The hosts and panelists of “Morning Joe” added their voices to the chorus criticizing the launch of Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign, after the announcement via Twitter Spaces was plagued by glitches on Wednesday night.
On Thursday morning’s episode of the MSNBC talk show, the hosts and panelists pretty much agreed unanimously that DeSantis’ launch went as poorly as it could go, after starting 20 minutes late because Twitter’s servers purportedly couldn’t handle the volume of people tuning in to listen (which former Twitter CEO Elon Musk and DeSantis’ camp have been spinning as a good thing).
“I mean, it was an abomination,” former White House Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri said bluntly. “And just so much hubris all around, from DeSantis, from Musk — by the way, 700,000 people is not that much. Like, Twitter should be able to handle 700,000 people.”
That said, Palmieri added that the glitches of the launch probably didn’t matter among the voting base DeSantis is targeting, arguing that while someone like Tim Scott needed a successful launch, DeSantis didn’t, because he already has plenty of name recognition.
But Joe Scarborough argued that “the day you launch a campaign sets the tone of everything,” and by that standard, DeSantis’ launch was “an embarrassment.”
Reverend Al Sharpton agreed, and argued that the struggles of the launch might’ve become a non-story pretty quickly, if DeSantis were competing against anyone besides twice-impeached-once-indicted former president Trump.
“Every chance Trump gets, he’s going to say ‘How can this man run the economy when he can’t run a launch? How can this man handle international global affairs when he can’t handle a launch?’” Sharpton said.
“I mean if you were running against candidates that would move on, I would say don’t worry about it Governor DeSantis,” he continued. “But you’re running against Donald Trump. He will never let you forget it, and more importantly, he will never let us forget it. That’s how Trump is. You just served him a softball, and he’s gonna keep hitting that ball over the fence every chance he can.”
You can watch the full discussion from “Morning Joe” in the video above.