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Tim Scott’s Audience of One

Tim Scott relies on the coded notion of “personal responsibility” to shift the burden of society’s failures onto the individual.
Tim Scott relies on the coded notion of “personal responsibility” to shift the burden of society’s failures onto the individual. Photo: Peter Zay/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

It’s hard for me to resist mocking Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is allegedly very good at local politics—he did win re-election by nearly twenty points—but whose national political instincts are frequently confused. How else to explain his creative but predictably disastrous decision to make his big I’m-running-for-president announcement on the audio-only compilation of unforced errors that is Elon Musk’s Twitter? 

Musk, often rightly lauded as a pioneer in futuristic technologies, has also managed to drag his personal plaything of a media platform into the past, undoing advertiser relationships, rolling back the clock on efforts to combat spam and disinformation, and dragging DeSantis into what was essentially a broken radio broadcast. That’s fitting for a politician who is himself unwinding progress in his home state in terms of access to reproductive healthcare, and who is leading his constituency down the Orwellian road of banning books and limiting speech. (For more thoughtful thoughts on this weak moment in media flexing, listen to my Puck colleagues Jon Kelly and Dylan Byers discuss the repercussions on The Powers That Be.)