Next up for Byron Donalds: VP? Florida governor? 'Whatever God has for us, we’re here for it'

Byron Donalds' stint as a national man of mystery started in January, when the two-term Naples Republican congressman emerged as a Kevin McCarthy alternative in the Speaker of the House election.

Stories asking "Who is Byron Donalds?" sprouted nationwide, amid dismay from those who saw his nomination as cringe-worthy GOP tokenization.

In Southwest Florida, though, the questions are different. As Donalds' star rises higher, his constituents wonder how long he'll stick around. In recent months, their hometown (but not homegrown) politico, a Brooklyn-born, single-mom-raised Democrat-turned-firebrand-conservative, has been suggested both as a Florida gubernatorial candidate or as a Trump running mate (provided a few legal details get ironed out).

In Donalds' district, short-timers have been the rule since 2013, when Trey Radel resigned after a year, followed by Curt Clawson who lasted two and a half, followed by two-termer Francis Rooney, followed finally and currently by Donalds.

His constituents already know the Tea Party-forged God, gun and small government banker who took a seat in Florida’s Legislature in 2016. In 2020, Donalds won U.S. Congressional District 19 in a nail-biter of a race. The field was crowded with better-known, better-funded primary opponents, including two who used personal millions in their campaigns. After that trial, he cruised to easy victory in 2022 and is now the far, far-right House Freedom Caucus' lone Black member.

Even after the speaker question was settled, Donalds, 44, didn't fade from national view. Following a July profile in Vanity Fair, he turned up in Forbes, the New York Times and the New Yorker. His wife, Erika, was key to another New Yorker piece about virtual charter schools featuring her company, OptimaEd.

'We're in a real tough spot ... we have an idiot as president'

To members of the Naples Republican Club gathered at Stix, a strip mall sushi place, that high-profile reading list was largely beside the point. At one of their recent meetings, Donalds was a suave, spot-lit celeb on center stage, working the room with ease, frequently pausing for laughter and applause from a crowd that looked a lot like his deep-red district.

In a crowd like that, Donalds stands out. But his “Make America Great Again”-shaded politics fits into a party dominated by Trump. His talk that night answered some major questions and revealed a little more about who he is. Interviews provided even more insight.

In this 834,988-person swath of Lee and Collier, GOP voters outnumber Democrats by 100,000. Older, whiter and slightly more female than the rest of the United States, District 19 extends from Cape Coral in Lee County to the Ten Thousand Islands in Collier and includes Fort Myers, Naples, Bonita Springs, Estero and barrier islands in both counties hard-hit by Hurricane Ian.

The gathering had a casual, night club vibe Donalds called “An evening with the Congressman.”

“We're just gonna have a little fun, talk about some things, have some more fun, talk about some other issues, and have some more fun. Does that work for everybody?” he asked. The answer: cheers.

“I could give you the speech (but) you've all heard that from me,” he said. "We’re in a real tough spot. I mean we have an idiot as president. (Laughter). He’s an idiot. I'm sorry – that’s just part of it.” Donalds looked across the tables. “Wayne, happy birthday, man. It's good to be home. I've traveled a lot more this year than I did my first two years in Congress," he said. "I think the thing that really kind of set it off is this thing that happened in January – the speaker of the House thing – so I figure I'll start there.”

'Why don't we nominate Byron?'

Donalds spun a winding tale about the complicated process of voting for speaker. As he tells it, at one point, “Somebody pops up: ‘Why don’t we nominate Byron?’

"And so I just told those guys, you gotta give me a minute … just let me call my wife." (To the crowd: “Good call, right?") “So I call Erika and I'm like, 'Hey;' she's like, 'Hey honey!' You know she's happy (and) I'm like, 'I think I'm gonna be nominated for speaker of the House.'

“So we prayed, I cried. I walked out of the room, went back talked to the guys, said, 'All right, let's do it. Let's roll.' ”

In a preview of the chaos unfolding in the House with Tuesday’s ouster of Kevin McCarthy as House speaker, Donalds in January drew a bloc of Republican votes from hard-right conservatives to stop the Californian from gaining the gavel.

In the end, the bloc collapsed, McCarthy became speaker and Donalds was relegated to a footnote. But it was a moment that helped burnish his image as a GOP up-and-comer. Still, he is a rarity: a Black Republican lawmaker in a time when polls show Black voters across the nation are repelled by the party’s presidential field. In his home state, Black voters have been alarmed by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ anti-woke, anti-diversity, Black history agenda.

At DeSantis' election night party last November, Donalds had introduced him as “America’s governor.”

