Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made the worst-kept secret in politics official by announcing his presidential campaign.
This pits DeSantis in a fight to the finish with Donald Trump.
And Ron DeSantis made a major 2024 announcement and then Trump delivered a stunning response.
Ron DeSantis and his campaign see that Twitter is encroaching on Fox News’s status as the go-to platform for conservatives.
That’s why the DeSantis campaign rolled the dice and scheduled DeSantis to make his official entry into the 2024 campaign during a Twitter Spaces event hosted by Elon Musk that Musk titled “Ready to Launch.”
But the DeSantis campaign’s reach exceeded its grasp.
After only a couple hundred thousand users – slightly smaller than the audience for a CNN prime-time show – joining, the Space crashed as the servers could not handle the slightly below-average demand for the event.
Elevator music played for 20 minutes and Musk and his team scrambled to fix the audio issues.
The DeSantis campaign got off on the wrong foot and Donald Trump was more than happy to gloat and twist the knife.
Trump posted a video on Truth Social of his campaign announcement event where Trump spoke at Mar-a-Lago to a packed ballroom of cheering supporters.
Trump just shared this video mocking the DeSantis 2024 launch event.pic.twitter.com/bYFMpLhOxf
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) May 24, 2023
Trump even had some fun at DeSantis’s expense by satirizing the DeSantis “ready to launch” slogan with a video of a rocket imploding on the launch pad with a “failure to launch” banner.
FAILURE TO LAUNCH. pic.twitter.com/6IMDQQHSX3
— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) May 24, 2023
There is an old saying in politics that the two days everyone is nice to a candidate are the day they enter a race and the day they drop out.
On the day a candidate ends their campaign the media shows some grace and rivals offer kind words hoping to win over the failed candidate’s supporters.
But the kickoff of a campaign is supposed to provide 100 percent positive coverage because it is the one time the campaign controls the setting, the optics, and the message it would like the candidate to communicate.
Campaigns schedule rallies in front of cheering crowds so the press broadcasts images to the public that the candidate is popular and already counts on the support of a cheering throng.
The images are designed to create a bandwagon effect where voters unfamiliar with the candidate think this campaign is the next big thing and it’s time to jump on the bandwagon both in terms of wanting to vote for the candidate but also to donate to the campaign.
DeSantis gave up the chance to introduce himself to the broader public as a popular governor with a telegenic family whose enthusiastic crowd could not wait to support for president to instead gamble that Elon Musk provided the cutting-edge platform to talk to voters.
That bet backfired.
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