Gov. DeSantis says there’s ‘no reason’ he snubbed Joe Biden in Tallahassee

Minutes after excoriating the President for failure to get striking Longshoremen back to work, Gov. Ron DeSantis played dumb when asked why he didn’t voice his objections to the strike and concerns about Hurricane Helene recovery to Joe Biden’s face.

“No reason. We had this planned,” DeSantis said to reporters during a press conference with other state officials in Anna Maria.

This is the second straight storm season in which the Democratic President visited the state, while the Governor who has pressed the White House to come through on storm recovery couldn’t be bothered to meet him.

It is unclear why DeSantis couldn’t have scheduled this presser for a different time slot, given he has access to an airplane that gets him anywhere in the state quickly. But the snub continues a deliberate disconnect between the Governor and the President he looked to run against in this election cycle.

After last year’s Hurricane Idalia, DeSantis discouraged Biden from making the trip, saying it would be “very disruptive” to have the President’s “security apparatus” in storm recovery zones. Ultimately, Biden appeared with U.S. Sen. Rick Scott and other prominent political leaders.

The Governor sniped at Biden in absentia though.

While Biden claimed that “climate change” contributed to tropical turbulence, DeSantis disagreed, saying that storms had strafed Florida historically and that the “notion that somehow hurricanes are something new” is “just false.”

“We’ve got to stop politicizing the weather and stop politicizing natural disasters,” DeSantis said last year.

The Governor and President did interface after 2022’s historic storm, and DeSantis was more complimentary of Biden then.

“You know, he could have tried to politicize it. I’ll give him credit. He didn’t try to politicize it,” DeSantis said, regarding Biden’s response to 2022’s Hurricane Ian.

It was left to local officials to greet the President in the state capitol where DeSantis has lived for nearly six years, on Thursday, as he arrived for an aerial tour of the devastation. Tallahassee Mayor John Dailey and some City Commissioners were on hand, as was Leon County Sheriff Walt McNeil.