When you are a publicly elected official, every aspect of your life is fair game. This can be tricky to navigate. When you are running for president of the United States, you have to be willing to open up.
Although Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has not officially announced his candidacy, it's a sure thing. One indication of this is his recent interview with Piers Morgan, where Ron revealed personal details about his marriage and his sister’s death. He is trying to appear more human to voters.
He and his wife, Casey DeSantis, first met on a golf course. He had a bucket of golf balls and used them to strike up a conversation. “I used the balls as a way to start talking to her,” he recalled. “So we started talking, we divvied up the balls and we hit ‘em. And then we went out after that and the rest is history.”
Ron claims to have known early on that Casey was the one. “I was like ‘This is different’ and I made sure to court her. Of course, I got mobilized to Iraq, so we stayed together through all that, but I told myself as soon as I get back from Iraq, I’m popping the question and so we ended up doing that,” he said.
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Ron proposed to Casey after returning from Iraq. “I took her to a nice little resort in Florida and we were out on the balcony, and I had a nice ring, and I just dropped to the knee and asked her,” he recalled.
Ron thinks he hit the jackpot with Casey. “I don’t think I could have done any better in life. Not just to have a friend, we have three wonderful kids, she’s a great mother, she’s a great first lady,” he gushed. “She’s really the whole package.”
“There's a picture that I have from the 2019 inauguration and then in 2023 sitting at the desk, same pose, she’s prettier in 2023 than she was in 2019, and she had a kid, she went through four years of this nonsense, and she beat breast cancer. How do you end up being prettier after four years of that? She finds a way to do it,” he went on to say.
Casey’s breast cancer journey was not easy on the family. “Everything all of a sudden is up for grabs,” Ron recalled. It was difficult to watch Casey go through chemotherapy. “It just saps you. It’s putting like poison in your body and to see someone that you love go through that, it was really tough on her, but it’s also just, you hate to see it. It’s like ‘What can I do, I can’t make it all of a sudden get better.’ That’s why I was there, just being a helping hand, I went to all of the chemotherapies with her, and I got attacked by the left for not being in the office one day, but I was at the cancer center with her when they were saying that I wasn’t doing my job.”
Thankfully, Casey is now cancer-free. However, Ron’s sister, Christina DeSantis, died in 2015 at age 30 from a pulmonary embolism. She was in the hospital in London for a blood clot at the time of her death.
Ron has never spoken about this before. “It was just a shattering experience. I remember my mom calling me, my wife and I were on our way back from church on a Sunday morning, and she said that Christina was in the hospital and she had a blood clot but was stable. She was in the hospital for a couple of days and then had the embolism and died and I just didn’t think that was even possible at that point because I thought that she was stable,” he explained, getting emotional.
To cope with this loss, he turned to his faith. “You start to question things that are unjust, like ‘Why did this have to happen?’ And you just have to have faith that there’s a plan in place, trust in God, there’s no guarantee that you’re gonna have a life without challenges and without heartbreak and that’s just a function of being human. And so it was important for me,” he said.
