| Ron DeSantis’s botched campaign launch suggests that he’s no Trump-killer.  Photograph by Spencer Platt / Getty The results of last year’s midterm elections appeared to clear the path for the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, to glide ahead of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for President in 2024. DeSantis had won his race for reëlection by nineteen points; Trump was viewed as costing the Party seats in Congress. Yet, in the intervening months, despite Trump facing a criminal indictment and further scandals, DeSantis found himself losing ground to the former President in the polls. And that was before last night, when DeSantis’s official campaign launch, on Twitter, was mired with technical glitches. “The start of the Twitter Spaces event featuring DeSantis and Twitter’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, was delayed by more than twenty-five minutes while Musk audibly struggled to get his new platform to work,” our political columnist Susan B. Glasser writes. “But just as wretched was what DeSantis had to say once he started talking, both on Twitter and in a subsequent interview on Fox News, which boiled down to a lot of complaints about the ‘legacy media’ and little rationale for his candidacy.” DeSantis failed to mention Trump by name, and instead focussed on his own political preoccupations—which Glasser describes as “Disney-bashing, book banning, and policing who uses which bathroom.” The appeal of this platform may be limited, but we’re all certain to hear plenty about these themes in the months to come. As Glasser points out, DeSantis’s primary super PAC claims that it will have “a budget of as much as two hundred million dollars to spread this agenda to the nation.” Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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