The campaign for the Republican nomination on social media and Trump’s reinstatement after the January 6th riot in the U.S. Capitol
A campaign announcement for the Republican nomination will be made on Wednesday by DeSantis at an event on the social media platform with Musk.
It will be the first time that a thing like this will happen on social media and with real time questions and answers. “Not scripted. It’s going to be live, and let’s rip. Let’s see what happens.”
Musk has gained support from Republicans who have spent years accusing social media companies of wrongly censoring conservative content and users. The January 6th riot in the US Capitol and the fact that Trump championed these criticisms, eventually led to the banning of him from mainstream platforms. Musk took over the company and restored Trump’s account after he posed a poll to his followers. The people have made a decision. Trump will be reinstated,” Musk tweeted at the time.
An Incomplete Space for a Political Campaign: The Event that Musk Embolded on Twitter as Tucker Carlson in the Daily Wire and Fox News
The wife of the congressman teased the likely run with a video showing her husband taking to a stage with an American flag backdrop.
Musk’s popularity with the GOP could serve as a boon to DeSantis whose poll numbers amongst Republican primary voters have fallen over the last few weeks. A recent Morning Consult survey shows that Trump is number one amongst GOP primary voters.
Republicans have appreciated Musk’s work since he took over a social media platform that was accused of unfairly censoring conservative speech. Musk has repeatedly played into this grief by rallying behind various right-wing talking points and offering up troves of internal Twitter documents as evidence that the company’s previous leaders were bias against conservatives. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and The Daily Wire have chosen to move their shows over to Twitter in recent weeks, after Carlson was fired from Fox News.
Lindsey Curnutte, a DeSenatis spokesperson, confirmed the event in an email to The Verge Tuesday. The company replied to the request for comment with its usual poop auto-reply.
The event was mired with problems from the beginning, and the initial Space hosted by Musk did not prove to be an effective platform for the launch of DeSantis campaign. When David Sacks, a venture capitalist and former PayPal product lead, unmuted himself to start his talk, the Space was filled with loud, feedback sounds before quickly going silent. The accounts of DeSantis and Sacks popped in and out of the initial room, muting and unmuting themselves before leaving entirely.
DeSantis is also already trying to combat a narrative that he lacks a certain charm as a candidate. Stories are highlighting how he’s retail politicking in early states.
The Avatars of Rep. B.R. DeSantis: The Rise and Fall of a Republican Candidate Whose Voting Will Win a Governorship
As many as half a dozen others are considering getting in, including former Trump Vice President Mike Pence, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
There are cautionary tales of GOP candidates who have risen and fallen sharply. During the 2016 Republican primary campaign, for example, Jeb Bush, also a former Florida governor and political scion, then-Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and even neurosurgeon Ben Carson had fleeting moments atop the polls.
The bigger the field, the better for Trump because if other-than- Trump Republican voters don’t coalesce around one alternate, he’ll lose the election.
Many conservatives prefer a younger, less chaotic, long-term alternative to the 44-year-old DeSantis.
Another point that candidates have not made a bigger issue is the fact that Trump is constitutionally limited. If he were to win in 2024, he could only serve four more years.
The vicious attacks relating to taxes and Social Security have shown Trump is willing to do whatever it takes to win.
That changed when Trump and his allies came to the rescue of the candidate. There have been countless attacks that have gone unanswered and left DeSantis allies wringing their hands.
Trump’s continued lies about the 2020 presidential election he lost, defeats racked up by candidates he backed in swing states and competitive districts, plus the myriad investigations in multiple states was giving Republicans pause about the 76-year-old former president.
One thing DeSantis does have, though, is money. A superfund supporting him expects to have a $200 million budget with about half of it dedicated to voter outreach in key early states and some 2,600 field organizers, as he has about $90 million left over from his reelection bid for governor.
It’s not easy to go from congressman to governor. Because of Trump’s endorsement, DeSantis was aided in the GOP primary and eventually won the governorship.
