Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, long seen as Donald Trump’s leading rival for the Republican nomination, plans to launch his 2024 presidential campaign on Wednesday in an online conversation with Twitter CEO Elon Musk, two insiders told the Associated Press.
Fittingly, First Lady of Florida Casey DeSantis has used Twitter to preview her husband’s announcement.
The first lady tweeted a video of her husband buttoning his suit jacket and walking onto a stage. She also urged her followers to sign up for alerts by texting “LAUNCH” to a certain phone number.
“America is worth the fight,” she tweeted Tuesday. “Every. Single. Time.”
The two insiders said that the governor will live-stream his announcement through Twitter Spaces, an auditory medium.
“Big if true …,” DeSantis’ wife, Casey, posted Tuesday on Twitter, linking to a Fox News story on the announcement and adding a smiley face.
While it is common for campaigns to publicize their announcements in videos shared on social media, it is far more unusual — and perhaps unprecedented — to hold a campaign announcement in a live social media forum.
Following the reports of his plan to use Twitter Spaces, the governor has been credited with understanding Twitter’s role in the rise of former President Donald Trump.
Predictably, the governor also faced criticism for relying too much on the media-savvy first lady.
On Telegram, Trump consultant Roger Stone raised a comparison between Casey DeSantis and Lady Macbeth, the character known for killing her husband to become queen.
On Friday, Politico magazine ran an entire piece about Casey DeSantis. The Politico writer cited lobbyists chastising the governor for… listening to his wife too much.
The magazine reported —
In the DeSantis political project, she is unusually important and uncommonly involved, according to hundreds of interviews over the last few years and more than 60 more over the last few weeks…
For nearly as long, too, though, others who have worked with her or around her have nodded more quietly to the downsides of the starring part that she plays. She is and always has been by far his most important adviser, they say, because she is hesitant to cede that space to nearly anybody else…
One in particular during the first year of his administration struck many then as a shortsighted miscalculation and looks to them now like a possibly fatal mistake — the ouster of Susie Wiles, the well-respected operative who had helped former President Donald Trump win Florida in 2016, and then helped DeSantis, 44, get elected governor in 2018 but now is running Donald Trump’s rival White House bid.
After this piece, Gov. DeSantis earned some defenders.
Danielle Butcher Franz, a conservative nonprofit executive, took issue with the magazine article.
“The [gist] is that a man trusts his wife more than paid advisors jockeying for power, so they wrote a hit piece about how that’s problematic,” she tweeted. “Nice.”
Take a look —
America is worth the fight… Every. Single. Time. pic.twitter.com/lWNQ3DIXgp
— Casey DeSantis (@CaseyDeSantis) May 23, 2023
Big if true… 🙂https://t.co/Jrm528DPpA
— Casey DeSantis (@CaseyDeSantis) May 23, 2023
The TLDR is that a man trusts his wife more than paid advisors jockeying for power, so they wrote a hit piece about how that’s problematic. Nice. pic.twitter.com/eLqS3wfwxY
— Danielle Butcher Franz (@DanielleBFranz) May 19, 2023