Ron DeSantis floats Trump and Jan 6 pardons after ‘train wreck’ Twitter launch – live

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has sought to push past an embarrassing beginning to his presidential campaign, outlining an aggressive travel schedule as his allies insisted they remain well funded and well positioned for a long Republican primary fight ahead.

While DeSantis supporters privately acknowledged the bungled announcement was an unwelcome distraction, there was a broad sense — even among some Republican critics — that it would likely have limited long-term political consequences, if any at all.

Eric Garcia and Andrew Feinberg write:

He’s a ubiquitous presence in conservative media with a reputation as an anti-woke warrior who has used a compliant state legislature to make Florida a mecca for Trump-era Republicanism.

But if Ron DeSantis wants to be president, he has to defeat Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and prominent Florida politicians aren’t so sure either of those things will ever happen.

Ron DeSantis’s bid to become to the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential candidate got off to a wretched start on Wednesday, when the Twitter Spaces event at which he made his announcement in the company of Elon Musk was hit by a series of technical glitches.

Discussing the “DeSaster” on her MSNBC show The ReidOut on Wednesday night, anchor Joy Reid joined in the mockery of the event and showed a clip of Mr DeSantis meeting supporters at a fundraising bash in Sioux Center, Iowa, last weekend in which he wipes his hand across his face before patting an elderly gentleman sitting nearby on the shoulder.

“Part of running for office is shaking hands,” the host commented. “Not only does this dude eat pudding with his hands, he literally wipes his nose and wiped snot on somebody’s shirt. We have of it.

The “DeSantis War Room” Twitter account released a stylised advertisement of over three minutes that was roundly mocked for heavily featuring Elon Musk, whose platform was used for the Republican’s long-awaited campaign announcement.

President Joe Biden poked fun at Ron DeSantis as the Florida governor’s 2024 campaign kickoff during a Twitter Spaces event with CEO Elon Musk was riddled with tech issues.

Ron DeSantis’s long-anticipated 2024 campaign bid for the White House on Twitter Spaces was marred by a host of glitches that gave his political rivals enough ammunition to mock the Florida governor.

Long silences and persistent echoes marred Mr DeSantis’s Wednesday announcement that he made on Twitter’s audio group-chat feature with billionaire Elon Musk who has long boasted about several overhauls to the social media platform to make it better than it was under previous leadership.

Vishwam Sankaran reports.

Republicans would love to be able to have a sort of super-candidate who could simultaneously pass all of the policies Mr Trump enacted, nominate all of his judges, not fire off tweets that cause them headaches, but also help them get back on the path of victories in the suburbs while also not alienating the very non-college-educated voters (including a non-negligible slice of people of colour) that Mr Trump brought into the Republican fold.

But Mr DeSantis likely isn’t that candidate and he certainly isn’t the beta version of Mr Trump. If anything, he is likely to be the next version of Ted Cruz.

The Florida governor chose to officially kick off his bid for the White House on Twitter in a conversation with Elon Musk, but the beginning of their Twitter Spaces event was bedeviled by issues including long silences and a persistent echo. For some users, the Spaces feature crashed.

“I prefer to stay out of politics.” Those were Elon Musk’s words when forced in September 2021 to respond to a claim by Texas governor Greg Abbott that he supported the state’s anti-abortion laws.

If he really does prefer to stay out of politics, however, Musk has a funny way of showing it, writes Io Dodds.