Six months later, Donalds was seated at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago for a multicourse dinner with nine other Florida Republican members of Congress who had spurned DeSantis and endorsed the former president for the party’s nomination.

Donalds’ wife Erika helps complete the pair as a MAGA power couple. A former Collier County School Board member, Erika Donalds is on the advisory board of Moms for Liberty, the arch-conservative organization promoting ‘parental rights’ attacks on books, coursework and school boards across the nation.

Erika Donalds has even been mentioned by some as a potential Education Secretary in a second Trump presidential term.

But at the Naples Republican Club meeting, the congressman reflected on his past as a rising Republican activist.

'I specialize in breaking bad habits'

He described CNN’s Manu Raju asking him: “Are you concerned about retribution from the leadership and the speaker's office?”

“And I looked at Manu and I said, 'Man, I'm not worried about that – I'm 6’2”, 275 pounds.' "(Laughter).

And he recalled his old Tea Party days, when “We were out there on the side of Pine Ridge and 41 with no trees, no shade, it's hot (and) you’re doing speeches in the back of a pickup truck." No problem, he said. “I'm fine with being a little uncomfortable if it means getting the country on track.

"So in the halls of Congress, my colleagues now say I break things." (Laughter.) "Washington has a lot of bad habits, but good thing for Washington: I specialize in breaking bad habits.”

About Trump’s indictments: “These indictments are B.S. The end. That's that. I think at this point it's pretty clear what they're really trying to do is suck him dry of campaign funds so he cannot mount a challenge to the presidency.

"And I get it – some people are like, 'Oh, but the tweets' ... but what you see is what the media chooses to let you see," he said, "because when you're around him, it's a very different person” than what’s portrayed in the media, he said.

If Trump asks him to be his V.P.?

Donalds takes a question from the floor about whether he might be a Trump vice-presidential pick.

“Hold on, I gotta roll up my sleeves – it's getting warm in here,” he said with a chuckle. “The speculation is out there. I've not talked to the president about it (but) if he goes, ‘All right, Byron, that's what I want you to do,’ then yeah, all right let's roll. Because you know it's about the country."

Peter Bergerson, Florida Gulf Coast University political science professor emeritus points out that election rules require the president and vice-president to be from different states, though the technicality can be resolved with an on-paper switch, as happened when Texans George Bush and Dick Cheney made things legal by changing the latter's residence to Wyoming.

Next, a man asks about Florida’s governorship: “So my legit thoughts are...,” he pauses. “We'll see what happens.” “So have I thought about it? Of course I have. I think about everything, I really do, but you can't time politics. That's the other thing I've learned watching politics the last 16 years … (If) it comes around, I’ll talk to my wife, we’ll pray about it, look at where we are, make a decision and then away we go.”

After a few more questions – 'Will Michelle Obama run?' (he’s pretty sure she won’t) and 'Should we send troops into Mexico to fight the drug cartels?' (very tricky, he says; it might exacerbate the immigration crisis) – Donalds hands back the microphone to a final round of cheers and a few standing ovations.

Just another night's work for a now-seasoned politician with plenty more to do. The funny thing is, wife Erika says, for the first decade of their relationship, elected office wasn't anywhere on the horizon.

'Attacking him for being married to a white woman'

"We were apolitical for 10 years of our relationship ... We had a whole different life before politics came along, and it was really based on our faith," Erika told The News-Press. Those early years were also unclouded by something that's dogged them since he stepped into the public eye: questions about their interracial marriage.

“In college, nobody said anything. We lived in Tallahassee (and) Naples and never experienced vitriol or what I’d call racism around our relationship until we got involved in politics," she said. These days, it comes “mostly from the left from people who don’t agree with his politics and are mostly attacking him for being married to a white woman ... I can’t even think of a time aside from, honestly, family who had those issues early on, where anyone in the general public has made those kind of statements or those kind of attacks.”

What she often encounters is an "Oh, I knew it” attitude “when they don’t agree with his politics and then they see the picture of us and they’re like, 'Oh, well now it makes sense.’ What does that mean?” she asks. “What’s the implication? People don’t know our history, they don’t know we’ve been together since we were basically kids and had no idea of politics when we first connected and fell in love."

Back then, Donalds was a Democrat, the middle child of a single mom from Crown Heights, Brooklyn. About his growing up, he says “We were poor. My mom lost her job with the city of New York when I was in middle school, so we struggled,” he told The News-Press in 2020. “I was jumped by a gang when I was in fifth grade … that’s just what would happen.” They took his Walkman and his train pass but he shrugged it off. “You don’t have a choice but to heal. You better. Or you’re just going to fall victim to the next person who comes along. So you have to learn really quickly to let it go, get past it. Because if you don’t. the city will swallow you up.”

