Elections

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida could have made his presidential campaign announcement in some idyllic seaside park, surrounded by the wholesome families he’s trying to defend from subversive books and the Walt Disney Company. Instead, he did it in a glitchy audio feed with a socially awkward billionaire. Even if the Twitter rollout had worked smoothly — which it definitely did not — it would have been a debacle.The technological failures are, understandably, dominating the headlines. They were humiliating for everyone involved, making the campaign look amateurish and undermining Elon Musk’s claims that firing most of Twitter’s work force hasn’t impaired the platform. But behind these unforced errors lie deeper failures of political judgment by DeSantis, ones that speak to a blinkered and — for all his cultural populism — elitist worldview. How else do you explain a campaign kickoff with more discussion of crytpo regulation than of inflation?DeSantis’s decision to begin his campaign like this is a sign of weakness in three ways. First, there’s his inability to see what is obvious to Musk’s critics, which is that Musk, while perhaps a genius in some areas, is also often an arrogant screw-up whose projects break down in public. (See: the Tesla Cybertruck’s supposedly shatterproof windows or the explosion of the SpaceX Starship.) You have to be fairly deep in the right-wing echo chamber to believe Musk’s self-presentation as a swaggering Tony Stark figure who can be counted on to deliver.Second, DeSantis’s decision to make his tacit alliance with Musk such an integral part of his campaign identity suggests a submissive and receding quality. He ran for governor in 2018 by emphasizing his worshipful fealty to Donald Trump, cutting an embarrassing commercial in which he lovingly instructed his children in the MAGA gospel. Now, coming out of Trump’s shadow, he’s opted to attach himself to another big, strong friend rather than stand on his own. Last night, after the announcement, his campaign tweeted a bizarre, music-less video that features DeSantis speaking about immigration over a montage of images of him and of Musk, as if they were running for president as a team.Finally, DeSantis is so deeply, fatally online that he doesn’t seem to understand that Musk’s concerns only partly overlap with the concerns of the people he needs to vote for him.DeSantis is betting that anti-wokeness, the belief system that ties him to Musk, is enough to power a presidential race. He’s not necessarily wrong: Though polling about the salience of wokeness is mixed, in an April Wall Street Journal survey, 55 percent of Republicans said “Fighting woke ideology in our schools and businesses” was more important than protecting Social Security and Medicare. The reason DeSantis is a major contender in the first place is the reactionary agenda he’s enacted in Florida, which includes sweeping limitations on what can be taught in public schools, a six-week abortion ban and the cruelest anti-trans policies in America.But anti-wokeness has different flavors. There are the worries about the erosion of what were once called “family values,” and then there are the esoteric concerns of Silicon Valley edgelords. DeSantis emphasized the latter on Wednesday night, discussing niche issues in language that I suspect is unintelligible to ordinary people, even those who might hate the brand of social justice politics derided as wokeness. He spoke, without much explanation, about college “accreditation cartels,” the “E.S.G. movement” — investing that weighs environmental, social and governance factors — and central bank digital currency. A large part of the discussion — far more than about, say, the economy or foreign policy — was about Twitter itself.“The woke mind virus is basically a form of cultural Marxism,” DeSantis said later Wednesday night on Fox News. If you spend time on the right-wing internet, that is a platitude. But my guess is that for a lot of people, it’s gibberish. Now, Trump also repurposes ideas and memes from the far-right internet demimonde, but he does so with a lowest-common-denominator bluntness. “We’re going to defeat the cult of gender ideology and reaffirm that God created two genders, called men and women,” Trump said in South Carolina earlier this year. You don’t have to know exactly what “gender ideology” is to know what he means.In his recent book, “The Courage to Be Free,” DeSantis wrote that his first encounter with the left was at Yale University, where he got his undergraduate degree, and that experiencing “unbridled leftism on campus pushed me to the right.” From there, he went to Harvard Law School, which “was just as left-wing as Yale.” What he doesn’t seem to understand is that for all his hatred of Ivy League pretensions, his political outlook was shaped in the Ivy League’s crucible. He speaks the language not of normal people but of right-wing counter-elites, thinkers and activists who come out of the same rarefied milieus as the progressive intellectuals they despise.Maybe DeSantis’s misunderstanding of elitism has tripped him up. As he wrote in his book, the word “elite,” to him, is not about wealth, talent or achievement. Instead, it’s an epithet for progressives, those who share “the ideology and outlook of the ruling class, which one can demonstrate by ‘virtue signaling.’” He singles out Clarence Thomas as someone who is not an elite, despite being one of the most powerful men in America. Neither, in his view, are wealthy Texas oilmen or Florida car dealers or, presumably, Musk, one of the richest men in the world. It is, of course, a standard right-wing rhetorical move to suggest that so-called wealth creators are part of an oppressed class. The problem with DeSantis is that he seems to believe it, so when he’s speaking to plutocrats on Twitter Spaces, he thinks he’s speaking to the people.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

