Apparently, he's always been a bully.

[quote] As a baseball and football coach at the school, Mr. DeSantis was admired and respected by his team. As a teacher, he was remembered by some former students as cocky and arrogant. He once publicly embarrassed a student with a prank, hung out at parties with seniors and got into debates about the Civil War with students who questioned the focus, and sometimes the accuracy, of his lessons.

[quote] The governor who has taken on the “woke left” over the teaching of history, gender identity and sexual orientation showed signs back then of being a committed conservative, a young, cool teacher whom girls liked and boys envied.

[quote] “He was a total jock; that was his personality,” said Gates Minis, a 2003 graduate who lives in Colorado. “He was definitely proud that he graduated Ivy and thought he was very special.”

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[quote] Ms. Minis, who is white and was in the same history class as Ms. Pompey, also remembers debating issues around the Civil War. Mr. DeSantis wasn’t so much politically opinionated, she said, but, in her view, factually wrong. She remembers him claiming that every city in the South had burned, even though she knew her hometown, Savannah, had not and she called him out on it.

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[quote] “Mr. DeSantis was kind of a smug guy,” Mr. Arne said. Students were well aware that he had just graduated from Yale, he said. “It was like a, ‘I’m kind of better than you,’” he said. “And we were all just kids.”

[quote] Several students recalled that Mr. DeSantis was a frequent presence at parties with the seniors who lived in town. Most spoke about socializing with him on the condition of anonymity because they feared backlash for speaking publicly about it.

[quote] “As an 18-year-old, I remember thinking, ‘What are you doing here, dude?’” one former student said.

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[quote] They said Mr. DeSantis challenged the boy to guzzle as much milk as he could in one sitting. The boy did, and threw up as dozens of students watched.

“I think about it, now — I’m a teacher now in public school,” said Adam Moody, who was a freshman on the baseball team and witnessed the incident. “I put myself in that moment, and it’s just unthinkable. There’s a cruelty to the sense of humor. There’s a cruelty to the mentorship.”