Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday he tried to install Congressman-elect Randy Fine as president of Florida Atlantic University because members of the state Legislature, where Fine served at the time, disliked him so much they wanted to get rid of him.

“He repels people,” DeSantis said of Fine. The two men are onetime Republican allies who now loathe each other.

So DeSantis said he attempted to rid the Legislature of the Fine irritant by foisting him off on FAU.

The attempt didn’t go well, to put it mildly, as DeSantis acknowledged Wednesday during a news conference in Ocala.

DeSantis brought up the FAU scenario, which convulsed the university and its governing board for much of 2023, during a discourse about Fine’s victory in Tuesday’s special congressional election in northeast Florida. Though he won, Fine did worse than Republicans normally do in the solidly conservative territory, which DeSantis represented in Congress before he was elected governor in 2018.

DeSantis said many Republican voters didn’t turn out for Fine in the special election because he’s a “squish,” the label conservatives apply to Republicans who can’t be counted on to uphold conservative principles. “When people see that, our base voters don’t get excited about that. You’re not giving them a reason to go out and vote.”

Then DeSantis added the kicker: “Just the way he conducts himself is somebody — he repels people. He’s repelled people in the Legislature. … They wanted to get him out of the Legislature, so they asked me to put him up for Florida Atlantic president, and I did, and the whole board would have resigned rather than make him president.”

Fine shot back at DeSantis’ overall assessment — not specifically about FAU — in a social media post Wednesday. “A dying star burns hottest before it fades into oblivion. I’m focused on working with @realDonaldTrump to stop Democrats from taking this country backwards, not working with them. Let’s go,” he wrote.

Initially, Fine was on a DeSantis-laid path toward the FAU presidency. But the university’s presidential search committee, appointed by and chaired by the same person who chaired the university’s Board of Trustees at the time, balked.

The search committee named three finalists in the summer of 2023, and Fine wasn’t on the list. Two days later, the state university system’s Board of Governors, almost all of whom are gubernatorial appointees, suspended the search due to alleged “anomalies.”

The university was led for two years by an interim president. Under DeSantis, presidential vacancies have increasingly gone to high-profile Republican political players. In February, former state Rep. Adam Hasner was hired as FAU president.

In October 2023, Fine gave his version of events. He said his interest in the FAU job started when he got a call early that year from someone in the governor’s office, whom he declined to name. He said he applied after the governor’s office assured him he would get it. “Their pitch was everybody wants you. The path has been cleared,” Fine said at the time. “If you say yes, you’re going to waltz right in.”

He later discovered the FAU “community didn’t want me.”

“I don’t think it has anything to do with me. I think they don’t want a conservative non-academic,” he said.

That’s just one element of the DeSantis-Fine relationship in its evolution from support to dislike.

In 2018, DeSantis was in an exceedingly tight race for governor, which he narrowly won. Fine, who is Jewish, was such a strong DeSantis supporter that he traveled to South Florida to vouch for the gubernatorial nominee with the Jewish community.

Later, Fine endorsed DeSantis’ ultimately unsuccessful candidacy for the 2024 presidential nomination.

But Fine ended up repudiating DeSantis and switching his support to Donald Trump, who ultimately won the Republican nomination and second term as president. He announced his decision while slamming DeSantis’ handling of issues important to Jewish Floridians in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks in Israel and increasing antisemitic incidents in the state.

“I love his words. His actions have broken my heart,” Fine wrote in the Washington Times about his decision to go with Trump instead of DeSantis.

Days after he broke with DeSantis and went with Trump, he discussed what happened at FAU. He suggested that DeSantis’s inability to get university trustees to do what he wanted said something about the governor’s leadership abilities as he sought the presidential nomination.

“If you can’t get those people to do what you want, how are you going to get Vladimir Putin to do it?” Fine said. “I think it’s an insightful example of failure.”

This report includes information from Sun Sentinel archives.

Anthony Man can be reached at [email protected] and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.

Originally Published: April 2, 2025 at 2:16 PM EDT