Baseball to serve in the U.S. Navy, was taking his own fight for limited government to Congress. Reserve Lieutenant Commander Ron DeSantis announced the official start of his first congressional campaign on February 9, 2012. He’d made his motivation to enter politics clear months earlier, when he published his first book, Dreams from Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama.
The book is a masterful dissertation on James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, early American history, and the creation of the U.S. Constitution. The cogency of the future congressman’s arguments, and the scholarly rigor of his historical analysis, sets Dreams apart from standard political biographies. This would come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the credentials of its author. Before swearing a solemn oath of allegiance to that same Constitution when commissioned to serve in the Navy’s Judge Advocate Generals Corps, where he earned the Bronze Star, DeSantis had graduated with honors from Yale with a degree in U.S. History, and with honors from Harvard Law School as a Juris Doctor.
The subtitle of his book, First Principles in the Age of Obama, is a fitting description of its two-fold purpose: to document the determination of Barack Obama to destroy individual liberty and economic opportunity by supplanting the courageous pursuit of happiness with complacent dependency on big government-directed wealth redistribution; and to argue forcefully for America’s return to constitutional “first principles.” Here is a particularly memorable passage summarizing these principles:
“The Framers considered the protection of individual liberty to be the primary object of government. Understanding that individuals possessed different ‘faculties’ for acquiring property, they presupposed that an equality of property could never exist in a free society. Since the lawful acquisition of property is a function of an individual’s liberty, a government that leveraged the power of the state to redistribute, or ‘level,’ wealth throughout society necessarily undermined the very liberty that it was constructed to safeguard.” (Dreams from Our Founding Fathers, 99)
This statement of first principles is the spine of the book, serving as the springboard from which DeSantis launches his sharp critiques of modern progressivism, spotlighting the clear contrasts between the vision of the Framers and the freedom-stifling big government policy positions of the Obama administration.
“Hamilton took comfort in the “adventurous spirit” that distinguished “the commercial character of America” . . . Obama considers private commerce as inherently exploitive and sees the wealth-creating “adventurous spirit” to lie not in the fabric of the American people but in the government, its spending, and its bureaucracy. This is a wholesale reformulation of the basic philosophy relied on by the Founders when they created the Constitution. From leveraging government power to redistribute the wealth of the nation’s citizens to conceiving a taxation as a punishment rather than as a mechanism to raise revenue, Obama’s economic worldview represents an outright rejection of the basic, time-honored principles that the Framers espoused. The transformation he seeks is largely what they sought to prevent.” (Dreams, 106–107)
Having drawn this sharp philosophical distinction, DeSantis widens the lens beyond abstract theory to examine what he views as the practical consequences of such an economic worldview in contemporary governance.
“All told, the Obama approach to the economy and property rights rests heavily on political considerations: what group to punish, what behaviors to require, and what outcomes to engineer. Rather than emphasize policies that create an environment where people can create wealth or otherwise enhance their own circumstances, Obama champions ‘redistributive change,’ shorthand for government activism that transfers resources among different classes of citizens through the force of law.” (Dreams, 86)[*]
Five years after Ron wrote those words in Dreams, Charlie would echo him in Time for a Turning Point:
“. . . The founding fathers . . . put in place a framework that intentionally creates checks and balances to limit the power of the state and maximize individual liberty . . . .
The American constitutional framework gave rise to more than a country. It trailblazed a culture in the west that embraces merit, the limited rule of law, individual liberty, and capitalism. The framers did more than start the greatest country in the history of the world; they liberated billions of people from oppression under the ruling class of the state. They gave the world a glimpse as to what a free society looks like and what a free people can do.
In a very real sense, the work that I do each day, the reason for the formation of Turning Point, is directly because of the First Principles embedded in our Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Each day I and Turning Point promote, without exception, [what] came from the Founding Fathers and those documents . . . Our fight is designed to preserve their work.”(Turning Point, 65–67)
Kirk’s rhetoric not only mirrors that of DeSantis, but amplifies it for Kirk’s young activist audience, translating abstract appeals to first principles into a generational call to arms:
“Right now in America, the federal and state governments have created such a culture of dependency and entitlement that [people] can too easily end up settling for subsistence and leisure time instead of pushing themselves to the extreme levels to which their skills and talents could otherwise carry them . . . .
Under President Barack Obama, . . . we have witnessed the near perfection of the welfare state.”(Turning Point, 50)
The theme of dependency—economic, cultural, and psychological—thus becomes a recurring through-line, linking DeSantis’s scholarly constitutional critique with Kirk’s campus activism. As Kirk put it: “Big government doesn’t just suck; it makes dependent slaves out of all of us. Our Founding Fathers knew these dangers, took great steps to prevent this from happening, and yet we have found a way to chip away at everything they built for us.”(Turning Point, 80)
DeSantis’s 2012 announcement of his intention to run for Congress strikes virtually the same notes. On February 9, 2012, St. Augustine’s Historic City News reported that Ron DeSantis had entered the race for Congress in Florida’s newly proposed 6th District. In formally declaring his candidacy, DeSantis framed the campaign in unmistakably constitutional terms: “I’m running for Congress to reverse Obama’s big government policies, to be faithful to the principles on which our nation was founded, and to make members of Congress play by the same rules as the rest of us.”
That statement was not campaign fluff. It was an early declaration of the governing philosophy that would come to define his entire career. DeSantis was not emerging from the usual conveyor belt of career politicians. Historic City News noted that the candidate was a young Floridian with serious academic credentials, having worked his way through Yale and Harvard Law; the article emphasized his decision to enter the Navy as a JAG officer. It also described his service as both a military and federal prosecutor, his deployment to Iraq during the 2007 troop surge in support of a Navy SEAL commander, and his receipt of the Bronze Star for meritorious service.
In his first race for elected office, DeSantis ran as a limited-government conservative committed to free-market economics, a strong national defense, repeal of Obamacare, structural fiscal restraint, reform of a distorted tax code, and an end to the culture of congressional privilege and cronyism that had come to define Washington. The underlying message was simple and deeply Reaganite: government expansion was suffocating American strength, and self-government could not survive if the ruling class remained exempt from the consequences of its own decisions. As DeSantis put it, “Freedom will work for us if we will let it.” (“Ron DeSantis Announces Run for Congress in Florida’s 6th District,” Historic City News, February 9, 2012)
That 2012 campaign would prove to be far more than a rhetorical exercise in constitutional nostalgia. Upon his election to Congress, DeSantis would soon put his principles into practice, becoming a founding member of the influential House Freedom Caucus, and aligning himself with a bloc of legislators committed to limited government, fiscal restraint, and an uncompromising take on the checks and balances of constitutional authority—the institutional embodiment of the very “first principles” he’d articulated in Dreams.
[*] Noteworthy here is the fact that at a TPUSA event in October 2025, just one month after Charlie Kirk’s death, JD Vance explicitly embraced the idea of engineering outcomes via the leveraging of big-government power to mandate certain behaviors of which the government approves, and to punish others which it disfavors. The quote at issue, which came in response to a question about a future president using government power against conservatives, was as follows: “We cannot be afraid to do something because the left might do it in the future. The left is already going to do it regardless of whether we do it.” Vance’s attitude exemplifies a “will-to-power” sentiment that has become prominent within some corners of the Republican party, advocating for the abusive use of political power that would hardly have been embraced by the Founding Fathers. (“‘We Cannot Be Afraid To Do Something Because the Left Might Do It in the Future’: Vice President J.D. Vance on the Nature of Power,” Reason)
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