DeSantis’ disastrous presidential announcement shows he isn’t serious competition for Trump

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced his 2024 bid for president of the United States on Wednesday, immediately spawning criticism from the left, right, and center. The anti-woke warrior’s Twitter Space announcement, which is rightly seen as an absolute dud, has been described by major publications as a “meltdown,” “awkward,” and a “fiasco.”

The primary issue that most people have given for why this event was so bad was that it was on the ever-glitchy Twitter Spaces. In fact, if you go back and listen to the recording, it’s so buggy that you often can’t even hear the governor’s speech. Hence, it’s impossible to reliably share the announcement, which is obviously important for getting one’s message out. To be fair, DeSantis did also share a video on his campaign page – but it hasn’t gone viral to any extent because it wasn’t touted as the official announcement.

The official event on Twitter was so fraught with technical issues that the hashtag #failuretolaunch made the rounds on the site. People kept hearing insane microphone feedback and the whole space cut out intermittently. Elon Musk, who was hosting the space, said this was a “good sign,” but most intelligent people would agree that this shows extraordinary levels of ineptitude by the DeSantis campaign and also by Twitter. Eventually, the space was moved over to mega-donor David Sacks’ account due to the roughly 24 minutes of non-stop glitches.

As far as the announcement itself, a few things stand out. First of all, the governor was on the script the entire time and that’s mostly because no one really showed up for the virtual event. It was mostly just a bunch of his most ardent supporters and no one asked substantive or hard-hitting questions. He was pitched softballs that gave him no opportunity to flex any inkling of intelligence he might possess. For example, he was asked about cryptocurrencies but wasn’t pressed about the elephant in the room – why should anyone vote for him over Donald Trump?

The announcement was so bad that the Trump campaign immediately made memes out of it. They posted a video depicting a rocket with a Ron DeSantis campaign logo (which was eerily similar to failed Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush’s) exploding during takeoff, poking fun both at Musk and DeSantis in one fell swoop. The team also posted a video on Instagram making fun of the announcement itself, with apparent AI/dubs of DeSantis and Musk sharing the space with the likes of George Soros, Klaus Schwab, Dick Cheney, the Devil, Adolf Hitler, and the FBI.

As someone who absolutely despises Donald Trump, as well as Ron DeSanctimonious, as the former president calls him, I do have to give Trump credit for absolutely obliterating his opponent. Policy aside, one must be amazed at how ‘The Donald’ has already given his biggest challenger a hilarious nickname and mocked everyone under the Sun all at once while being receptive to social media trends. I must admit that I actually lost it when the ‘FBI’ said on the fake Twitter Space, “Okay, so how are we gonna take out Trump, you guys?”

We all know that DeSantis is essentially the progeny of Trump and they differ very little on policy. The official campaign is now running the slogan that he wants to ‘Lead Our Great American Comeback’, which sounds like an uninspired rip-off of ‘Make America Great Again’, minus the catchiness and the recognizable hats. Basically, Trump is trying to paint his opponent as a Trojan horse for the deep state, or some kind of plant by ‘the swamp’ that Trump had promised to drain. And the governor isn’t really doing much to push back on that – he used the image of a literal swamp creature, an alligator, during a teaser for his presidential bid.

The fundamental communication failures of the DeSantis campaign are a reflection of who he actually is – an unremarkable politician with the charisma of expired milk. Some folks have actually made the argument that the reason he didn’t do a live announcement on television, like Trump did, is because he lacks any serious people skills. That much is evident if you just watch the man interact with the public for less than a minute.

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