The United States presidential race for 2024 has hotted up on the Republican side, with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announcing, as planned, his 2024 presidential bid on Twitter yesterday, with the promise of “our Great American Comeback”. That’s a variation of the MAGA (“Make America great again”) message of Donald Trump, former president and now the main rival that DeSantis has to beat within the party.
The governor filed his papers with the Federal Election Commission, and then moved on to a planned event with Twitter owner and tech maverick Elon Musk. “We show that we can and must revitalise America,” said DeSantis in his video message. “We need the courage to lead and the strength to win.” Blaming the current Joe Biden Administration for making it “harder for families to make ends meet” and for the crime statistics, he said, “Righting the ship requires restoring sanity to our society, normalcy to our communities, and integrity to our institutions.”
Presenting his work in Florida as the template, the new presidential candidate spoke of his mission to lead the “Great American Comeback”.
While the announcement video available on Twitter shows no sign of any problems, there was a tech snag when DeSantis held a Twitter event with Musk. The live interview on Twitter Spaces was described as “groundbreaking” by Musk, but the livestream audio crashed several times because of tech snags.
The Republican camp saw the tech glitches as a good sign — something like “breaking the Internet”. David Sacks, Republican donor, friend of Musk, and event moderator was quoted by The Guardian as saying, “We got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign.”
About two-and-a-half hours after DeSantis launched his campaign video, the Twitter page of President of the United States Joe Biden put up a montage of what DeSantis has said in the past, with the post: “No matter what happens, you can hear Ron DeSantis’ agenda loud and clear.”
