CNN
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose clashes with Disney and aggressive pursuit of conservative victories have made him a prominent figure in the Republican Party, formally announced Wednesday that he is running for president in 2024.
“Well, I’m running for president of the United States to lead our great American comeback,” he said during an event with Twitter owner Elon Musk on the site’s audio platform. “But we know our country is going in the wrong direction. We see it with our own eyes. And we feel it in our bones.”
Early chat glitches delayed the event at Twitter Spaces, with heavy traffic “melting the servers,” according to moderator and tech mogul David Sacks.
“The servers are struggling a little bit,” Musk said, citing nearly 400,000 listeners.
Twitter had to stop the live stream after the start was delayed for more than 20 minutes. “I think you broke the internet there,” Sacks said when the event was relaunched.
Earlier Wednesday, before the event with Musk, DeSantis also made a filing with the Federal Election Commission.
It formalizes a decision that has been long anticipated since November, when DeSantis won re-election in a landslide and captured the attention of a party eager to move on from recent defeats. He’s entering the race for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination later than other contenders and hasn’t been able to freeze further from jumping in, but he’s better funded, better known and polled more than all but one: Donald Trump .
The former president has dealt with DeSantis, whom he once endorsed for Florida governor, as his archenemy for months, regularly attacking him on social media and in interviews. A Trump-aligned super PAC has spent millions attacking DeSantis on national television, setting expectations for a tight primary between the two former allies.
To overcome Trump, DeSantis will have to convince Republican voters that he is better positioned to take on President Joe Biden next November. That will likely involve winning over conservatives who can still look back fondly on Trump’s presidency, while also rallying support among Republicans eager for new blood to lead the party.
DeSantis, 44, has been laying the groundwork to make this case for months. He has toured the country, cast himself as a leader in the right-wing culture wars, and presented a new vision for a Republican Party that uses elected power to punish political opponents and force conservative orthodoxy into institutions. and companies. Working with his state’s GOP-controlled legislature, DeSantis has racked up multiple policy victories, including banning abortion after six weeks, eliminating permits to carry a concealed handgun in public, enacting a universal school voucher and access to transgender health care. which will serve as a platform to start your campaign.
“I think (DeSantis) and former President Donald Trump have a lot in common, which they don’t want to hear, but I think it’s the truth,” Wisconsin voter Steve Frazier said after DeSantis spoke at a recent GOP dinner. in Marathon County. “Unfortunately, they’re possibly running for the same position, and that’s a conflict for people like me, because we can have two very, very qualified men running for the same position.”
DeSantis has continued to make headlines for his year-long fight with Disney, his state’s most iconic business and a vital economic engine, over a new law banning certain instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in schools . After Disney issued a statement opposing the move, DeSantis planned a takeover of the special tax district that allowed the entertainment giant to build its iconic theme park empire in Central Florida.
The move put Florida businesses on notice and alarmed even some in the GOP, who questioned whether elected executives should use state power to punish a company. Undeterred, DeSantis has made his run-in with Disney a central part of his political history, devoting an entire chapter of his recent memoir to the saga. Disney has sued DeSantis, accusing the governor of using his political power to punish the company for exercising its free speech rights, while DeSantis has vowed not to budge.
While he is eager to take on private companies, journalists and sometimes his own party, DeSantis has largely avoided directly confronting Trump. Instead, he has opted for more subtle comparisons between his terms in office. He has vilified the lack of action during Trump’s first four years while listing his own accomplishments as governor. He regularly touts the lack of “drama” and “leaks” in his administration, a clear jab at the chaos that often engulfed the Trump White House.
“If I had to run, I’m running against Biden,” DeSantis said in a recent interview with British TV host Piers Morgan.
That same day, however, DeSantis appeared to poke fun at Trump over his alleged relationship with an adult film star who is at the center of a Manhattan district attorney’s case against the former president.
“I don’t know what’s going on with paying hush money to a porn star,” he said at a press conference.
To many, DeSantis had indicated he was willing to mix it up with Trump. But a week later, when Trump was indicted, DeSantis backtracked and criticized the prosecutor who brought the charges.
The pushback was illustrative of Republican struggles to challenge Trump head-on that date back to the 2016 presidential primaries. The former president’s Republican rivals have often chosen to target the contender perceived as the biggest threat to unseat Trump: DeSantis. Already, 2024 hopefuls like former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy have launched attacks on the Florida governor more often than they have criticized Trump.
“The subject of most of the attacks in the first debate will be DeSantis, not Trump,” said Alex Conant, a veteran of several presidential campaigns.
Conant is familiar with what it’s like to run after Trump. He advised Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign and watched as the Florida Republican faced arrows from the rest of the GOP camp in a debate leading up to the New Hampshire primary. Rubio never recovered.
DeSantis’ team, Conant said, needs to “be wide open because it’s going to be addressed at every point in the first debate.”
DeSantis will have more resources than most to withstand these attacks. A super PAC supporting his political ambitions, Never Back Down, had already raised $30 million in the first month after launching and has spent millions boosting DeSantis and responding to negative ads from Trump allies in early primary states. . He has more than $85 million parked in a state political committee that his team has planned for more than a year to move to a federal committee, possibly never back, though some campaign finance watchdogs have suggested that this plan would violate the law.
DeSantis, for a time, was also a favorite among deep-pocketed Republican donors who have soured on Trump and are willing to fund an alternative. However, that support has cooled somewhat of late, with several key financiers expressing reservations about DeSantis. His hard right turn, antagonistic feud with Disney and perceived lack of personality have some looking for others to stay behind.
Thomas Peterffy, a billionaire businessman who has given $570,000 to DeSantis’ political committee over the years, recently told the Financial Times that he and other Republican donors were turned off by DeSantis’ stance on “abortion and prohibition of books’ and were ‘holding our dust’. sec.” DeSantis has championed a new state law that requires approval of books in classroom libraries and makes it easier for the public to flag school books for review.
But without another major alternative to Trump emerging, DeSantis allies remain convinced that Republican donors willing to move on from the former president will eventually get behind the Florida governor.
“There’s a broad acceptance that this is really becoming a two-person race, and there’s a lot of personal appreciation for President Trump, but the realistic understanding that he doesn’t have the best chance to beat Biden,” he said. former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. founder of the super PAC Never Back Down, told CNN in March. “He doesn’t have the best chance to win the Senate and keep the House, as history shows.”
This story has been updated with additional information.