As Republican candidates enter the race for their party’s 2024 presidential nomination, Times columnists, Opinion writers and others will assess their strengths and weaknesses with a scorecard. We rate the candidates on a scale of 1 to 10: 1 means the candidate will probably drop out before any caucus or primary voting; 10 means the candidate has a very strong chance of receiving the party’s nomination next summer. This entry assesses Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who announced his bid for the Republican nomination on Wednesday.How seriously should we take DeSantis’s candidacy?David Brooks Ron DeSantis was overvalued before and is undervalued now. He’s still the most likely Trump alternative since he spans the Trump wing and the non-Trump wing of the G.O.P. But it would take a Trump implosion to bring that about. I doubt there’s much that DeSantis can affirmatively do to control his destiny.Jane Coaston Extremely seriously, and very literally.Michelle Cottle About as seriously as a moderate to severe case of shingles. (So, pretty seriously.)Ross Douthat More seriously than any Republican not named Donald Trump. Ron DeSantis’s weaknesses are obvious — social awkwardness above all — but even as his poll numbers have sagged, nobody else has emerged from the pack, so he enters the race as the only currently plausible vehicle for Republicans who don’t want Trump again.David French We should take Ron DeSantis more seriously than many pundits are taking him today. He has struggled under Trump’s relentless attacks, but he’s still the clear second choice, and it’s way too soon to write his campaign obituary.Michelle Goldberg A few months ago, before it became clear what a problem his personality was going to be, I thought he was very likely to be the nominee. And until 6 p.m. on Wednesday, I still thought he had a decent chance. But I don’t see how he comes back from that catastrophic Twitter launch.Rosie Gray Ron DeSantis is the only Republican so far who appears capable of putting up a credible challenge to Trump. But his pre-candidacy wasn’t very encouraging: He’s allowed Trump to define him as a personality-challenged weirdo, and he has made politically questionable moves like the six-week abortion ban he signed.Katherine Mangu-Ward He’s a capable governor of a successful state who has a good eye for the places where political points can be scored — mostly authoritarian culture-war stunts — even if he isn’t always successful in scoring them.Daniel McCarthy He would be the front-runner any other year. He’ll be the front-runner next year if luck somehow takes Donald Trump out of the race. As things stand, Ron DeSantis is as serious a contender as anyone can be with the ex-president in the contest.Bret Stephens Three months ago, I would have predicted that Ron DeSantis, fresh from his resounding re-election as governor of Florida, would beat Trump for the Republican primary. Now he looks more like the Ted Cruz of this electoral cycle, pompous, mean and not nearly as clever as he seems to think he is.What matters most about him as a presidential candidate?Brooks DeSantis’s problem is that he can’t attack Trump, because a chunk of his support is Trumpy, and he can’t not attack Trump, since Trump is flailing him day after day. I can’t think of a candidate who took down a front-runner without criticizing him. DeSantis has locked himself into a posture in which he looks weak and passive.Coaston He is in almost every way a standard presidential candidate — a successful governor of a big state looking to make the leap to the national stage. That seeming regularity makes him seem familiar, recognizable, even.Cottle He has long been the great hope of the many, many G.O.P. donors and other establishment Republicans desperate to move the party beyond Trump. As the cliché goes, they see him as Trump without the crazy — a hard-edge conservative who has a gift for playing to the base’s angriest, most revanchist tendencies, but isn’t totally cracked.Douthat Almost alone among the not-Trump candidates, he has a case that could actually work in a G.O.P. reshaped by Trumpism: namely, that he fought the key battles of the Trump era more effectively than Trump himself. That line may not be enough to win, but it’s an argument that actually meets Republican voters where they are (or, for now, seem to be).French He’s the most likely Trump alternative in the race.Goldberg Anti-wokeness is the glue that holds the modern right together, uniting people who disagree about economic organization or foreign policy. DeSantis — who loves to say that Florida is “where woke goes to die” — is betting that anti-wokeness alone can power a presidential campaign. But his official campaign launch suggests he’s so far down the right-wing rabbit hole that he can’t communicate with people who aren’t upset about college “accreditation cartels” and central bank digital currency.Gray DeSantis will be the clearest test so far of how much Trumpism without Trump actually appeals to voters.Mangu-Ward In his self-published 2011 book, “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers,” DeSantis writes like a normie Tea Party conservative — and much of his record in Florida is consistent with those values, including during Covid. But the title, which tweaks Barack Obama’s memoir “Dreams From My Father,” is a hint that the Trumpish troll always lurked within and may be all voters care about. The DeSantis candidacy is a test of whether there is anything left of the G.O.P. besides Trump fandom.McCarthy DeSantis is as much an heir as a rival to Donald Trump. He shows that the changes Trump began as president will continue and expand under the next generation of Republican leadership, with DeSantis at the fore. The governor is an immigration restrictionist and foreign-policy restrainer, and he’s more systematic than the former president about attacking progressivism’s institutional strongholds in corporate America and higher education.Stephens DeSantis is running on the theory that the best way to beat Trump is to imitate Trump, minus the obvious personal flaws. But it might just be that the only way to beat Trump is to run directly against him, pointing out all the ways in which he has been a disaster for the Republican Party and a disgrace to the United States.What do you find most inspiring — or unsettling — about his vision for America?Brooks The modern G.O.P., like many populist-right parties across the West, is built around one idea: The progressive highly educated elites are awful; they serve themselves and condescend to everyone else. DeSantis has embraced this belief up and down the line. It’s served him well politically.Coaston His belief is that America is a problem that must be solved by the state. He appears to believe that American companies, business and schools and universities were once deserving of freedoms and liberties, but some of them have failed (in his view) and thus must be punished until they submit to the will of the state. He reminds me of Woodrow Wilson, another former governor who believed in the perfectibility of the American populace by government intervention.Cottle He is just as thirsty for power as Trump — and just as cruel and cynical in pursuit of that power. Fly planeloads of hapless migrants to Martha’s Vineyard? Make schoolteachers pawns in his culture war? Use the levers of government to threaten and punish those who say things he dislikes? It’s all good in DeSantis Land.Douthat The thing that many of his critics loathe most about DeSantis, his willingness to use political power directly in cultural conflicts, represents the necessary future of conservatism in