Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launches 2024 presidential bid on Twitter with Elon Musk

After technical glitches delayed the start by 25 minutes, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday announced on Twitter’s audio platform that he is entering the Republican presidential primary, setting up a clash with the current GOP front-runner, former President Donald Trump.

“I am running for president of the United States to lead our great American comeback,” he said during an event with Twitter owner Elon Musk and tech investor David Sacks. “But we know our country’s going in the wrong direction. We see it with our own eyes. And we feel it in our bones.”

With those remarks, DeSantis, who won reelection in resounding fashion last fall and captured the attention of a party longing to turn the page from recent defeats, opened up a new chapter in the campaign to take on President Joe Biden in 2024. DeSantis stepped into the Republican primary later than other contenders, but begins his bid with more campaign cash and support in the polls than anyone except for Trump.

DeSantis, in his opening address to listeners, painted a dark picture of a country he said is going in the wrong direction under Biden and urged Republicans to get behind him.

“My pledge to you is this: If you nominate me you can set your clock to January 20, 2025, at high noon because on the west side of the US Capitol, I will be taking the oath of office as the 47th president of the United States,” DeSantis said. “No excuses, I will get the job done.”

The Florida governor, who got a decisive boost from Trump during the 2018 primary, did not directly criticize Trump, except for an implied jab that has become a staple of his pre-campaign rhetoric.

“There is no substitute for victory,” said the governor, who filed with the Federal Election Commission earlier Wednesday. “We must end the culture of losing that has infected the Republican Party in recent years.”

During the question-and-answer segment, DeSantis again passed up a chance to directly attack Trump. Conservative commentator Steve Deace began a question by listing many of the former president’s perceived shortcomings, then asked how DeSantis would ensure his agenda becomes reality.

“Even my worst critics in Florida will acknowledge when I tell people I’m going to do something,” DeSantis said. “I don’t make promises or say I’m going to do something lightly.”

DeSantis’ decision to effectively share a stage with Musk, who purchased Twitter last year and leads a rabid following of largely right-leaning fans, was an unusual choice for a presidential aspirant. It spoke to his desire to win over right-wing activists that are increasingly prevalent on the site.

To that end, DeSantis criticized the NAACP, the country’s preeminent civil rights organization, as a left-wing outfit, explained away book ban accusations as “curation that is not consistent with state standards,” and shrugged off the technical hurdles that befuddled the first half of the virtual event.

In one new development, DeSantis came out against congressional action to limit crypto currency, a favorite topic of the men hosting the chat.

“You have every right to do Bitcoin,” DeSantis said, to which Musk plugged Dogecoin, the meme alternative cryptocurrency that the billionaire helped to popularize.

DeSantis also said reining in federal bureaucracies would be a key tenant of his platform going forward.

“We’ll go into this a little bit more as the campaign goes on, but buckle up when I get in there because the status quo is not acceptable,” he said.

Then, in his first post-announcement televised interview, he told Fox News he would fire the FBI director, Christopher Wray, on the first day of his administration.

“I would not keep Chris Wray as the Director. There’ll be a new one on day one,” DeSantis said. “I think the DOJ and FBI have lost their way. I think that they’ve been weaponized against Americans who think like me and you, and I think that they become very partisan.”

As governor, DeSantis has taken state agencies that often operated independently and turned them into extensions of his office.

Musk billed the event as an unscripted discussion with DeSantis. However, the questions came from a rotating cast of allies, including Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor who advised DeSantis on Covid; Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who endorsed the governor; Chris Rufo, the conservative commentator who first led the charge against critical race theory; and Dana Loesch, the former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association.

Many of the guests invited to talk spent a chunk of their time praising Musk, seeming to ignore DeSantis during what was supposed to be his moment in the spotlight.

“I’m one of your biggest fans,” Massie said to Musk. “I’m the first congressman to have a Tesla. I’m on Starlink.”

Much of the conversation also centered on Twitter itself and its ability to supplant the so-called “legacy media” – just minutes after the social media platform failed to handle the most important moment of DeSantis’ career.

“We are absolutely committed to freedom of speech and a level playing field and just a vigorous debate,” Musk said. “The First Amendment is irrelevant if all the media and all the governments are operating in lockstep.”

While Musk insisted that the technical failure at the top of the planned “conversation” was, in fact, a show of Twitter’s strength, the flub set off a wave of mockery from DeSantis’ rivals.

“Ron DeSantis’ botched campaign announcement is another example of why he is just not ready for the job. The stakes are too high, and the fight to save America is too critical to gamble on a first-timer who is clearly not ready for prime time,”said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Make America Great Again Inc., Trump’s super PAC.

Trump himself, on his Truth Social site, initially restricted himself to a comment on DeSantis’s appearance in a campaign launch video.

“His collar,” the former president observed of his rival, “is too big.”

Later, Trump offered an unkind review of the occasion.

“Wow! The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER! His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!” he said.

Biden’s campaign also poked fun at the messy kick-off, posting a fundraising link – on Twitter – with the a note saying: “This link works.”

In his opening remarks, DeSantis took aim at Biden – at once describing him as the leader of an activist left while suggesting the president is too old to lead.

“Our president, while he lacks vigor, flounders in the face of our nation’s challenges and he takes his cues from the woke mob,” DeSantis said, the first of countless rhetorical assaults on the “woke ideology” he says is leading to “American decline.”

Musk spoke in stops and starts throughout the event, which ended up running for more than an hour, most often using the stage to celebrate his ownership of Twitter and talk up its place in the “public square.” When Twitter finally got the chat up and running, Sacks flattered DeSantis, telling him, “I think you broke the internet there.”

DeSantis later echoed that line in a video posted to the site by his campaign.

“We announced that on Twitter Spaces earlier tonight, and it broke the internet, because so many people were excited about being on that Twitter Space,” DeSantis said.

In making his case to listeners, DeSantis – who largely stayed on script even when Musk and company did not – focused largely on his controversial handling of Covid-19 in Florida and his more recent clash with Disney, which DeSantis has sought to frame as the avatar of bogus corporate “wokeness.”

“When Covid happened, I had to make decisions about do you go with the crowd? Or do you look at the data yourself and cut against the grain, and I chose to do the latter,” DeSantis said. “My view was I had to look out for the people I represented, prefer protecting their jobs over trying to safeguard my own political hide, but it was very, very lonely in a lot of those decisions.”

He then praised Musk for his leadership at Twitter and commitment to protecting the “freedom to debate.”