The TV ad, from 2018, is a sign of what once was.

In it, Casey DeSantis begins, “Everyone knows my husband, Ron DeSantis, is endorsed by President Trump. But he’s also an amazing dad. Ron loves playing with the kids.”

Then we cut to a scene of her husband, a newly announced candidate for Florida governor. He’s on his knees and watching his young daughter Madison play with big blocks. “Build the wall,” he tells her. In another scene, he’s teaching her to read with a “Make America Great Again” sign. In yet another scene, he’s reading Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal to his infant son Mason: “Then Mr. Trump said, ‘you’re fired!’ I love that part,” says DeSantis.

“It was the dumbest, most effective ad in Florida history,” said Kevin Cate, a clearly jealous media consultant for DeSantis’s opponent.

Those were the days.

Since then, 44-year-old Gov. Ronald Dion DeSantis — a former captain of the Yale baseball team and a retired U.S. Navy JAG officer — has become the wildly successful, resoundingly reelected governor of The Free State of Florida. He’s also seen as the future of the Republican Party and a potential 2024 presidential challenger to the man whose endorsement of him for governor in 2018 helped him win election by the narrowest of margins.

A book by DeSantis will only add to the speculation of a presidential run. That book, The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, chronicles his life in public service.

In a preview, the book’s publisher, Broadside, the conservative arm of HarperCollins, notes that the autobiography “will cover key moments in DeSantis’ life, from growing up in a working-class family, playing in the Little League World Series, working his way through Yale University and Harvard Law School, volunteering for the Navy after 9/11 and serving in Iraq.”

That Navy service, as reported in a lengthy New Yorker profile by Dexter Filkins, includes his deployment to Iraq as a legal advisor for SEAL Team One while they conducted operations in Ramadi. During that time, he was on the ground with SEAL operators and briefed them on rules of engagement, treatment of prisoners, and the like. The Filkins piece continues:

Back in Florida, DeSantis started dating Casey Black, a television news reporter for WJXT, in Jacksonville; in 2010, they were married. Not long afterward, a seat opened up in the Sixth Congressional District, south of Jacksonville Beach. In 2012, DeSantis entered the race.

DeSantis campaigned on smaller government and lower taxes, arguing to overturn Obamacare and eliminate entire federal agencies. “My mission was largely to stop Barack Obama,” he told a crowd later. As the campaign got under way, DeSantis published a book titled “Dreams from Our Founding Fathers” — a swipe at the President’s memoir. For a campaign book, it’s unusually wide-ranging, with carefully argued sections on the Federalist Papers, the Progressive Era, and the leftist theoretician Saul Alinsky. The basic contention, though, would have been familiar to followers of Barry Goldwater: “The conceit that underlies many of Obama’s policies and his allies is that virtually any issue, from the waistline of children to the temperature of the earth, is ripe for intervention of expert (and progressive) central planners.” DeSantis’s book was largely ignored — he once told a crowd that it was “read by about a dozen people” — but his message resonated in the Sixth District, one of the most conservative in the state. He won the election, and was reelected twice by wide margins.

Interestingly, as National Review’s Kyle Smith writes, what was supposed to be a predictably leftward New Yorker hit piece on DeSantis didn’t end up that way — at least for those who think a profile of DeSantis as “smart, serious, hard-working, focused, honest, and apparently incorruptible,” and who “ignores media noise and does what he thinks is best for Florida based on analysis of data and science,” and who has “an intense work ethic, a formidable intelligence, and a granular understanding of policy” is a fair and accurate portrayal of the man.

We tend to think it makes him sound downright presidential.

DeSantis, though, isn’t alone among Republicans when it comes to publishing. Two other likely 2024 presidential candidates — former Trump VP Mike Pence and former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — have also published books, and they also have a strong case for the GOP nomination.

DeSantis routinely gives the stiff-arm to talk of a White House run, but his resounding reelection in Florida — in which he trounced his Democrat opponent, Charlie Crist, by nearly 20 points — has made him the talk of the town. It’s also put him in the crosshairs of the only Republican whom we know is running for president in 2024: his onetime champion and endorser, Donald Trump. And if the former president’s recent swipe at the governor as “Ron DeSanctimonious” is any indication, a competition between the two could get really really ugly.

For now, though, DeSantis is plowing ahead as Florida’s governor and doing the little things that keep his name top-of-mind. As he put it recently during a well-received keynote address at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual leadership meeting, “We’ve got a lot more to do, and I have only begun to fight.”