America. The line between politics and culture is always a blur, and a faction that enjoys political power without cultural power can’t serve its own voters without looking for ways to bring those scales closer to a balance. There are good and bad ways to do this, and DeSantis’s record is a mixture of the two. But the project is a normal part of democratic politics, not an authoritarian betrayal.French Ron DeSantis has a Jekyll and Hyde persona. He ran an extremely MAGA first campaign for governor, then governed as Dr. Jekyll, squarely in the mainstream. Even his divisive Covid response was within the norms for Southern G.O.P. governors. Then, as his star rose, Mr. Hyde emerged, and he began to run to the edge of the populist G.O.P., trying to outflank Trump from the right. He’s now the avatar of a more authoritarian G.O.P., eager to wield state power against his ideological enemies, often in unconstitutional ways.Goldberg Of all the Republican candidates, DeSantis is the most likely to govern as an American Viktor Orban. He’s been relentless and at times very effective — despite his Twitter broadcast — in using the power of the state to persecute his enemies and impose his ideology. A DeSantis presidency would represent a more orderly and disciplined kind of authoritarianism than we saw with Trump.Gray His vision is an America under dire threat from woke teachers and Disney. He’s spent his time as governor engaged in emotionally charged culture war by wielding executive power (with the assistance of a Republican legislature) — something that raised his profile in the conservative media.Mangu-Ward I love to hear a candidate talk about freedom, but it would be more exciting if I believed his policies would match his rhetoric. For someone who has a lot to say about liberty, DeSantis has scored his biggest hits on the national scene in an overwhelmingly authoritarian vein — book bans, border walls, punishments for dissenting speech, restriction on the internal policies of private companies and more.McCarthy Higher education wields enormous power over American life but is disproportionately the preserve of a single party and political outlook. DeSantis has a vision of greater representation, balance and intellectual diversity in Florida’s universities, and ultimately America’s. It’s an inspiring vision that shifts conflict from the culture, and all its private and public institutions, back to the realm of ideas. More ideological balance on campus means more of it in corporations, journalism and beyond.Stephens DeSantis minus the bombast could be an effective governor, never more so than when he defied conventional wisdom and required public schools to open up in the fall of 2020. But his pinched view of democracy — whether it comes to freedom of speech, abortion rights or the importance of supporting Ukraine in its struggle for survival — disqualifies him as someone I could think of supporting.Imagine you’re a G.O.P. operative or campaign manager. What’s your elevator pitch for a DeSantis candidacy?Brooks Many fast-growing states are run by Republicans — Texas, Georgia, Florida. Florida has passed New York in population, Miami is becoming a tech hub, times are good. We need a president who has a record of economic success, not someone a majority of Americans have already rejected.Coaston He’s like Donald Trump with a plan.Cottle He knows how to use theatrical jerkiness to own the libs without getting himself impeached.Douthat He turned Florida a deeper shade of red. He knows how to govern. And nobody else who can win is walking through that door. If you don’t get behind DeSantis, you might just as well get behind Trump.French He’s the only man who can unite every faction of the party. Anti-Trump or Trump-weary Republicans will vote for him despite their reservations, and he’s the only other candidate who can pry the populists from Trump’s grasp.Goldberg He’s still the leading Trump alternative, so if you don’t want an insurrectionist loser who’s fighting off felony charges, it’s time to coalesce.Gray DeSantis has shown that he can run a state that attracts hundreds of thousands of new residents while at the same time making the MAGA right feel good.Mangu-Ward DeSantis: He’s Trump, but also not Trump!McCarthy Ron DeSantis is sternly disciplined, strikes an irresistible contrast between his own youth (44) and vigor and Joe Biden’s age (80) and infirmity, and can serve two consecutive terms if elected. He’s primed to be the most transformative president since Franklin Roosevelt.Stephens To beat a creep takes an even bigger creep.Jane Coaston (@janecoaston) is a staff writer in Opinion.Michelle Cottle (@mcottle) is a member of the Times’s editorial board.Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) is a political reporter.David Brooks, Ross Douthat, David French, Michelle Goldberg and Bret Stephens are Times columnists.Katherine Mangu-Ward (@kmanguward) is the editor in chief of Reason magazine.Daniel McCarthy (@ToryAnarchist) is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Mr. DeSantis will make stops next week in the three early nominating states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.After his digital kickoff went haywire on Twitter on Wednesday night, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is going analog next week for a more traditional rollout of his presidential campaign.Mr. DeSantis will make stops in the three early nominating states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina from May 30 to June 2. The four-day swing through 12 cities and towns is being billed as the first leg of his “Great American Comeback Tour.” Mr. DeSantis will start with his first in-person event of the campaign in Des Moines, Iowa, on Tuesday. He will remain in Iowa on Wednesday, before traveling to New Hampshire on Thursday and South Carolina on Friday.“Our campaign is committed to putting in the time to win these early nominating states,” Generra Peck, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign manager, said in a statement.Campaigning in a presidential primary is, especially early on, usually a grip-and-grin affair. Mr. DeSantis’s decision to declare his candidacy on a livestream Twitter Spaces event with Elon Musk, the platform’s billionaire owner, came with the possibility of spectacular failure — which seemed to take place, at least for the first 25 minutes, when the event was plagued by technical glitches, causing dead air and an intermittently hot mic.Mr. DeSantis’s return to a more traditional form of electioneering will still be closely watched. He has had some awkward moments on the trail so far while meeting voters, leading to mockery from the front-runner for the Republican Party’s nomination, former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. DeSantis is expected to need a victory in Iowa and a close second-place finish in New Hampshire, at least, to show that he can challenge Mr. Trump.On Thursday night, Mr. DeSantis is scheduled to attend a reception with major donors at a hotel in Miami. The donors are helping Mr. DeSantis begin his fund-raising efforts. Despite the Twitter mishap, his campaign said it had raised more than $1 million online during its first hour on Wednesday night. More