His mom knew her bright son needed more of a challenge than public school afforded. She “didn’t want me just sitting around in class, waiting for the rest of the class to catch up,” so she got him into private schools – paid from her own pocket, he said – until she lost her job. His grandmother, a retired teacher, stepped up to cover him so he could stay. At Nazareth, a Catholic high school in Flatbush, Donalds played basketball, soccer and baseball.

The early days: 'Almost an oxymoron': Rising star Byron Donalds is a Black conservative aiming for national office

College was a given. He’d been recruited by schools in Vermont, but Florida A&M’s five-year business master’s degree program won the day. “I just wanted to get as far away from home as possible.”

He left the Big Apple at 18, alone, on a Greyhound bus, he recalls. It didn’t take long to change worlds, at least geographically. About 24 hours later, he and one travel trunk arrived in Tallahassee, where he started at the historically Black university, later transferring to Florida State.

There, he joined a business fraternity, where a certain young woman named Erika Lees also pledged. “The rules were you couldn’t date a pledge, but I broke that rule,” he admitted. He graduated in 2002 with a degree in finance and marketing; they married in 2003, settled in Naples and he went on to work for TIB Bank, CMG Life Services, and Moran Wealth – a perfect "Horatio Alger story, or Booker T. Washington pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps narrative," as professor Bergerson characterizes it.

Galvanized by the Tea Party movement that awakened outrage across the U.S. political landscape starting in 2009, Donalds began absorbing seminal titles like “The Law,” by 19th-century French economist,  Frédéric Bastiat, listening to both far-left and far-right broadcasters like Mark Levin, and going to those sweltering rallies.

At one of them, from the back of that pickup he'd later tell the Naples Republicans about, Donalds gave his first political speech. It was March 2010. In 2016, he was elected to the Florida House of Representatives, where he championed school choice and fiscal protections for the elderly.

His bootstrap background and rock-ribbed conservatism made him a favorite of right-wing GOP lawmakers and then-president Donald Trump, who began to take notice. It probably didn't hurt that Donalds called himself a "Trump-supporting, liberty-loving, pro-life, pro-Second Amendment Black man."

He’d prove his allegiance to Trump in his first-ever vote as a U.S. congressman, when he joined 146 other Republicans in a Jan. 6, 2021 bid to void the U.S. election results based on objections to rule changes in two states Donalds said violated the Constitution.

From student to banker to locally in-demand speaker to state legislator to the national arena, "at every stage I've been excited for him, mostly because I've seen the calling God has on his life," Erika said. "I'm proud of him because obviously he was faithful in the little things that he'd done over the years and God has trusted him with a bigger and bigger platform."

Of the future possibilities being floated, does she have a favorite?

"What I say now, because people ask me this question all the time is whatever God has for us, we're here for it. He's the one who opens the doors and we walk through them.

"If he closes the doors, we're OK with that too."

'High school for adults ... the tribalism is toxic'

Donalds has learned a lot these past three years in Washington.

“It was a good year before I felt like I could see the place,” he said. “There’s still parts of it I’m learning now … but if you engage, you can figure it out pretty quickly ... When you’re in DC, it’s just a bunch of circles and who you hang out with. It’s like high school for adults," he said. "Honestly, I think there are a lot of members who need to go home, who’ve been there far too long."

Of major concern: divisions between the parties, "Where if you’re not on my side, then to quote Keith Olbermann, you’re the worst person in the world (and) the tribalism is toxic."

For Donalds, bipartisanship has been a priority. "Take (Alexandra) Ocasio-Cortez, I’m working on two bills with her. She was actually shocked. She said, ‘You’re going to do a bill with me?' and I was like, ‘If it’s good business, we’ll do it.’“

He's sticking with his pledge to term-limit himself out of the Congressional job after 10 years, he says. "Well, seven now, because it’s been three already,” he said. “I’m pretty solid on that, because politics need turnover. We need new blood to come in. What I’ve seen is after a while … there’s the inertia of the political environment.”

But don't count him out as a major political player Bergerson says: "I see him as clearly being a career public servant – and that's not said disparagingly at all – but what's the next opportunity?" Bergerson asked. "He's much alluded to being interested in higher office ... There's no question the road to the speakership in January really placed him in the national spotlight and people are looking at him as an upcoming star in the Republican Party."

