Florida Governor Ron DeSantis finally announced that he’s running for president in 2024, surprising exactly no one. It’s apparent that he’s been running for the past year or more. The decision to launch his campaign on Twitter, however, ended up making the new hashtag #DeSaster trend on the social media platform.
The first Twitter Spaces section on the site where the launch was supposed to happen crashed when there were about 500,000 people listening in. Yes, listening. It was an audio-only campaign launch, which prompted a ton of jokes online about the importance of announcing your campaign on ham radio. It was bad.
When they got the second Twitter Spaces section up and running, about half of the original people who tuned in had already checked out. They never came back. In the end, only about 300,000 people listened to the not-exactly-energetic speech that DeSantis read out loud. And it never really got better after that.
Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez jumped in to make fun of DeSantis’ weak campaign launch. She noted that more people tuned in to watch her play a video game online once—which is true.
Most of the responses on Twitter after the event were in agreement that the launch was a dud, and that Twitter Spaces was a bad choice for DeSantis. Comedian Mark Dice is a huge Trump supporter, so he made a video blasting the DeSantis campaign launch. Check it out…
