When I was on my honeymoon in South Africa, a few weeks ago, a fellow tourist heard that I was a political journalist and wanted to talk shop. He seemed more like a news junkie than a partisan, and he asked me about a fresh New York Times push alert regarding Ron DeSantis and the infamous presidential announcement on Twitter. Even this guy understood the patent absurdity of it all: who does a campaign announcement on Twitter Spaces with Elon Musk? And who was this for, exactly? Surely not primary voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, or South Carolina, people who have jobs and families. 

The announcement justified the mockery. There were tech fails, arcane bromides against “woke banking,” and corporate D.E.I. initiatives, and a heavy dose of David Sacks, a tech entrepreneur known to most Puck readers but zero actual voters. At certain moments, DeSantis sounded like he was talking to some kind of imagined human with a vocabulary familiar only to Ben Shapiro and the anons who edit Musk’s Wikipedia page. At other times—riffing on the REINS Act and Chevron deference—he was a typical Washington politician, talking about committee votes like the House member he once was.