The calamity that was Wednesday night’s formal announcement of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign wasn’t just Twitter’s fault.
As is usually the case in politics — and otherwise in life — there is room for more than one person to be embarrassed after a calamitous mistake.
The 20 minutes of fumbling that preceded the formal announcement by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis of his bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination was not, in itself, DeSantis’s fault. It was a technical failing on the part of Twitter, DeSantis’s chosen venue, and it was irreducibly the fault of Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk. Since assuming control of the social media platform, Musk has had a habit of overpromising and under-delivering, and his site’s failure to accommodate a crowd of relatively modest scale (by internet standards) lands on his shoulders.
When DeSantis said the magic words — “I am running for president of the United States” — only 108,000 people were tuned in.
Musk claimed that Twitter’s servers were overloaded, the sort of thing that might have been caught had the team prepared for the event, which it reportedly didn’t. But while that stumble is attributable to Musk, blame for the repercussions of it can extend further. After all, it was not unpredictable.
Focusing on the technical side actually understates the mistakes the campaign made at launch. But we’ll come back to that in a second. First, let’s assess why the mistake of the Twitter rollout was particularly acute.
DeSantis is running as a competent administrator, as the guy who will do all of the things former president Donald Trump would do but without the baggage and toxicity.