A Conversation with a Republican Candidate: The Rise and Fall of Donald Trump in the Age of COVID-19, and Why Russia Won’t Go to Crimea
He even ran an ad showing him playing and reading to his children, helping one to “build the wall” with paper blocks and reading from Trump’s The Art of the Deal, noting that he loves the part where Trump says, “You’re fired.”
DeSantis became one of the loudest voices defiantly opposing the expert guidance of Dr. Anthony Fauci during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic; he pulled stunts, shipping migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and other liberal enclaves and cities run by Democrats; and DeSantis has pugilistically taken on universities, school districts and even Disney for how sexual orientation, gender identity and race are taught in schools.
His right-wing, Trumpian tendencies have made him at odds with his potential base of Republican supporters, who would be open to voting for someone other than Trump. It’s hard to out-Trump Trump, and the people inclined to go a different way than Trump in the primary, tend to be college-educated and wealthier Republicans, according to the February NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.
After being criticized, he walked that back. He went on to call Russia’s Vladimir Putin a “war criminal,” and added, “It’s just — it’s a messy situation. But Russia did not have a right to go in to Crimea or to go in February of 2022. And that should be clear.”
Why didn’t the Florida governor ban abortions after 6 weeks of pregnancy? Why did he do that in the early Republican primaries? A response to Sweeney
If Ron is as electable as he is, why didn’t he ban most abortions in Florida after 6 weeks of pregnancy? That’s manna for the Christian conservatives who matter in Republican primaries, but it’s a liability with the moderates and independents who matter after that point. It steps hard on DeSantis’s argument that he’s the version of Trump who can actually beat President Biden. It turns that pitch into a pancake.
A version of the account is back up but provides tracking information on Musk’s jet with a 24-hour delay. The page following it is delayed by a day.
The new account followed by the Florida governor was created by Jack Sweeney, the 20-year-old who created the popular Twitter page that tracked billionaire Musk’s private jet.
The account noted that the flights do not guarantee that DeSantis is on board. Sweeney, an information technology major at the University of Central Florida, wants to know if the private flights that Ron DeSantis takes on are being used by his political donors.
The nonprofit watchdog Integrity Florida said recently that the governor was traveling on a state plane to attend events that resembled campaign rallies, the Orlando Sentinel reported. The governor’s office denied that the governor’s office had been accused of being “really blurred between what is considered campaign activity and his public duties of the office.” Ben Wilcox, the research director of the group, said that the governor’s office had been accused of being “really
“With all the things going on, I thought it was good to bring transparency to everybody and bring my abilities for everyone to see where the jet is going,” Sweeney said.
He said that he was going to create an account after Florida’s government jet, but he got around to it after the buzz about the expected Republican presidential hopeful.
A lot of hate and conspiracy has already been created by Eldon Musk on the social networking site. But his full-throated embrace of Ron DeSantis – only weeks after Tucker Carlson announced he would revive his Fox News show on Twitter – is a new low for what was once one of the world’s most important communication platforms,” said Nicole Gill, co-founder and executive director for Accountable Tech, in a statement Wednesday.
Both DeSantis and Musk have painted people with progressive positions on issues like LGBTQ+ rights as members of an existential “woke mob” intent on corrupting conservative tradition. Musk said that he wasn’t planning to endorse any particular candidate, even though he had said in the past that he’d back DeSantis if he ran for president.
Asked about censorship Wednesday, DeSantis said he would soon be signing a “digital bill of rights” that would ban state and government officials from “colluding” with social media companies.
Why did the Sacks Space become a little too small after the first one shut down? “It’s been a struggle for Elon, but they’re still doing what they do”
Sacks created a separate Space after the first one shut down, and said he thinks they melted the internet there. “I think it crashed because when you multiply a half million people in a room by an account with over 100 million followers, which is Elon’s account, I think that creates just a scalability level that was unprecedented. But with my meager followership it seems to be working much better.”
As of now, it’s not clear what went wrong but Musk said that the problems were caused by overload of server. Some 600,000 users were tuning in just a few minutes before the room ended.