If it hadn't been so par for the course, just business as usual, merely another habitual indignity, I'd guess that Ron DeSantis's Twitter debacle was orchestrated by the Greek gods. But even Aristophanes would not be so ironically obvious as last night's tragicomic play of a muted presidential announcement.
DeSantis had invited a ballroom-full of deep pockets to the Miami Four Seasons to watch his launch on a large-screen TV. What they — along with more than 600,000 other viewers, soon to shrink to 275,000 — got instead was dead air and the occasional whisper for nearly a half-hour. Two Twitter employees said "there was no planning for what are known as 'site reliability issues' for the event" — even though the site's technical troubles have mushroomed under Elon Musk's infamous management.
Is any of this of lasting import? Is it something other than a momentary embarrassment? A pregnant comment on DeSantis's leadership abilities? Of course not — other than his having made the unintelligible decision to announce on Twitter. What could be of lasting import, and far more tragedy than comedy, however, is this assessment from a journalist who has covered him for six years:
"Mr. DeSantis’s willingness to exert ... power in extraordinary ways has led him to barrel through norms, challenge the legal limits of his office and threaten political retribution against those who cross him. Unlike former President Donald J. Trump ... Mr. DeSantis is a keen student of American government who has expanded his influence tactically and methodically, using detailed knowledge of the pliable confines of his office to his advantage."
Patricia Mazzei's first sentence is as Trumpian as it is DeSantian: the Florida governor shatters norms, tortures his office's legal limits, and terrorizes opponents with political retribution. These characteristics are, after all, originally what made DeSantis appealing to the deviant GOP base.
Yet Mazzei's second sentence is anything but Trumpesque: the highly educated Florida governor knows government, and he has used this knowledge to methodically enlarge his power. As president he would be, as many observers have already noted, a "smart Trump" — a clever, competent, and thus far more dangerous authoritarian than the former chief executive. Trump was Mussolini; DeSantis would be Stalin.
As bumbling as the governor has been to date, his stupendous awkwardness would in no way inhibit his abominable lust for, and attainment of, untrammeled presidential power. Trump was simply too stupid to know how to wield unfettered authority; DeSantis would shrewdly mold it in his own image and to his own liking. Within a year, the nation's founding document would be wastepaper. The government would be of President DeSantis, by President DeSantis, for President DeSantis.
As he wrote in his campaign book, The Courage to Be Free, "[As governor] I was able to ... to leverage authority to achieve substantive policy victories." The state's ACLU legislative director, Kara Gross, pointedly stripped the line of its euphemism (that of "leveraging authority"): "What is scary in Florida is that we’re seeing the governor’s continued efforts to consolidate power under himself so that there are not any checks and balances for what he does."
And so when DeSantis says he wishes to "Make America Florida," in scary reality he's saying that he would, as president, do away with any bothersome (Constitutional) restraints. As he has shown in his home state, "leveraging authority" translates into any means at all to an end.
This would become the new and really frightening par for the course, which would indeed be worthy of the Greek gods' machinations.