He is in the starting blocks. Republican Ron DeSantis will announce his candidacy for the 2024 US presidential election on Wednesday during a live Twitter conversation with Elon Musk, a source close to US media and AFP told Tuesday.
This information was quickly confirmed by the boss of the social network. “I’m going to interview Ron DeSantis and he has a hell of an announcement to make,” he said in an exchange with the wall street journal. The conversation between the two men is scheduled for Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. Washington time (midnight Thursday Paris time).
Crusade against Disney
The governor of Florida is seen as Donald Trump’s main rival for the Republican nomination. But the former president retains a clear lead, with 56% of voting intentions, according to the RealClearPolitics average, against 19.4% for Ron DeSantis. After the rout of many Trumpist candidates during the November midterms, Ron DeSantis seemed to be hounding his former mentor. But his failed attacks and crusade against Disney in Florida appear to have shaken up his campaign before it even started.
At 44, DeSantis should contrast his age with that of Donald Trump, who would be 82 at the end of a possible second term. Elon Musk repeated that it was “too old” to be “CEO of any company, let alone the United States”. The Twitter boss has shown his affinity for DeSantis on several occasions, even going so far as to answer “yes” to a user asking him if he intended to support the governor of Florida if the latter presented himself.
“Well-thought”
In this face-to-face with Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis can however count on an imposing war chest of 110 million dollars in which he intends to draw to try to catch up by flooding the country with commercials.
In a recent video from his political action committee, a man puts a “DeSantis president” sticker to cover a “Trump 2016” on a car. This is a summary of the message that the governor wants to convey to voters: facing the 76-year-old billionaire, Ron DeSantis claims to embody the new guard. He multiplies the ultra-conservative blows on education or immigration, in the name of a battle against the supposed “good-thinking” and “wokism”. A point that he should address with Elon Musk, who regularly denounces the “woke virus” which, according to him, is gangrene in the United States.