At the final sundown before the first round of voting in the toughest election of his two-decade rule, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey visited Hagia Sophia for evening prayers — and to remind his voters of just what he had delivered.For nearly a millennium the domed cathedral had been the epicenter of Orthodox Christianity. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, it became one of the Islamic world’s finest mosques. In the 1930s, the new Turkish republic proclaimed it a museum, and for nearly a century its overlapping Christian and Muslim histories made it Turkey’s most visited cultural site.President Erdogan was not so ecumenical: In 2020 he converted it back into a mosque. When Turks return to the ballot box this Sunday for the presidential runoff, they will be voting in part on the political ideology behind that cultural metamorphosis.Join the crowds at the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque now, leaving your shoes at the new long racks in the inner narthex, and you can just about glimpse the mosaics of Christ and the Virgin, today discreetly sheathed with white curtains. The famous marble floor has been upholstered with thick turquoise carpet. The sound is more muffled. The light’s brighter, thanks to golden chandeliers. Right at the entrance, in a simple frame, is a presidential proclamation: a monumental swipe at the nation’s secular century, and an affirmation of a new Turkey worthy of its Ottoman heyday.“Hagia Sophia is the crowning of that neo-Ottomanist dream,” said Edhem Eldem, professor of history at Bogazici University in Istanbul. “It’s basically a transposition of political and ideological fights, debates, polemical views, into the realm of a very, very primitive understanding of history and the past.”In the 1930s, the new Turkish republic made Hagia Sophia, which, over the centuries, had been a cathedral and a mosque, into a museum. In 2020 President Erdogan made it a mosque again. Bradley Secker for The New York TimesBradley Secker for The New York TimesBradley Secker for The New York TimesIf the mark of 21st-century politics is the ascendancy of culture and identity over economics and class, it could be said to have been born here in Turkey, home to one of the longest-running culture wars of them all. And for the past 20 years, in grand monuments and on schlocky soap operas, at restored archaeological sites and retro new mosques, Mr. Erdogan has reoriented Turkey’s national culture, promoting a nostalgic revival of the Ottoman past — sometimes in grand style, sometimes as pure kitsch.After surviving a tight first round of voting earlier this month, he is now favored to win a runoff election on Sunday against Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the candidate of the joint opposition. His resiliency, when poll after poll predicted his defeat, certainly expresses his party’s systematic control of Turkey’s media and courts. (Freedom House, a democracy watchdog organization, downgraded Turkey from “partly free” to “not free” in 2018.) But authoritarianism is about so much more than ballots and bullets. Television and music, monuments and memorials have all been prime levers of a political project, a campaign of cultural ressentiment and national rebirth, that culminated this May on the blue-green carpets beneath Hagia Sophia’s dome.Some mosaics with Christian imagery are now discreetly covered by white curtains.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesOn the eve of the first round of voting President Erdogan visited Hagia Sophia for Maghrib prayers. Murat Cetinmuhurdar/PPO, via ReutersOutside Turkey, this cultural turn is often described as “Islamist,” and Mr. Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party, known as the A.K.P., have indeed permitted religious observances that were once banned, such as the wearing of head scarves by women in public institutions. A Museum of Islamic Civilizations, complete with a “digital dome” and light projections à la the immersive Van Gogh Experience, opened in 2022 in Istanbul’s new largest mosque.Yet this election suggests that nationalism, rather than religion, may be the true driver of Mr. Erdogan’s cultural revolution. His celebrations of the Ottoman past — and the resentment of its supposed haters, whether in the West or at home — have gone hand in hand with nationalist efforts unrelated to Islam. The country has mounted aggressive campaigns for the return of Greco-Roman antiquities from Western museums. Foreign archaeological teams have had their permits withdrawn. Turkey stands at the bleak vanguard of a tendency seen all over now, not least in the United States: a cultural politics of perpetual grievance, where even in victory you are indignant.For this country’s writers, artists, scholars and singers, facing censorship or worse, the prospect of a change in government was less a matter of political preference than of practical survival. Since 2013, when an Occupy-style protest movement at Istanbul’s Gezi Park took direct aim at his government, Mr. Erdogan has taken a hard turn to authoritarian rule. Numerous cultural figures remain imprisoned, including the architect Mucella Yapici, the filmmakers Mine Ozerden and Cigdem Mater, and the arts philanthropist Osman Kavala. Writers like Can Dundar and Asli Erdogan (no relation), who were jailed during the purges that followed a failed military coup against Mr. Erdogan in 2016, live in exile in Germany.This election suggests that nationalism, rather than religion, may be the true driver of Mr. Erdogan’s cultural revolution. Bradley Secker for The New York TimesMore than a dozen musical concerts were canceled last year, among them a recital by the violinist Ara Malikian, who is of Armenian descent, and a gig by the pop-folk singer Aynur Dogan, who is Kurdish. The tensions reached a grim crescendo this month, shortly before the first round of voting, when a Kurdish singer was stabbed to death at a ferry terminal after declining to sing a Turkish nationalist song.In the days after the first round of voting, I met with Banu Cennetoglu, one of the country’s most acclaimed artists, whose commemoration of a Kurdish journalist at the 2017 edition of the contemporary art exhibition Documenta won acclaim abroad but brought aggravation at home. “What is scary right now compared to the 90s, which was also a very difficult time, especially for the Kurdish community, is that then we could guess where the evil was coming from,” she told me. “And now it could be anyone. It is much more random.”For the Turkish artist Banu Cennetoglu, Istanbul has become a city of self-censorship. “But even if you don’t speak,” she says, “you can be the next one.”Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesThe strategy has worked. Independent media has shrunk. Self-censorship is rife. “All the institutions within art and culture have been extremely silent for five years,” Ms. Cennetoglu said. “And for me this is unacceptable, as an artist. This is my question: when do we activate the red line? When do we say no, and why?”Nationalism is nothing new in Turkey. “Everybody and his uncle is a nationalist in this country,” Mr. Eldem observed. And the Kemalists — the secular elite who dominated politics here for decades until Mr. Erdogan’s triumph in 2003 — also used nationalist themes to spin culture to their political ends. Turkey’s early cinema glorified the achievements of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Archaeological digs for Hittite antiquities aimed to provide the new republic with a past rooted even more deeply than Greece and Italy.Edhem Eldem at his home in Istanbul. “When it comes to heritage, the uses of the past, he’s not very different from his predecessors,” the historian says. “He’s just more efficient.”Bradley Secker for The New York TimesIn the 2000s, Mr. Erdogan’s blend of Islamism and reformism had Turkey knocking at the door of the European Union. A new Istanbul was being feted in the foreign press. But the new Turkish nationalism has a different cultural cast: proudly Islamic, often antagonistic, and sometimes a little paranoid.One of the signal cultural institutions of the Erdogan years is the Panorama 1453 History Museum, in a working-class district west of Hagia Sophia, where schoolchildren discover the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in a painted cyclorama. At one point, a painting in the round might have been immersion enough. Now it’s been souped up with blaring video projections, a wildly nationalist pageant styled like the video game “Civilization.” Kids can watch Sultan Mehmed II charge toward Hagia Sophia, while his horse rears up in front of a celestial fireball.Visitors to Panorama 1453, a history museum founded in 2009, whose 360-degree mural celebrates the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesAn immersive video animation depicts the Ottoman victory over the Byzantine Empire.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesSultan Mehmed II rears for battle.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesThere’s a similar backward projection in Turkey’s television dramas, which are hugely popular not just here but internationally, with hundreds of millions of viewers throughout the Muslim world, in Germany, in Mexico, all over. On shows such as “Resurrection: Ertugrul,” an international hit about a 13th-century Turkic chieftain, or “Kurulus: Osman,” a “Game of Thrones”-esque Ottoman saga airing every Wednesday here, past and present start to merge.“They are casting the discourse of Tayyip Erdogan in the antique ages,” said Ayse Cavdar, a cultural anthropologist who’s studied these shows. “If Erdogan faces a struggle right now, it is recast in an Ottoman context, a fictional context. In this way, not the knowledge about today’s struggle, but the feeling of it, is spread through society.”A still from “Kurulus: Osman,” starring Burak Ozcivit as Osman I, the first sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Turkish historical dramas are popular not just at home but abroad.ATVIn these half-historical soap operas, the heroes are decisive, brave, glorious, but the polities they lead are fragile, teetering, menaced by outsiders. Ms. Cavdar noted how frequently the TV shows feature leaders of an emerging, endangered state. “As if this guy has not been governing the state for 20 years!” she said.Culture came on the agenda during the runoff, too, as Mr. Erdogan showed up to inaugurate the new home of Istanbul Modern. The president had praise for the new Bosporus-side museum, designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano — but he couldn’t help bashing the creations of the previous century, with what he described as a misguided abandonment of the Ottoman tradition.Now, the president promised, an authentic “Turkish century” was about to dawn.Assuming he wins on Sunday, his neo-Ottomanism will have survived its strongest test in two decades. The cultural figures with the most to regret are of course those in prison, but it will also be a bitter outcome for the academics, authors and others who left the country in the wake of Mr. Erdogan’s purges. “A.K.P.’s social engineering can be compared to monoculture in industrial agriculture,” said Asli Cavusoglu, a young artist who recently had a solo show at New York’s New Museum. “There is one type of vegetable they invest in. Other plants — intellectuals, artists — are unable to grow, and that’s why they leave.”Back issues of Agos, the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper edited by Hrant Dink, a journalist assassinated in Istanbul in 2007. His home has been converted into a memorial museum.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesNayat Karakose, coordinator of the museum, in Hrant Dink’s office. “In the past we were able to cooperate more with universities, but now it’s almost impossible,” she said.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesTurkey’s minorities may face the greatest hazards. At the memorial museum for Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist assassinated in 2007, I looked through copies of his independent newspaper and watched footage of his television chat shows, each an admonishment of contemporary Turkey’s constricted freedom of expression. “Civil society actors are becoming more prudent,” said Nayat Karakose, who oversees the museum and is of Armenian descent. “They do events in a more cautious way.”For Mr. Eldem, who has spent his career studying Ottoman history, the reconversion of Hagia Sophia and the “Tudors”-style TV dramas are all of a piece, and are less confident than they seem. “Nationalism is not just glorification,” he said. “It’s also victimization. You can’t have proper nationalism if you’ve never suffered. Because suffering gives you also absolution from potential misconduct.”“So what the naïve Turkish nationalist, and especially neo-Ottomanist nationalist, wants,” he added, “is to bring together the idea of a glorious empire that would have been benign. That’s not a thing. An empire is an empire.”But whether or not Mr. Erdogan wins the election on Sunday, there are headwinds that no amount of cultural nationalism can stand against: above all, inflation and a currency crisis that has bankers and financial analysts flashing a red alert. “In that future, there’s no place for heritage,” Mr. Eldem said. “The Ottomans are not going to save you.”Hagia Sophia has been the epicenter of Orthodox Christianity, one of the Islamic world’s finest mosques and, for decades, a museum that was Turkey’s most visited cultural site. Now it is called the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque.Bradley Secker for The New York Times More

