MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

DeSantis finally announces White House bid on Twitter

“If I get nominated I will do the job,” DeSantis promised

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Wednesday announced he would be participating in the primary elections of the Republican Party to run for President of the United States in 2024. He will face former President Donald Trump, among others, if he is to make it to the White House. “I'm running for president to lead our great American comeback,” De Santis wrote on Twitter, where he also participated in a broadcast interview with Elon Musk.

DeSantis insisted on Twitter that “America deserves the fight. Every time.” The governor of Florida won his reelection in that state in November 2022 and had some political triumphs to his credit, such as the prohibition of abortion and the facilitation of the death penalty. However, this also brought him a heavy barrage of criticism from different groups, including LGBTQ organizations.

In his video posting on social media, DeSantis highlighted that his administration as governor has chosen “facts over fear, education over indoctrination, and law and order over disorder and unrest.”

The video was distributed hours after the governor filed with the U.S. Federal Election Commission his candidacy for the Republican primary, and at about the same time he was scheduled to begin a Twitter chat with entrepreneur Elon Musk, which began nearly half an hour late due to technical problems.

The glitches, caused by the large influx of listeners (at one point reaching more than 600,000) that overloaded the servers, were mocked by part of the Trump-friendly MAGA War Room Political Action Committee (PAC) and some Democrats, including President Joseph Biden.

During his hour-long conversation with Musk and tech entrepreneur David Sacks, a donor to the DeSantis campaign, the now presidential hopeful deployed many of the pro-freedom and anti-progressive “ideological indoctrination” postulates of his campaign for re-election as governor.

“If I get nominated I will do the job,” DeSantis promised in a talk followed by some 300,000 people in which he promised to reverse the immigration policies of the Biden Administration.

“Government is not entertainment. It's not about brand building or virtue signaling,” he also said.

The governor also responded to the travel alert to Florida issued over the weekend by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a warning he called a “political stunt.” In that context, DeSantis defended the low crime rates in the state and the high reading rates of the African-American population in the state's schools.

On his decision to announce his candidacy on Twitter, something unprecedented in the history of political campaigns in the US, DeSantis highlighted the social network's stance on freedoms and recalled the criticism the governor faced when he instituted policies against Covid-19 contrary to confinements and mandatory masks. “I think what was done with Twitter was significant for the future of our country,” DeSantis said, clearly alluding to the time when the social network came under Musk's ownership.

As DeSantis was tweeting about his candidacy, former President Trump uploaded a pair of videos critical of the governor.