JUPITER, Fla. — Almost a century ago, in a famous Supreme Court dissent, Justice Louis Brandeis provided an enduring definition of the role of states in the American political system. They were, in a metaphor contained in his 1932 minority opinion in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, laboratories of democracy.
The Brandeis commentary spoke about “one of the happy incidents of the federal system,” one that permits states to “try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” The states have led the way in innovations in women’s rights, consumer regulation and, in Massachusetts and Arizona among many others, health care, and the “laboratory” notion has been quoted in three dozen Supreme Court cases.
The states do remain laboratories. But perhaps the signal characteristic of the Donald Trump era is the way the precepts of conservatism are being rewritten in a political laboratory of a different sort. Old nostrums — the Ronald Reagan views of foreign affairs, for example — are being abandoned. New ones are being drafted.
In states with a conservative outlook and strong Republican majorities, the leadership and the new style of politics are coming from Trump.
For decades, conservatives have defended their movement from charges that they were wedded to “trickle-down” economics, the notion that tax cuts and other favors for the wealthy would prompt growth and prosperity at the bottom of the economic ladder. That nostrum still prevails in Republican circles. But now, conservatives are experiencing trickle-down politics.
A large part of it is attitude: aggressive, determined, restrained by no tradition, convention or custom. If there were a 2026 revision of the classic 1991 “Be Like Mike” slogan for Gatorade — the sports drink pioneered here in Florida — it would be: Be Like Donald.
Trump not only is calling the tune. He also is determining the dynamics, tempo and timbre. Prime example: Florida, the state he now calls home.
Here the lab manager is Ron DeSantis, completing his eighth and final year as governor.
DeSantis once was regarded as the leading challenger to Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. With Trump on the defensive because of multiple court challenges, DeSantis, a onetime House member who won the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee on the contrail of a Trump endorsement, was packaged as a fresh face for a new era of conservatism. However, his campaign provided the greatest fizzle since the failed candidacies of two other Republican governors once considered potential giants in national politics until their campaigns fell to Earth in ignominy: Pete Wilson of California (1996) and Scott Walker of Wisconsin (2016).
Defeated, demoralized, humiliated, but determined to rise from the ashes of a mortifying defeat, DeSantis retreated to Florida, there to be as Trumpist as Trump himself — perhaps even more so.
He had attracted considerable attention in 2022 by signing legislation that banned abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Trump, preferring to skirt the abortion wars, didn’t embrace the idea. Three months after suspending his presidential campaign — DeSantis didn’t even wait to depart the 2024 race until voters went to the polls in the New Hampshire primary, the first in the nation — he supported a five-week ban. He signed a controversial book-ban bill that last year was overturned by a federal judge.
Three weeks after Trump was inaugurated, DeSantis signed legislation that repealed in-state tuition for undocumented students, denied bail for some undocumented people, and required the death penalty for undocumented people convicted of some crimes. Trump’s success emboldened DeSantis. Indeed, “emboldening” may be the word of the age.
Trump has been emboldened to talk aggressively about acquiring Greenland after his success in capturing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Republican governors across the county have been emboldened by Trump’s refusal to be the prisoner of past politics. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and DeSantis are merely the most visible examples.
Others in the emboldened state of mind include governors of Louisiana (Jeff Landry, for instructing state officials to speak of the Gulf of America rather than the Gulf of Mexico) and Missouri (Mike Kehoe, for calling a special session of the legislature to redraw congressional district lines to help GOP candidates). This emboldened phenomenon has reached Democrats as well, in Illinois and California (JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom, both possible presidential candidates, for resisting Trump orders to dispatch troops to their states) and Minnesota (Tim Walz, former Democratic vice-presidential nominee, for resisting ICE deployments).
Now DeSantis is taking the Trump tax-cut theme into a new frontier, supporting the elimination of property taxes in a state that has no income tax. He is leading Florida where no state has been in modern times, though proposals to eliminate property taxes are percolating in Kansas, Ohio and North Dakota. New Hampshire, which has a Republican governor, has been tinkering with legislation to put a cap on property taxes.
A proposal similar to the Florida plan in Pennsylvania was defeated last year in the state legislature, but its proponents would like to put the question before voters as a constitutional amendment.
The impetus behind the drive to eliminate property tax is to cut spending and thus to cut programs run by the counties. The Florida Association of Counties argues that such legislation would wipe out nearly $3 billion in county funding next year and that by the end of the decade, the state’s counties would essentially be bankrupt.
Dave Shula, the former head coach of the Cincinnati Bengals, is a commissioner of Jupiter Inlet Colony (population 405), an incorporated Palm Beach County town that depends on property taxes for 81% of its $4.7 million budget. He argues that if this proposal were enacted, the town would have under $1 million in revenue — less than half the amount it spends on police and fire services.
This is what Frank Sinatra was talking about when he sang about “little-town blues.” For Shula’s community, the cut would collide with other requirements in the legislation that ban reductions in law-enforcement and fire services.
“This would be devastating for us,” Shula said in an interview. “We would have to come up with the money somehow. We would have to assess our homeowners to pay for these services — and people can’t write off assessments on their incomes taxes. It’s a double whammy.”
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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