Robert Zeidman was not planning on making the trek to Sioux Falls, South Dakota in August 2021 for a “cyber symposium” hosted by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who was pledging to unveil hard data that showed China had interfered with the 2020 election.Zeidman, a 63-year-old consultant cyber forensics expert who goes to the shows in Las Vegas with his wife and plays poker in his spare time, voted twice for Trump because he did not like the alternative candidates. He thinks there was some fraud in the 2020 election, though not enough to overturn the result. And he believed it was possible that Lindell could have discovered evidence voting machines were hacked in 2020. He was curious to see Lindell’s evidence, and a bit skeptical, so he thought he would follow along online.But Lindell – one of the most prolific spreaders of election misinformation – was pledging $5m to anyone who could prove the information was not valid data from the 2020 election, and Zeidman’s friends encouraged him to go.Zeidman decided to hop on a plane from his home in Vegas, figuring he would meet a lot of interesting people and be there for a historic moment.“I still had my doubts about whether they had the data,” he said in an interview on Monday. “But I thought it would be a question of experts disagreeing or maybe agreeing about what the data meant.“I didn’t think it would be blatantly bogus data, which is what I found.”An arbitration panel ruled in Zeidman’s favor last month ordering Lindell’s LLC to pay, within 30 days, the $5m he pledged to anyone who could disprove his data. Lindell has refused to pay since the arbitration ruling on 19 April, and Zeidman filed a suit in federal court in Minnesota last week requesting enforcement of the arbitration ruling. If the judge sides with him it would allow Zeidman to collect the money.Zeidman’s filing came after Lindell filed his own court papers last week in state court seeking to vacate the arbitration panel’s ruling (the filing said a rationale for doing so would be forthcoming). He said in an interview that the arbitrators were biased against him. But Brian Glasser, one of Zeidman’s attorneys, noted that Lindell and Zeidman’s legal team had each picked one of the arbitrators on the panel, and those two had picked the third, whom Lindell agreed to. Federal law only allows a federal court to vacate an arbitration decision where the result was produced by corruption, fraud, or in an instance where the arbitrators exceeded their powers.Lindell won’t have to immediately pay while the cases are pending in court. Glasser, Zeidman’s attorney, predicted it would be resolved quickly and was certain Lindell would lose.“There are no circumstances under which he will prevail on his chance to overturn it,” he said.The suit is one of several Lindell faces after the 2020 election. He also faces defamation suits from two different voting equipment companies, Dominion and Smartmatic, as well as a separate case from Eric Coomer, a former Dominion employee. The suits against Lindell, as well as litigation against conservative news networks like Fox, Newsmax, and OAN have become understood as efforts to hold those who spread misinformation about the election accountable for their lies. Dominion reached a landmark $787.5m settlement in a defamation case against Fox earlier this year.“People who attempt to destroy our democracy and put up $5m in support of their effort should pay it when they’re obligated to,” Glasser said.It wasn’t long after Zeidman signed the contest rules on 10 August and began to study the data that he began to see that it didn’t prove anything about election fraud in the 2020 election. In fact, the 11 files Lindell’s team handed over didn’t really say anything at all.There was a silent video of someone using a debugging tool without any explanation. There was a file of binary data – ones and zeroes – without any explanation of how to extract any meaningful data from it. “Very suspicious,” Zeidman said. There was also another text file provided to Zeidman that he managed to convert and see was gibberish.“It was perfectly formatted in a word document. It was almost as if someone had typed into a word document just random characters,” he said. “Like somebody had either typed it, or more likely designed a tiny little program to write into a word document thousands of pages.”Eventually, he wrote up a 15-page report concluding the files Lindell provided “unequivocally does not contain packet data of any kind and do not contain any information related to the November 2020 election”. The three-judge panel Lindell picked to judge the contest ultimately determined that Zeidman had not won. Zeidman, believing that he was entitled to the prize, sought a ruling from an arbitration panel. The panel issued its decision in his favor a little over a month ago.“Mr Zeidman performed under the contract. He proved the data Lindell LLC provided, and represented reflected information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data. Failure to pay Mr Zeidman the $5m prized was a breach of the contract, entitling him to recover,” the the three arbitrators wrote.Lindell said in a telephone interview that the panel’s ruling was wrong, and said he was taking legal action to vacate the arbitration panel’s ruling. He said his data was “solid as a rock”.“Whatever they did, it’s the wrong decision, and it’s going to come out in court,” he said.Zeidman “has a strong moral code” and said this is not the first time he has taken something to arbitration to prove a point.And while he conceded it would be nice to have $5m, he said he’s not doing it for the money. “I needed to win the arbitration to get some independent confirmation that I had disproved Lindell’s data,” he said.He plans to donate some of the money to non-profits that he put off giving to last year because of expenses, including those incurred because of the legal case. And he plans to donate some of the money to a “legitimate” organization reviewing voter integrity, he said.“When I first met Lindell, I thought he was eccentric but had his heart in the right place and trying to do the right thing,” he added. “As I went on, I found no rational person would believe what he’s saying. I think he’s not rational.” More

