No state’s political order has been more upended by President Trump’s return to power than that of his adopted Florida.
Mr. Trump stacked his new administration with Floridians, leaving powerful positions vacant. Ambitious Republicans have jockeyed to fill them through special elections or appointments by the governor. The reshuffling has empowered Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, to elevate close allies to prominent roles.
No sooner had Mr. Trump settled into the Oval Office than Mr. DeSantis and fellow Republicans in the State Legislature engaged in an unusual political battle over a top issue for the president and voters: illegal immigration. As January turned to February, Republican legislators seemed to care more about granting Mr. Trump’s wishes on the matter than Mr. DeSantis’s.
The feud, which remains unresolved as the two sides tussle over whether the governor or someone else should control the state’s immigration enforcement efforts, has made clear that Mr. DeSantis’s once-commanding influence has waned. It has also shifted power dynamics for the term-limited governor’s final two years in the State Capitol, with Republicans already jostling ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
At the end of January, Mr. DeSantis said that his political committee would raise money for “strong conservative candidates in legislative primaries” — effectively threatening sitting Republicans with possible challengers — and for his preferred candidate for governor. Who that might be has become a Tallahassee parlor game, as Mr. DeSantis has no obvious successor.
He might soon get to choose one, however: On Friday, Jeanette M. Núñez, his lieutenant governor, was named the interim president of Florida International University in Miami — at Mr. DeSantis’s suggestion, the chairman of the university’s board of trustees said — requiring Ms. Núñez to resign and giving Mr. DeSantis a chance to elevate someone he considers a potential political heir.
Already, Mr. DeSantis has appointed Ashley Moody, who had been the Florida attorney general, to the U.S. Senate, after the seat became open when Mr. Trump named Marco Rubio secretary of state. The governor has said he intends to appoint James Uthmeier, his chief of staff, to replace Ms. Moody as attorney general. Mr. DeSantis must still appoint a new state chief financial officer to succeed Jimmy Patronis, who is expected to win the congressional seat previously held by Matt Gaetz, who vacated the seat after he was briefly Mr. Trump’s pick for attorney general.
The Republicans eyeing a run for governor include Mr. Gaetz; Wilton Simpson, the state agricultural commissioner; and Representative Byron Donalds of Naples. All three have good relationships with Mr. Trump — whose endorsement is likely to matter more than anything else — but not with Mr. DeSantis. (There is periodic chatter among some Republicans about whether Mr. DeSantis’s wife, Casey DeSantis, would run.)
Mr. Gaetz, who led the governor’s transition team in 2018, backed Mr. Trump over Mr. DeSantis in the presidential primary. So did Mr. Donalds, who was also once close with the governor.
The relationship between Mr. Simpson and Mr. DeSantis is frosty; a key sticking point between the governor and Republican leaders in the immigration fight has been whether Mr. DeSantis or Mr. Simpson should be the state’s chief immigration enforcement officer. Giving those powers to the official overseeing the agriculture industry, which has a history of hiring some undocumented workers, would be like putting the “fox in charge of the hen house,” Mr. DeSantis said recently.
Last week, in what was seen as an olive branch to the governor, Mr. Donalds said on a podcast that he did not think the agriculture commissioner should take on immigration enforcement.
Mr. DeSantis has hardly shied away from political fights in his six years in office. If anything, he has sought them, relishing tussles with public health experts, the Biden administration, school boards, progressive prosecutors — even Disney.
But his tit-for-tat with the Legislature has been different, with Republican leaders casting Mr. DeSantis as only the second-most important Republican in the state, after Mr. Trump.
It began last month when the governor called a special legislative session on illegal immigration that Republican leaders did not want. One of Mr. DeSantis’s shortcomings as a politician has been his disinterest in nurturing certain relationships, including with legislative leaders from his own party. The governor has typically dispatched members of his staff to handle legislative affairs — and has expected lawmakers to fall in line.
Mr. DeSantis called Ben Albritton, the Senate president, 15 minutes before the 9:30 a.m. announcement, a Senate spokeswoman said. Daniel Perez, the House speaker, was flying to Tallahassee; the governor left him a voice mail message at 9:22 a.m.
The Legislature passed its own bill instead of what Mr. DeSantis had proposed, leading him to threaten a veto. Days of public bickering followed. At the peak of lawmakers’ discontent, Republicans questioned the governor’s record on immigration and said they might step up oversight of his administration.
Still, Mr. DeSantis appeared to savor getting perhaps the most media attention he had received since he ran unsuccessfully for president.
Mr. DeSantis, who won re-election in 2022 by nearly 20 percentage points, remains popular with Republican and independent voters, whom he urged to protest the Legislature’s immigration bill. He has dismissed talk of a power struggle and insisted that he did not want credit for toughening Florida’s immigration laws, as long as they get harsher.
Only in recent days has the tone shifted, suggesting a compromise might be near.
“We want to bring this to a conclusion,” Mr. DeSantis said on Friday in Tallahassee. “I think we’re getting close.”
Just how different the rest of the governor’s term will look may take some time to become apparent. The regular legislative session is scheduled to begin on March 4. Mr. DeSantis is widely seen in Florida as considering another White House run in 2028.
“We’re going to have to get together to solve the state’s problems,” said State Senator Joe Gruters, a Sarasota Republican, who sponsored the immigration bill. “I hope that he’s going to be a willing partner and not just take every opportunity to put himself back out there for 2028.”
Mr. DeSantis has not articulated a grand vision for what he would still like to accomplish, beyond keeping Florida at the forefront of right-wing policy. He said his push for legislation to expand the state’s power to detain and deport people who are in the country illegally — going further than even Mr. Trump has proposed — had been fueled in part by a desire to act before other states do and become a national model.
“There’s a reason why we’ve become a red state,” Mr. DeSantis said recently in Fort Myers, adding that it’s “not because we’ve been milquetoast.”
