Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., announced his presidential campaign in a Twitter Space on Wednesday, formalizing his rivalry with other presidential contenders.
However, DeSantis dealt with technical issues, including a half-hour delay… and he’s already seeing attach ads about a botched rollout.
DeSantis opponents have had a field day with the delayed announcement. “#DeSaster” was trending on Twitter.
“Glitchy. Tech issues. Uncomfortable silences. A complete failure to launch. And that’s just the candidate!” said Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for former President and current candidate Donald Trump.
President Joe Biden tweeted a link to his campaign’s website, and he added, “This link works.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, tweeted, “We had more people join when I played Among Us,” referencing the popular video game.
However, the most pointed response came from Trump himself.
On TruthSocial, Trump posted a video of a Twitter Space occupied by DeSantis, Twitter owner Elon Musk, liberal donor George Soros, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Dick Cheney, World Economic Forum chair Klaus Schwab, 20th-century dictator Adolf Hilter, and the Devil himself.
In the video, DeSantis is struggling to talk over the sounds of Cheney’s coughing, Hitler’s shouting, and Soros’s struggle to navigate the website.
Then, Trump joins the Twitter Space.
“Hold your horses, Elon,” the former president interrupts. “The Devil, I’m going to kick your ass very soon. Hitler, you’re already dead. Dick Cheney sounds like he’ll be joining Hitler very soon. Klaus Schwab and George Soros, I’m putting both your a**es in jail.
Trump concludes the video with his own message. “And Ron DeSanctimonious can kiss my big, beautiful 2024 presidential a**. Trump 2024, baby! Let’s go,” Trump says in the video.
Trump posted the video to TruthSocial on Wednesday night, and he quickly saw it go viral on Twitter.
The former president posted other videos, too, but none quite as outlandish as this one.
Take a look —
Team Trump at the top of their Meme Game tonight.
The next 15 months are going to be wild.pic.twitter.com/2sR7s82Czm
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) May 25, 2023
WATCH: Trump posts video to Truth Social mocking DeSantis' botched Twitter announcement pic.twitter.com/RlyY55dm6Q
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) May 24, 2023
In the world of traditional media and politics, a glitchy half-hour delay and an audience in the hundreds of thousands rather than millions, Wednesday’s Twitter Spaces event might look like a failure.
But in Silicon Valley, failure is often spun as positive, even essential in developing new products and improving existing ones. Twitter Spaces — which Twitter launched in 2020 to compete with the then-popular audio chat site Clubhouse — is generally not used for audiences in the hundreds of thousands, so in some ways it was not a surprise that the event was marred with technical problems.
Just a month ago Musk’s SpaceX launched a rocket that exploded minutes after its launch from Texas. After the explosion, Musk called it “an exciting test launch of Starship! Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months” in a tweet.
Still, DeSantis looked worse than Musk. Historically, presidential candidates have made their announcements on television, not on internet forums. For that reason, they’ve historically attracted millions of viewers, not 420,000.
After DeSantis logged off, Musk and Sacks extended an open invitation to any other presidential candidate who wants to do a Twitter Spaces event. Whether or not they get any takers could signal what the future holds for Twitter as a “public square.”
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article.