Sykes on Elon Musk, who, bewilderingly, will host Ron DeSantis and his by-now underwhelming, "I's-gots-the presidential-hots" announcement tonight:
"In 2023, a major candidate for president of the United States is paying court to an erratic, decompensating, narcissistic, endlessly needy, petulant man-child, who has spent the past few months posting poop emojis, taking counsel from someone called catturd, and destroying the social media platform he bought on a whim.
"Along the way, Musk has opened the door to bigots, crackpots, conspiracy theorists, charlatans, and the insane of every stripe, while displaying his own brainworms on a regular basis."
The peculiarity, in fact, the stupidity, of DeSantis's chosen venue to declare his candidacy for the presidency of the United States cannot be overstated. He could have reached out to Middle America — most importantly, America's somewhat conservative suburban women, all of whom Trump has disaffected — on one of the heavily watched late-night television shows. Instead he opted to re-hammer the largely neofascist Twitter choir with his authoritarian pieties, on which Trump has a sizable, unbreakable lock.
DeSantis's cloistered, suffocating stupidity doesn't end there. His debutante Twitter ball will be chaperoned and moderated by one David Sacks, also a consummate wacko and boy wonder of right-wing petulance. Observes Puck:
"His Twitter feed is an endless stream of provocations that generate tons of heat online. His myriad bête noires include the mainstream media, San Francisco socialists, and neocons that Sacks believes have taken over the G.O.P.; his loves include Elon Musk and his 'Twitter Files,' a pseudo-journalistic series that, Sacks believes, demonstrates the corruption of the old Twitter regime under Jack Dorsey and its complicity in government censorship."
And so here DeSantis again makes it clear that he's rather uninterested in rational voters. The New Yorker's Andy Borowitz, however, may be onto something.
Also from Puck. One of its reporters assayed actual human contact with DeSantis, who returned ... you got it, petulance:
"[He] quickly bypassed the press while I volubly asked him whether he would take a meeting with [Disney's] Bob Iger. DeSantis didn’t acknowledge me, and instead seemed to be turning his body away from the scrum as he moved into the diner for photo-ops with the red-meat MAGA crowd.... I shouted a few more of the same questions about Iger and Disney before DeSantis rushed past the scrum that was filming his photo-op with a child, his back to us, and slipped into his black-tinted S.U.V. and on to Concord, [New Hampshire]."
And while we're on the petulance theme, here's Michael Cohen, who needs no introduction, on the odds of his former boss — the Republican Party's frontrunner for the presidency of the United States — obeying a Manhattan court's order that he not attack or intimidate prosecution witnesses in the hush money case:
"I have less than zero confidence" in any odds, said Cohen to Insider. "Rational thought flies out the window when Trump gets angry. He's no different than a petulant child."
Such are the American Right's adolescent menschen, misanthropes and malefactors: Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Elon Musk, the Triple Axis of rudderless petulance. You may never get H.W. Bush "vision" or even dry policy from these man-children, but you could go swimming in their oceanic cesspools of sempiternal peevishness.