'That’s what happens when you’re dealing with extremists'

Yet that rising-star status has left Donalds' district behind, says Naples political commentator, blogger and former managing editor of The Hill, David Silverberg, who has sharp criticism of both Donalds’ hometown and Washington performance. "Look, everybody has their difference of opinion and God bless us, we have a Constitution that allows us to vent these differences in a constructive way. I am just not satisfied he’s doing all he can for the district and the people in it."

On the national stage, “He’s not an effective congressman," he said. "He introduced 46 standalone bills (and) he has never done a damned thing for any of them other than introduce them,” Silverberg said.

So far, Donalds has sponsored 50 bills, ProPublica's count shows; making him the fourth most prolific in the house, but that's not enough, Silverberg says. “You do not simply drop a bill into the hopper and walk away. If you’re a serious legislator, you see it through the subcommittee, the committee, to the floor and then to the president’s desk.”

Silverberg did initially praise Donalds’ role in the government shutdown wrangling. “He has done something constructive: He negotiated on behalf of the Freedom Caucus with the Republican leadership to come up with a continuing resolution, and that moved the ball forward,” he said early on. Paradoxically, that earned Donalds ferocious criticism from Matt Gaetz (R-Niceville). “He gave a speech that kind of tore him limb from limb," Silverberg said.

All of which illustrates a challenge Donalds faces: No matter how conservative he is, there are those who accuse him of being a RINO (Republican in name only), Silverberg says. “As right-wing as he is, he’s always being attacked (by) people who say he doesn’t go far enough,” he said. “But you’ll never satisfy fanatics (and) that’s what happens when you’re dealing with extremists – there’s no end to it.”

But when it came time to vote on the shutdown Sept. 30, Donalds posted on X, "Today, voting closed before I could cast my NO vote."

Silverberg's not buying it: "Unforgiveable … pure cowardice … flight in the face of one of the most critical votes of his time in office." Fellow Florida Republican Greg Steube dinged him on X as well, posting, "Should’ve just pulled a fire alarm and bought some time."

Even so, days later Gaetz led an effort to oust McCarthy from his seat, leaving the speakership vacant once more.

As for whether Donalds might fill it, he told Fox News Wednesday such discussions so far have been private. “We don't want to just be floating names for news clips,” he said. “We want to make sure we have the best leader to lead the Republican conference going forward.”

'FEMA’s got to take a look in the mirror'

In-district, Donalds says he's made it a point to help constituents, no matter their party. After Hurricane Ian, he sponsored a bill to speed up help to hard-hit fisherfolk, a move that pleasantly surprised Pine Island commercial fisherman Casey Streeter, who's used to being ignored by politicians. He also spearheaded oversight committee hearings on Hurricane Ian response.

"Agencies start doing more when they see Congress is paying attention. It’s also not lost on the agencies that we’re in the middle of funding them because Congress is going through appropriations right now," Donalds said. "So when we start talking about what an agency is doing or not doing, they start paying attention ... FEMA’s got to take a look in the mirror and say, ‘Oh, man – maybe we did mess that up.'"

As for homeowners still struggling with unpaid insurance claims, "That part is just terrible," Donalds said. "The one thing we’re trying to do is if you’re dealing with the agencies, call our office. We’ll do everything we can to help get through the agencies, because it's tough. And it’s unfortunate, but the truth is, if I start calling, all of a sudden, things start moving ... At the end of the day, it’s really about making sure the people that we all serve are getting heard."

Donalds gives his 15-member staff, split between the district and D.C., immense credit. “My idea: Basically, there’s no excuses. Just get the job done, and as long as you do that, I’ll be one of the easiest people you could ever work for,” he said. “I’m not going to manage you and tell you where you have to be – I just want to make sure people get responded to in the district."

And it's in that district he plans to stay after he's done in Congress. "Southwest Florida is home. I don’t plan on leaving."

It doesn't hurt that Erika loves the place too. "I don’t want to live anywhere but Florida," she said. "It’s a great place to raise kids … it’s paradise."

Their 20-year-old, Damon, is a college football player at Holy Cross in Massachusetts, though his parents are hoping he'll come back to raise a family here. Middle brother Darin plays varsity football and J.V. basketball at First Baptist Academy in Naples. Youngest, Mason, is 12 (and not, Donalds says, named for the school he and Erika helped found: Mason Classical Academy in Naples, which opened its doors in 2014).

What's next after politics? "Who knows? I could go back to finance,” he said, “but it’s really about what’s in front of you at that point, what’s your journey, and you go from there.

“What I just want to see now is my kids become men and help them get into positions where they can take off, and be a grandfather and spoil my grandchildren.”

— USA TODAY Network-Florida capital reporter John Kennedy contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared on Naples Daily News: What's fueling GOP star Byron Donalds' rise to fame? Is governor next?