How Ron DeSantis Botched His Launch

How Ron DeSantis Botched His Launch

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Parker Molloy on how Elon Musk used the Florida governor.

Jeet Heer
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After months of teasing voters and reporters, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has finally launched his presidential bid. He did it on an unusual platform: Twitter Spaces. The launch was widely viewed as a bungle because of its small audience and many technical glitches.

Even if was a fiasco, it was significant as an example of Elon Musk trying to remake himself as a right-wing media mogul, a Rupert Murdoch of the digital age. To better understand what DeSantis and Musk are up to, I talked with Parker Molloy, who runs the fine newsletter The Present Age.

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Jeet Heer Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.


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