When Florida Gov. and 2024 GOP presidential primary contender Ron DeSantis is stumping on the campaign trail, his standard speech doesn’t delve into the details of what he did as an attorney in the United States Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or in Iraq.
Instead, rather than focus on his status as the only military veteran among the dozen declared Republican hopefuls, DeSantis stresses why he joined the Navy in 2004 and how it influenced the rest of his life.
He talks about being “a middle-class kid who did every kind of odd job you could imagine,” working his way through Yale, where he was the captain of the baseball team, to graduate in the spring of 2001 with a degree in history and a teaching job at Darlington School, a private prep in Rome, Georgia….