Ron DeSantis’s long-awaited entry into the presidential race showed some potential strengths as a Republican candidate, after an embarrassing start on Twitter.Gov. Ron DeSantis’s glitch-marred 2024 debut on Twitter was a distraction from his chance to introduce himself as a serious contender to take down former President Donald J. Trump.It was a much-anticipated moment for the Florida governor to reset after months of dropping in the polls, which made the painfully long 20-plus minutes of Twitter malfunctions on Wednesday all the more disappointing to his supporters.For all the media attention on the Twitter fiasco — The Daily Mail called it a “De-Saster,” Fox News a “disaster,” Breitbart News a “DeBacle” — Mr. DeSantis appeared to have later found his footing on the familiar airwaves of Fox News, a far more traditional — and effective — method of communicating to primary voters. His appearance there was the first time he laid out a substantive case for what a DeSantis presidency would look like.Still, it was a night his team will be eager to put behind them. And it highlighted both Mr. DeSantis’s potential successes as a candidate but also a campaign still in formation while under intense attack from a dominant Republican front-runner.Here are five takeaways.Taking risks on Twitter backfiredThe delay was longer than some campaign speeches.For more than 25 minutes, Twitter wheezed its way through what was supposed to be Mr. DeSantis’s grand pronouncement of his 2024 candidacy, with long stretches of dead air interrupted by frantic, hot-mic whispers before they pulled the plug and started over.The Twitter event with Mr. DeSantis was marred with technical problems.A presidential announcement is the rarest of opportunities. It is the moment when a candidate can draw all the attention on themselves and their vision. Instead, Mr. DeSantis wound up almost as a panelist at his own event, sharing the stage with Elon Musk and his malfunctioning social media site.Fox News splashed a banner headline at one point on its website that featured a photo of Mr. Musk, not Mr. DeSantis. “Want to actually see and hear Ron DeSantis?” read a breaking news alert on the site. “Tune into Fox News.”Even in advance, the decision to begin his campaign on Twitter with Mr. Musk had drawn mixed reviews. It was innovative, yes — and a chance to reach a potentially huge online audience — but also risky.The technically challenged result obscured some of Mr. DeSantis’s arguments and sapped him of listeners, and potential donors. For a candidate whose promise of competence is a Republican selling point, it was a less-than-ideal first impression. Mr. Trump and President Biden both mercilessly mocked the rollout.His aides said Mr. DeSantis raised $1 million in an hour, a sizable amount but far from the record for a presidential kickoff, with no details provided about how many individual donors gave small contributions.Mr. Biden’s campaign was also seeking to capitalize, buying Google ads to show Biden donation pages for those searching for terms like “DeSantis disaster” and “DeSantis flop.”The candidate of educated right-wingersThe DeSantis-Musk discussion on Twitter meandered at times into a cul-de-sac of the hyper-online right.Here’s a taste of the highly ideological and wonky message Mr. DeSantis delivered:“Some of the problems with the university and the ideological capture — that didn’t happen by accident, you can trace back all the way to the accreditation cartels. Well, guess what? To become an accreditor, how do you do that? You’ve got to get approved by the U.S. Department of Education. So we’re going to be doing alternative accreditation regimes, where instead of saying, ‘You will only get accredited if you do D.E.I.,’ you’ll have an accreditor that will say, ‘We will not accredit you if you do D.E.I. We want a colorblind, merit-based accreditation scheme.’”Got that?Mr. DeSantis repeatedly highlighted his blue-collar roots. But it has long been apparent that Mr. DeSantis polls far better with college-educated Republicans than he does among those without college degrees, who heavily favor Mr. Trump and form the increasingly rural base of the Republican Party. And his campaign introduction night showed why that’s the case.The conversation detoured into complaints about the horrors of The Atlantic and Vanity Fair magazines and into discussions of cryptocurrencies and the “de-banking” of “politically incorrect businesses.”Later, in his interview with Trey Gowdy on Fox News, Mr. DeSantis rattled off acronyms — E.S.G. (environmental, social and governance investing) was just one — without explaining what they meant.DeSantis is ready to hit Trump — only indirectlyMr. DeSantis made clear on Wednesday that he isn’t ready to punch Mr. Trump just yet — but he signaled where he will aim once he does.He went through the Twitter Spaces session and two interviews — one on Fox News with Mr. Gowdy, his former congressional colleague, and the other on the radio with the conservative host Mark Levin — without uttering Mr. Trump’s name. (The word did come out of his mouth at one point: “Merit must trump identity politics,” the governor said during the Twitter talk.)But his attempts to contrast himself with the nameless one were frequent.Mr. DeSantis said on Fox News that the reason Mr. Biden could get away with “shenanigans” at the southern border was because there was not a wall protecting it. Mr. DeSantis promised to build a “full” border wall — a rebuke of Mr. Trump’s failure to keep that signature promise.Mr. DeSantis also previewed a line of attack he is expected to center his campaign on: Mr. Trump’s personnel appointments in his first term.Mr. DeSantis blamed the Federal Reserve — Jerome H. Powell was appointed the Fed’s chair by Mr. Trump — for exacerbating inflation. And he said he would fire the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, another Trump appointee, on Day 1. (A Trump senior adviser noted on Twitter that Mr. DeSantis publicly supported the selection of Mr. Wray at the time.)Mr. DeSantis took his sharpest jab at Mr. Trump in the final moments with Mr. Gowdy, who asked him what he would say to candidates who may not want to debate. It was a clear reference to Mr. Trump, who has indicated he may skip one or both of the first Republican debates. Mr. DeSantis, who needs the debates in order to have breakout moments, called for people to take part.