The Morning Briefing: DeSantis vs. Trump Is the Heavyweight Fight We've Been Waiting For

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Happy Thursday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Allondra would not yield to any opinion that insisted overalls weren’t appropriate for waltzing.

Well, it’s finally on.

I’ll begin by saying that I will more than enthusiastically vote for either of these guys. If the Republican Party somehow nominates somebody else to run in 2024, I’ll remove myself to a remote South Pacific island and fish until the ChiCom bombs hit.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ended THE LONG TEASE yesterday and announced that he would indeed be seeking the Republican nomination to run against Drooling Joe Biden next year.

DeSantis’s candidacy is both long-awaited and dreaded on the Republican side of the aisle. Many view him as Trump without the unforced errors. The Trump hardcore faithful, on the other hand, see DeSantis as the one guy who can upset the MAGA apple cart. That’s why Trump has been acting like DeSantis is the scary monster under his bed for several months.

In stark contrast to the Democrats, the Republicans are not a hive mind. Internecine squabbles abound in the GOP. Trump vs. DeSantis is going to be the biggest one that the party has seen in a very long time.

Taking a page from Trump’s 2016 playbook, DeSantis used Twitter to get his message out. His announcement on the social media platform created quite the technological hullabaloo, which Paula covered:

It was an unprecedented move. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis decided to announce his campaign on Twitter Spaces with Elon Musk rather than going through the left-wing media gatekeepers. It was a good idea in theory, but Twitter’s tech team apparently didn’t anticipate the enormous interest in the announcement. A minute into the Twitter Space, it was clear that the social media platform was experiencing technical problems. Users got a message saying, “Details not available.” The Space started, and then quickly stopped again. Eventually, moderator David Sacks came on and said, “There’s 380,000 people… I think we’ve got just a massive number of people online, so its servers are straining someone.”

At one point, there were nearly 700,000 users in the Space. “We’re just reallocating more server capability to be able to handle the load here. It’s really going crazy,” Sacks said.

This was reminiscent of Twitter’s early days, when big news stories would bring on the iconic “Fail Whale.” Unlike olden times, however, Twitter quickly fixed things and the announcement proceeded apace.

This battle isn’t just for the party nomination. It’s for the future of the Republic. If the Democrats win the White House again in 2024, the United States of America will be burnt toast. That’s not fantastical hyperbole. One only has to look at the shredding of the Constitution since Joe Biden showed up in January 2021 to see that it’s true.

The fight will — if Team DeSantis is smart — quickly center around the COVID pandemic and how leaders in government responded. As governor, DeSantis gave the finger to the prevailing governmental wisdom of the time. Trump stood onstage with the thoroughly evil Anthony Fauci every day. I loved almost everything Trump did as president, but he is the one who weaponized Fauci. His hardcore fans have been trying to rewrite that story. It’s not going to work.

Once more, with feeling: either one of these candidates can save the country if elected. GOP voters will have to abandon their petty penchant for sitting out an election if their candidate isn’t in it. If the Escalator MAGA faithful won’t vote for DeSantis if he’s the nominee, they’ll be guilty of doing what they accused the Never Trump Republicans of doing in 2016: essentially voting for the Democrat.

Political junkies are in for what will no doubt be one of the more entertaining throwdown nomination fights in recent memory. I try to keep the carbs to a minimum, but I’ll be kicking back with some popcorn for this one.

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