“Let’s not look too much into this,” James Fishback, a GOP primary candidate in the Florida gubernatorial race, tells me when I ask him about referring to his chief primary opponent, US Rep. Byron Donalds, who is black, as “a slave.” Fishback has also suggested that Donalds would turn the Sunshine State into “a Section 8 ghetto” and spelled Donalds’s first name “By’rone.” “I have in the past called Lindsey Graham a slave,” he adds. “I have called Mitt Romney a slave. I would call black or white a slave.” Fishback represents a new kind of candidate: a younger version of President Trump, who, like his MAGA role model, understands the value of clickbait, shock value, and information overload. Fishback, however, has even fewer limits, a shorter attention span, and a new crop of populist promises. He can also, due to his youth and novelty, be freshly anti-establishment and…

The gubernatorial hopeful, 31, is slender, energetic, and seizes upon every opportunity to refer to himself as a “fourth-generation Floridian” — presumably on his father’s side, since his mother is from Colombia. He’s originally from South Florida, currently lives in the Panhandle, and dropped out of Georgetown at 21 to start his own hedge fund. He first gained media attention last year on DOGE’s coattails, following his proposal that Elon Musk create “DOGE Dividends” — i.e., send money saved through gutting government programs directly to citizens as stimulus checks. Before that, he worked as a trader for Greenlight Capital, a New York-based hedge fund, and founded Azoria, an anti-DEI investment firm committed to “free thinking, excellence, and meritocracy,” which he launched at Mar-A-Lago in December 2024. In attendance was Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage F…