CONTRIBUTED PHOTO — Gov. Kim Reynolds enjoys a moment with Florida first lady Casey DeSantis on July 14 at the Iowa Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines.

Minutes before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis spoke last week in Des Moines to an influential social conservative audience, the presidential aspirant’s wife beamed in the front row as she sat next to Iowa’s wildly popular governor, Kim Reynolds, and key Republicans.

Casey DeSantis had reason to keep smiling as her husband joined moderator Tucker Carlson on the stage for the Family Leader’s Leadership Summit before 2,000 people, most of them likely caucus-goers.

DeSantis, the final speaker in the roster of assembled presidential candidates (absent front-runner Donald Trump) controlled the narrative and owned the moment with Carlson, who had clowned some of the previous candidates.

The Florida governor hit on all cylinders. He became the story of the exchange with Carlson — no small task in a format that heavily favored the experienced cable TV interrogator. Carlson had been given free rein of topics, evidenced by his late-morning pounding of former Vice President Mike Pence on the Indiana Republican’s support of sending resources to a besieged Ukraine. In an earlier give-and-take, Carlson hammered presidential candidate Asa Hutchison of Arkansas for being vaccinated against COVID-19.

“Had I been president in 2020, Anthony Fauci would have been fired,” DeSantis said, earning some of the most sustained applause in the nine-hour conference.

Identifying China as the main international threat to the United States, DeSantis blended that observation with his tried-and-tested battering of so-called “woke” culture with a winning one-liner for the right-titled assemblage: “We could have a situation where our children are memorizing 37 different pronouns in Mandarin.”

DeSantis said undocumented immigrants have created a “national emergency” at the southern border, and he forcefully promised certain drug cartel members would be “stone, cold dead” for continued roles in overdoses in the United States.

Carlson threw few punches at DeSantis and landed none.

Asked if he expected to face President Joe Biden in a general election, DeSantis allowed for another potential Democratic nominee should Biden falter — California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“I’m fully prepared to have a California-Florida showdown,” DeSantis said.

Meanwhile, earlier in the week, Trump picked a politically questionable fight with Reynolds, swatting the Iowa governor for honing to tradition and staying neutral in the presidential nominating process instead of endorsing him. Trump said Reynolds’ adherence to neutrality, widely regarded on both sides of the aisle as a prudent to maintain the state’s influence, amounted to high-plains disloyalty.

Reynolds is arguably the most transformative governor in the state’s history with a bedrock-shaking bill for private school vouchers/education savings accounts (depending on your tribal tongue) and an aggressively anti-abortion bill (she signed the bill banning most abortions after six weeks on the stage at the Family Leader summit) under her political belt.

The smart money is that Reynolds stays neutral and enjoys the feting and vetting as a vice presidential candidate for the full field, including the mercurial Trump whose own loyalties swing as wildly as the fortunes of the contestants on his movement-minting reality TV show “The Apprentice.”

But there is an opening for Reynolds to depart with tradition. She has an excuse, and a fair one at that, to endorse DeSantis, using her steeled connection with Republicans culturally, and earned plaudits with the base of her party for delivering sacred goods for them on school choice and abortion restrictions.

You’d have two governors with records and rhetoric that match the modern Republican pulse.

Such a move by Reynolds could winnow the effective field in Iowa to two — Trump and DeSantis. The governor seemed quite comfortable with the DeSantis clan on a personal level and saw what everyone else in the hall did — DeSantis performing well in what for other candidates amounted to a tough, tough day.

That’s not the take of Kari Lake, the most recent Republican candidate for governor in Arizona and a talented Trump surrogate. Lake, a native of Scott County, Iowa and former broadcaster in the Southwest, had no formal role at the Family Leadership Summit. But she attended, and drew crowds and media attention before holding events this weekend in Iowa to support Trump.

In an interview with Iowa Mercury outside the convention hall, Lake said Reynolds owed it to Trump to endorse the former president.

“It’s one thing if we have a bunch of newcomers,” Lake said of the GOP White House field. “We have President Trump who the people voted for last time, but because of just outrageously corrupt elections, had that victory stolen. President Trump has done so much for Iowa. We are in unprecedented times and I think it calls for some unprecedented measures and maybe this is the time that Kim Reynolds should say, ‘I am going to get with President Trump.’ ”

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Douglas Burns is the former co-owner of the Carroll Times-Herald. This column was originally published on his blog “The Iowa Mercury.”