The novel choice of announcing your bid for US president via a live, audio-only interview on Elon Musk’s Twitter Spaces channel was always a curious one. What could possibly go wrong? In the event, almost everything.
The feed kept dropping and half a million puzzled listeners were treated to odd snatches of technical back-and-forth and occasional bars of elevator music before the Florida governor finally broke through the static after half an hour to declare, like a distant Marconi over the wireless, the dawn of a new era.
Many great things have started with botched rollouts, so we shouldn’t assume it presages looming failure. What we can say is that the rightly derided episode offers some useful insights into the sorts of risks and gambles DeSantis knows he must take if he is to dethrone Donald Trump for the Republican nomination in next year’s primary election.
Going with Twitter in the first place was a dubious call. A common mistake the politically obsessed make is to think Twitter is real life. Because they spend eight hours a day scrolling through the latest meditations from Gary Lineker or searching for clever affirmations of their views on the budget deficit, they assume everyone does.
This used to be a particular failing of the left. But since Musk acquired the platform last year, it’s often now conservatives whose epistemic universe has shrunk to 280 characters.
Right-wingers have hastened to the little blue bird like a blind fledgling waddling to its mother in a gathering storm, but the Musk embrace may well end in tears for them. He is first and foremost a business opportunist, as happy to laud the leadership of communist China as he is to build a giant green energy business with the help of big government subsidies.
Yet, as Molotov and Ribbentrop demonstrated, strange alliances can be useful for both sides, at least for a time, and while Musk is building a media empire, conservatives are happy to help him with a twittersphere of their own.
Before it fell flat on its face, DeSantis’s Twitter move was intended to boldly highlight two core elements of his pitch to conservatives, as evidenced by his record in Florida: loud denunciations of traditional media for their left-wing bias and a high-stakes battle with what the right calls “woke corporations”, in particular The Walt Disney Company, over its aggressive endorsement of progressive nostrums on gender, race and sexuality.
By choosing Musk’s social media platform for his launch, he was both raising a finger to traditional media and embracing one of the few business leaders in America, especially in the tech and entertainment field, who have publicly taken a stand against the excesses of wokery.
And all along, as Kristin Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, put it to me this week, the launch choreography was a move straight out of the Trump playbook. “There have been a lot of lessons learnt by Republican politicians during the Donald Trump era about what is and isn’t acceptable to voters – what you do and don’t need to do in terms of engaging with the media. It’s left a lot of Republican politicians trying to do things like Donald Trump. But the real question is, is that something that is replicable by people who are not Donald Trump and do not have his awareness, his brand?”
The semiotics will get you only so far. The real question is how does DeSantis plan to bring down the man who, opinion polls tell us, enjoys a lead of more than 35 points over the Florida governor – and the rest of the Republican field.
The DeSantis strategy so far, in the pre-campaign stage, has been to present himself as a more effective vehicle for the radical change that Trump himself brought to US politics. In four years as governor of America’s third largest state, he has shown himself to be an iconoclast on all the requisite political and cultural issues: curtailing Covid lockdowns, banning the teaching of sexuality to five year olds, cracking down on illegal immigration – all the kinds of things that drove disaffected voters to Trump seven years ago.
But if Trump is offering more of the same – and since, he has, after all, already delivered the White House to Republicans once – what’s the appeal of a candidate with the same message who has never been tested on the national stage, let alone won a national election?
The answer is obvious but still, for now, apparently unsayable: Trump’s character, a man whose language and behaviour, especially his denial of the 2020 election result and his role in the violent assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, represents a continuing challenge to the stability of political institutions and constitutional norms.
For now, though, his hold on Republican primary voters is so strong that his challengers, including DeSantis, recoil from making the case and instead revert to euphemisms about the former president now being “unelectable”.
At some point, the Florida governor is going to have to launch a more direct assault on Trump the man. If he can pull that off, this week’s little Twitter fiasco will be a historical footnote.
The Times
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To read the many gleeful accounts of it, you’d think Ron DeSantis’s memorably inept presidential campaign launch this week was Apollo One and the Titanic rolled into one. While it’s hard to suppress a chuckle at the awfulness of it or to resist drawing some conclusions about the man’s judgment and readiness, we should probably wait for his campaign to unfold before assessing whether, as maiden voyages go, it did in fact establish itself as a metaphor for hubristic folly.