Matt Gaetz says Ron DeSantis ‘has not acted outside of his powers’ in Disney battle

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) argued that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) “has not acted outside of his powers” in his feud with Disney but said further action regarding the company is still needed.

The Florida Republican gave his perspective on the feud engulfing his state on his Firebrand podcast on Tuesday. Gaetz applauded the governor’s move to strip Disney of its special status but partially agreed with 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s assessment that his other moves regarding the company have made some aspects of the problem worse.

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Gaetz began by defending DeSantis against accusations that his treatment of Disney was retaliatory, presenting it as a fair and democratic decision.

“DeSantis gets the authority, lawfully, to appoint the board, and he’s going to appoint people that have an arm’s length relationship with Disney,” Gaetz said. “Now, again, that doesn’t sound retaliatory to me to just say, ‘Look, this has got to be something where you don’t just dictate the terms under your own private government. There has to be some accountability.’ If people don’t like who the governor appoints, they can vote against the governor. That’s the beauty of a system that is just not run by corporate technocrats but with some sense of political oversight.”

Gaetz then aired Ramaswamy’s comments, which framed the argument that DeSantis wasn’t truly challenging Disney and only undergoing efforts that would score him political points.

“Here’s where Ron DeSantis really lost it here. He’s gone on the wrong path as he claimed — and this part actually sounded good to me — Disney should have never had crony capitalist lobbying-related privileges in the first place,” Ramaswamy said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Here’s the part he doesn’t mention: One of those crony-capitalist privileges was — and I think the most relevant one — was codified into law by none other than Ron DeSantis in 2021.”

“And so the irony is Ron DeSantis, who’s now railing against crony capitalism and rolling that back, was the one who actually passed that into law for the case of Disney,” Ramaswamy said. “So, I think that undermines the credibility of his crusade. I prefer to get to root causes rather than doing political stunts.”

The Florida representative agreed in part with the remarks and pointed to his own previous comments arguing for the reversal of those exact policies.

“Special carveouts for Disney [are] still happening to this day. I argued in an opinion piece recently for the Orlando Sentinel that there were special tax privileges that Disney had that needed to be extinguished by the Florida legislature,” Gaetz said. “I think that would be a far more effective tool.”

But he stopped short of being harsh on DeSantis, arguing that criticisms that he was acting outside his powers were incorrect but that he should take further action.

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“Now the bottom line is that DeSantis has not acted outside of his powers,” Gaetz said. “But there still is a lot of special treatment that Disney is getting. So that said, if Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to be the great white knight of the anti-Disney culture war, he should not swallow special carveouts and laws like those that Ramaswamy pointed out. You should also call for a change in Florida tax law.”

The DeSantis-appointed board of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District filed a countersuit against Disney on Monday in response to a lawsuit from the company, brought forward last week, alleging that Florida’s government is engaging in a politically motivated attack against the company, violating Disney’s First Amendment right to speech, the contract and takings clauses in the Constitution, and the company’s 14th Amendment right to due process.