Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis launched his 2024 residential bid on Wednesday using Elon Musk's broken toy and "things did not go well for them" is perhaps the greatest understatement in American politics so far this year.
It was the announcement not heard ’round the world.
Ron DeSantis plotted to open his presidential campaign early Wednesday evening with a pioneering social media gambit, introducing himself during an audio-only Twitter forum with Elon Musk. His 2024 effort began instead with a moment of silence. Then several more.
A voice cut in, then two — Mr. Musk’s? — only to disappear again.
“Now it’s quiet,” someone whispered. This was true.
“We got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers,” said David Sacks, the nominal moderator, “which is a good sign.” This was not true.
Soon, all signs were bad. Hold music played for a spell. Some users were summarily booted from the platform, where hundreds of thousands of accounts had gathered to listen.
“The servers are straining somewhat,” Mr. Musk said at one point, perhaps unaware that his mic was hot, at least briefly.
For 25 minutes, the only person unmistakably not talking (at least on a microphone) was Mr. DeSantis.
The Florida governor’s chosen rollout venue was always going to be a risk, an aural gamble on Mr. Musk, a famously capricious and oxygen-stealing co-star, and the persuasive powers of Mr. DeSantis’s own disembodied voice. (“Whiny,” Donald J. Trump has called him.)
But the higher-order downsides proved more relevant. Twitter’s streaming tool, known as Spaces, has been historically glitchy. Executive competence, core to the DeSantis campaign message, was conspicuously absent. And for a politician credibly accused through the years of being incorrigibly online — a former DeSantis aide said he regularly read his Twitter mentions — the event amounted to hard confirmation, a zeitgeisty exercise devolving instead into a conference call from hell.
“You can tell from some of the mistakes that it’s real,” Mr. Musk said.
At 6:26 p.m., Mr. DeSantis finally announced himself, long after his campaign had announced his intentions, reading from a script that often parroted an introduction video and an email sent to reporters more than 20 minutes earlier.
“Well,” he opened, “I am running for president of the United States to lead our great American comeback.”
After ticking through a curated biography that noted his military background and his “energetic” bearing, Mr. DeSantis stayed on the line. Mr. Sacks, a tech entrepreneur who is close with Mr. Musk, acknowledged the earlier mess.
“Thank you for putting up with these technical issues,” he said. “What made you want to kind of take the chance of doing it this way?”
Mr. DeSantis swerved instantly to his Covid-era stewardship of Florida.
“Do you go with the crowd?” he asked, recalling his expert-flouting decision-making, “or do you look at the data yourself and cut against the grain?”
Rivals agreed: If he hoped to differentiate himself, Mr. DeSantis had succeeded, in his way.
“This link works,” the @JoeBiden account mocked, inviting followers to donate.
“‘Rob,’” Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social, a standard troll-by-misspelling, winding to a confusing (if potentially juvenile) punchline: “My Red Button is bigger, better, stronger, and is working.”
Even Fox News piled on.
“Want to actually see and hear Ron DeSantis?” read a pop-up banner on its website. “Tune into Fox News at 8 p.m. E.T.” (Urging donations once he got on the air, Mr. DeSantis wondered if supporters might “break that part of the internet as well.”)
Seeing both DeSantis and Musk turned into laughingstocks across the internet represents the kind of apotheosis of loserdom that far exceeded my wildest expectations of failure to launch. Two white guys with gobs of money and political power were exposed for the frauds and incompetents that they always have been, and both of them are done.
Musk will slink off to be managed by Twitter's new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, the former global advertising chief for NBCUniversal. DeSantis will slink off and rule his little swamp kingdom for as long as he can before his campaign end up being chucked into the Everglades of failure. What little credibility either of these clowns had left due to political and financial inertia was stripped clean from them yesterday.
The only thing that makes this better is that my own clown of a congressman, Thomas Massie, hitched himself to this disaster from the start and crashed and burned along with them.
Good riddance to bad rubbish, as they say.
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