Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Editorial:

DeSantis’ campaign launch was a joke but his presidency would be terrifying

desantis

Robert F. Bukaty / AP

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at a political roundtable, Friday, May 19, 2023, in Bedford, N.H.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis finally launched his long-anticipated campaign for the White House this week, teaming up with Elon Musk for an official announcement live on Twitter Spaces. Unfortunately for DeSantis, his campaign launch went about as well as Musk’s last rocket launch after the first live feed broke and the connection was severed.

By the time the clownlike duo of supposedly tech-savvy tweeters launched a new “space,” almost half of the original audience was gone. The half that departed were clearly the smart ones, as the feed continued having audio and other technical problems.

Worth remembering: The clueless huckster Musk is the guy who wants to implant chips in our brains, while his cars burn on the streets and rockets explode overhead. And DeSantis is the guy who wants an education system in which no one thinks about anything ever again. What could possibly go wrong with these two?

If the campaign rollout is the first test of a candidate’s ability to be prepared and put their best foot forward, DeSantis failed miserably. Apparently, Musk and DeSantis hadn’t thought to test whether this type of announcement event was even possible.

The number of technical malfunctions plaguing the event was matched only by the number of times DeSantis and Musk tried to pass the blame. Remember, this was an event they organized together on a platform that one of them owns.

Rather than admit that they made a mistake, didn’t test enough or hadn’t foreseen all of the possible failure points, they instead swung back and forth between being overtly confused and frat guys pretending it was all a hilarious prank. By the way, the Food and Drug Administration just approved human testing of Elon’s brain chips. Want to bet how hilarious it will be for Elon when those fail too? Maybe Ron will volunteer.

The botched announcement was a vivid preview of what a DeSantis presidency might look like as DeSantis, surrounded by tech billionaires, laughed nervously while the people he’s supposed to represent struggle to gain access to a broken system that was never designed to serve most of them to begin with.

Imagine a President DeSantis, who despite months of intelligence reports about Russian forces gathering on the border of Ukraine, has made no plans or preparations. His friend and close adviser, Musk, would assure him that no plan was needed, they would simply troll Putin into submission on social media or buy Russia in order to stop the attack. If that failed, maybe his Vice President, Marjorie Taylor Greene, could appeal to the secret space laser cabal to help them out.

We offer this example in jest, but if DeSantis’ announcement had gone any worse, it could have been a “Saturday Night Live” sketch. And this isn’t the first time that DeSantis’ arrogance and hubris have caused him to fail in such an epic fashion.

This is the same Ron DeSantis whose attack on Disney cost his own state a billion dollars in investments and thousands of high-paying jobs. It’s the same Ron DeSantis whose publicity stunt to fly migrants to Martha’s Vineyard backfired when those same migrants sued him for fraud. And it’s the same Ron DeSantis who had to do a full 180 after threatening to kill Social Security while representing a state of retirees as a member of the U.S. Congress.

What’s worse is that all of these failures demonstrate that more than anything, DeSantis lacks any form of sympathy or empathy for others.

His greatest policy accomplishments include putting more guns in the hands of people without any education or training on safely using guns, championing legislation to ban abortions before many women are even aware that they’re pregnant, and stomping on the First Amendment while ignoring the pleas of Black, brown and LGBTQ+ victims of discrimination, bullying and abuse.

He isn’t “Trump without the chaos.” He’s just Trump 2.0 with fresh new flavors of chaos and malice. And, just like Trump, instead of accepting responsibility or apologizing to the people affected by his failures, he engages in endless efforts to scapegoat others. Instead of picking himself up with dignity, he pulls others down with him, hoping to make himself look better by comparison. He not only lacks judgment and foresight, he lacks character.

Let’s hope the rest of his presidential campaign is as successful as the launch.