After months of speculation, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is now officially in the 2024 presidential race. We recently learned that he’d made the surprising decision to announce his campaign on Twitter Spaces, a live audio conversation feature, alongside Elon Musk, bypassing traditional media outlets.
And it was so hot that it broke Twitter. As PJM’s Paula Bolyard reported, Twitter experienced unexpected technical difficulties due to the overwhelming interest in the announcement. The Space started and stopped multiple times, and users received error messages. Moderator David Sacks informed the audience that the platform was struggling to handle the massive number of people, with approximately 700,000 users at one point. Efforts were made to allocate more server capacity to accommodate the high demand.
Eventually, the servers were scaled up, and everything proceeded as planned.
Few people can say that they broke Twitter, and Ron DeSantis is one of them.
Yet the Trump campaign is pretending like it was an unmitigated disaster.
The Trump campaign sent out a flurry of emails blasting DeSantis after his Twitter launch started. “Glitchy. Tech issues. Uncomfortable silences. A complete failure to launch. And that’s just the candidate!” a spokesman said in one email.
Trump himself responded to the announcement on Truth Social.
Related: Ron DeSantis Busts Media Stranglehold
“‘Rob,’ My Red Button is bigger, better, stronger, and is working (TRUTH!), yours does not! (per my conversation with Kim Jung Un, of North Korea, soon to become my friend!),” he posted.
Apparently, Trump is using “Rob” as some sort of nickname for Ron, and he seems to believe that Americans want him to be BFFs with Kim Jong Un.
I don’t get it either.
In another post, Trump shared a video of a rocket failing to launch, superimposed with “Ron!” in the style of Jeb Bush’s 2016 campaign logo.
And Trump’s trolling continued. He later posted: “Wow! The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER! His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!”
Think he was done? Nope. “Tim Scott’s Presidential launch, even with the broken microphone (don’t pay the contractor, Tim!), was by far the best Presidential launch of the week,” Trump posted. “Robs was a catastrophe!”
Trump’s campaign kept busy too, including sending an email featuring quotes of DeSantis praising Trump in the past, as well as an email crediting Trump for DeSantis’s victory in 2018. “Ron (DeSantis)’s not a winner because Ron without me wouldn’t have won. If I would have left it alone, he would have lost by 30 points or more.”
Maybe I’m crazy, but if there was so much interest in Ron DeSantis that his campaign announcement, which had been anticipated for weeks now, literally crashed Twitter’s servers, I find it hard to figure out how that’s a bad thing. Yes, it delayed the announcement for a short while, but Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms with an established infrastructure to handle huge amounts of bandwidth–and the servers still couldn’t handle the load.
Has Trump also forgotten that the launch of Truth Social was plagued by similar issues, forcing the platform to roll out slowly over time? Did Trump call that a disaster, or a reflection of its unprecedented popularity?
As I’ve said before, Trump knows that Ron DeSantis is his biggest threat for the GOP nomination in 2024. That’s why he’s sending out attacks left and right against him and not against any of his other primary opponents. DeSantis breaking Twitter shows that there’s a level of enthusiasm behind his candidacy, and Trump can’t stand it.
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