Government

Ron DeSantis So Sure He's Going To Win Disney Lawsuit That He's Publicly Begging Bob Iger To Drop It

DeSantis says he's personally 'moved on' so Disney should stop trying to get their legal rights back.

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(Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

(UPDATE: And now it turns out one of DeSantis’s cronies working for this board was doing so in violation of state law. You can’t make this stuff up!)

After getting thoroughly flapjacked by Disney lawyers at every turn, Ron DeSantis told CNBC that he’s “basically moved on” from the dispute and hopes that Disney will drop its lawsuit and just accept the effort to steal from the company now that he’s lost interest in using it as a campaign talking point.

Disney… will not.

Which is the difference between the legal team surrounding a multibillion-dollar global enterprise and Ron DeSantis.

Already miffed at Disney for choosing to keep its cruise passengers alive rather than join the governor’s pitch for anti-vaxx voters, when then-Disney CEO Bob Chapek expressed lukewarm objections to the DeSantis-backed “Don’t Say Gay” bill, DeSantis hatched a plan to retaliate against the company. First he tried to blow up the Reedy Creek Improvement District, a special tax district governing Disney’s wholly owned property around its parks, but found out that would dump a gigantic financial burden on Florida taxpayers. So he decided to just replace the board members of the quasi-government with personal cronies like the guy who thinks fluoride makes you gay. With a new favorable board, DeSantis could render it difficult to impossible for Disney to manage its own land.

But then he forgot to monitor the existing board, which publicly noticed meetings to enter contracts to transfer the entity’s authority back to Disney until 21 years after the last of King Charles III’s living descendants dies. So then the new board tried to bring a lawsuit in state court arguing that they shouldn’t have to comply with these lawful contracts, but DeSantis — seeking maximum publicity for his campaign — pushed through a law invalidating the contracts. That rendered the state case moot and cleared the lane for the federal lawsuit that DeSantis hopes that Bob Iger could pretty please drop.

Sponsored

“They’re going to lose that lawsuit, so what I would say is: Drop the lawsuit,” DeSantis said, employing the time-honored but also wholly transparent “I could totally beat you up, but I don’t want to” move.

But the lawsuit rests on firm ground. Disney claims unconstitutional retaliation against political speech, which DeSantis denies now. Yet he also chose to directly confirm that this was an act of retaliation directed at Disney’s “woke ideology” in both a WSJ piece and the memoir he spit out in advance of his presidential campaign because he’s an idiot.

And that’s before we consider that the conservative Supreme Court took an opportunity this Term to dig the Contracts Clause — the explicit text in the Constitution barring state governments from passing laws that impair contractual obligations like these — off the back shelves of constitutional law to signal to DeSantis that he’s going to lose this case on that theory too.

DeSantis really thought his clumsy culture war against Disney would propel him to the GOP nomination. As it happens, the one-time challenger to Trump’s stranglehold on the party is now running over 30 points back and is getting lapped by a warmed over Chris Christie and novelty candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

Now that this has all spectacularly backfired on him, DeSantis wants it to go away. But for a guy with the campaign slogan “Never Back Down,” he’s now at the mercy of Disney just conceding to millions and millions of dollars in value to help the governor avoid another black eye.

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This is a company that made a hero out of a duck that swims in his own accumulated wealth. They’re not dropping anything.

Earlier: Supreme Court Subtweets Ron DeSantis That He’s Totally Losing To Disney
Disney Litigators Take Their Turn Beating The Hell Out Of Ron DeSantis With New Federal Lawsuit
We Shouldn’t Have To Choose Between Disney Whipping DeSantis And A Dickensian Hellscape
Judge In Disney’s Case Against Ron DeSantis Recuses Himself Because Father’s Brother’s Nephew’s Cousin’s Former Roommate Owns 30 Shares Of Disney
Disney’s Lawyers Are Better Than Ron DeSantis’s Lawyers
Disney Lawyers Seem Honestly Shocked That Ron DeSantis Legal Team Is So Bad At This

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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