Conservative commentator Megyn Kelly offered Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and his campaign some pointed criticism following his Wednesday night announcement on Twitter Spaces with Elon Musk.
The event was what children might call an “epic fail,” Kelly said.
BIDEN AND GOP BLAME EACH OTHER FOR DEFAULT THEY INSIST WON’T HAPPEN
“It was embarrassing and awkward and had the bewildering, unsteadying feel of a disaster unfolding before your very eyes,” Kelly told viewers of The Megyn Kelly Show on Thursday. “You can’t look away, and yet you’re viscerally uncomfortable watching, too.”
DeSantis’s announcement got off to a rocky start when Musk’s Twitter Spaces event experienced crashes as more than 500,000 listeners joined. After about 20 minutes of technical difficulties, Silicon Valley investor David Sacks launched a new attempt on his account, which proved to work better than the one on Musk’s account.
The event on Sacks’s account did not suffer the same problems, and the event averaged about 200,000 listeners.
Referencing Tucker Carlson’s recently announced show set to debut on Twitter, Kelly said, “Let’s hope they work out these kinks before Tucker starts posting over there — because crashing with 600,000 viewers ain’t gonna work with him.”
Former President Donald Trump’s team immediately seized on the early glitches, using it as proof that the Florida governor isn’t “ready for prime time.”
In a press release titled “Failure to Launch,” pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again Inc. spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said, “Ron DeSantis’s botched campaign announcement is another example of why he is just not ready for the job.”
Kelly commended DeSantis’s team for trying something new but also criticized it for not testing it first.
“Kudos to all involved for choosing a different medium and bypassing the mainstream media, which hates DeSantis and which is hated by most Republican voters,” she said. “I support that mission, but its execution here, to put it kindly, did not work. How on earth were the kinks not worked out beforehand?”
Some of the former Fox News anchor’s sharpest critiques were for the question-and-answer portion of the event. In her opinion, the questions were “softball.”
“There was no spice, nothing challenging, and nothing newsworthy,” she said. “I wrote a sentence to my team I didn’t think I would ever write: I miss journalists.”
She explained that the seemingly preselected questioners made for a “boring, cringey, and downright uncomfortable” event, adding that the questions were “almost Pravda-esque in their obsequiousness.”
She then wondered why the Florida governor’s launch would take place on an audio-only medium. She noted that there were no photos to be printed “above the fold” of the announcement and no video to circulate of his remarks.
Kelly also pointed out that the father of three didn’t include his young family in his campaign video, which she also criticized, saying it should have shown the governor among adoring crowds and beside his wife and children.
The host made a point of mentioning her alignment with many of DeSantis’s policies but added that he needs to be able to defeat Trump if he wants to win the presidency. And, she explained, Trump’s followers adore him.
Following the campaign launch event, DeSantis and his campaign lauded the announcement as having broken the internet.
Talking to reporters, DeSantis said he had an “internet-breaking start with Elon Musk.”
“He offered me the ability to do either a SpaceX rocket or Twitter. I just figured Twitter would be safer,” he joked.
“Turns out that we had too many people that tried to join. So, in some respects, you know, that’s a good sign,” he said.
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The Florida Republican’s team began selling T-shirts and mugs that read “DeSantis breaks systems” on Thursday.
Listed underneath are several systems that DeSantis breaks, according to the campaign: the internet, the deep state, corporate media, and woke indoctrination.
