1 year ago
40
On Wednesday evening, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will make official what was already blindingly obvious: He’s running for president in 2024. But rather than putting up his own campaign video or stepping in front of the cameras on Fox News, DeSantis will first go to a place where he feels even more comfortable: Twitter. There he will enter the race in “conversation” with CEO Elon Musk.
Then he’ll go to Fox, which is still willing to host his non-announcement despite being spurned in favor of Musk because Fox has made promoting DeSantis into one of their chief reasons to exist. Sometime in the future, DeSantis will reportedly make a more standard announcement, complete with a video pushing his “Make America Florida” tagline (no, seriously, that’s his campaign slogan). But for now, DeSantis is very appropriately starting with a stunt announcement for a campaign that has totally eschewed the idea of government as a force for good.
For DeSantis, government is a weapon—one he can use to punish any person, organization, or corporation that deviates from his vision of a straight, white, male-dominated, deeply ignorant America. He expresses that view through bills and executive orders that ban books, target the LGBTQ community, treat voting like a violent crime, and go after companies that dare to speak up against his bigoted actions.
That’s why Musk loves him, and why he’s the rising star of a falling party.