“Nobody’s entitled to anything in this world, Trey, you’ve got to earn it,” Mr. DeSantis said. “That’s exactly what I intend to do, and I think the debates are a big part of the process.”DeSantis made his case as a China hawkMr. DeSantis previewed his hard-line policies to confront the Chinese Communist Party. While Mr. Trump focused largely on the trade dimension of the relationship during his presidency, Mr. DeSantis talked more broadly about countering China’s influence, territorial expansion and military ambitions.On Fox News, Mr. DeSantis called for a 21st-century version of the Monroe Doctrine to counter China’s influence in Latin America. The Monroe Doctrine, laid out by President James Monroe in the early 19th century, warned European countries not to colonize America’s backyard.Mr. DeSantis also said the U.S. needed to form stronger partnerships with India, Australia and other allies to counter Chinese expansion in the Pacific. And he called for the reshoring of critical manufacturing — saying the U.S. was too closely mingled, economically, with China.His remarks indicated that as president, Mr. DeSantis would be more comprehensively aggressive against China than Mr. Trump was in his first term. Mr. Trump spent the first three years of his presidency mostly averting his gaze from China’s military expansionism and human-rights abuses because he wanted a trade deal with Beijing. Mr. DeSantis has signaled he wants to confront China from the outset on all fronts.DeSantis plans broad use of executive powerMr. DeSantis laid the groundwork for what his allies say will be one of his most important contrasts against Mr. Trump: his skill in using power effectively.In his Twitter Spaces live chat, Mr. DeSantis talked about his extensive record of enacting conservative policies as governor in Florida. He cited his talent for using governmental power for conservative ends. He said he had studied the “different leverage points under Article 2” of the Constitution and would put that knowledge to work if elected president. On Fox News, he repeated his plans to use Article 2 to remake the government.Mr. DeSantis hinted that he would be more heavy-handed than Mr. Trump was with the federal bureaucracy. It is part of one of his core arguments: that not only will he fight harder than Mr. Trump but that he’ll deliver sweeping change where the former president fell short.In his interview on Fox News, he portrayed the F.B.I. as one of many federal agencies run amok, and said he would exert much stronger control over the entire Justice Department.He rejected the notion that presidents should view these agencies as independent and said if, as president, he learned that F.B.I. officials were colluding with tech companies — a reference to requests by government officials to Twitter to take down content viewed as harmful — then “everybody involved with that would be fired.” More

Former President Donald J. Trump called it a “disaster,” President Biden’s campaign took a sly shot to raise a little extra cash, and low-polling Republicans tried to use Gov. Ron DeSantis’s glitchy, delayed campaign rollout to steal some attention for themselves.As technical difficulties derailed Mr. DeSantis’s attempt to make a splash by appearing in a Twitter livestream with the platform’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, much of the internet couldn’t resist poking fun — including the two leading presidential candidates and other trailing wannabes.The mix of 26 minutes of mostly dead air, followed by an intermittent celebration of Mr. Musk, made the livestream feel “a bit like an ad for Twitter,” Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump administration official who has turned sharply against Mr. Trump, wrote on Twitter. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, a Trump ally, called his governor “DeSedative.”But perhaps nobody enjoyed the stumbling start to Mr. DeSantis’s presidential bid more than his current and potentially future rivals.Mr. Trump — still shunning Twitter in favor of his Truth Social platform — called the DeSantis announcement a “catastrophe.” “His whole campaign will be a disaster,” he added. “WATCH!”On Instagram, Mr. Trump posted a satirical video of a fake Twitter Spaces event that included Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Musk, the liberal philanthropist George Soros, former Vice President Dick Cheney, the Devil and Adolf Hitler, among others. Not surprisingly, Mr. Biden’s campaign took a more understated approach: “This link works” it wrote, pointing to a site where supporters could make donations.Mr. DeSantis received support from some corners of the right-wing media universe. Ben Shapiro, the podcast host with more than five million Twitter followers, suggested the technical meltdowns were a distraction from what Mr. DeSantis was trying to say.“If you’re obsessed with the optics of the Twitter Spaces glitch, then you’re probably not going to vote DeSantis,” Mr. Shapiro wrote. “If you’re interested in political substance, DeSantis is likely your candidate.”And some of the other attention-starved, low-polling Republican White House hopefuls tried snagging some of the rubbernecking attention for themselves.Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas took a similar approach to Mr. Biden, writing — on Twitter, of course — “Just like my policies, this link works,” with a link to his donations page. And Vivek Ramaswamy accused Mr. DeSantis of sitting for softball interviews and what sounded like reading prepared remarks.“Challenge to the GOP field,” Mr. Ramaswamy wrote on Twitter. “No pre-written speeches. No teleprompters. No pre-scripted interviews. That’ll be good for authenticity, good for America. I promise to abide.” More

Ron DeSantis’s long-awaited official entry into the 2024 presidential campaign went haywire at its start on Wednesday during a glitch-filled livestream over Twitter.Despite the problems, Mr. DeSantis, the combative 44-year-old Republican governor of Florida who has championed conservative causes and thrown a yearslong flurry of punches at America’s left, provides Donald J. Trump the most formidable Republican rival he has faced since his ascent in 2016. His candidacy comes at a pivotal moment for the Republican Party, which must choose between aligning once more behind Mr. Trump — who lost in 2020 and continues to rage falsely about a stolen election — or uniting around a new challenger to take on President Biden.But on Wednesday, Mr. DeSantis’s official run for the White House got off to an embarrassing start as the planned livestream with Twitter’s eccentric billionaire owner, Elon Musk, was marred by technical problems and dead air. The audio cut in and out amid talk of “melting the servers,” hot mic whispering and on-the-spot troubleshooting.When, after more than 25 minutes, Mr. DeSantis finally spoke, he declared, “I am running for president of the United States to lead our great American comeback.”The extended social media hiccup — as more than 500,000 people were waiting — was gleefully cheered on the very platform Mr. DeSantis was supposed to be commandeering for his campaign. Donald Trump Jr. wrote a single word: “#DeSaster.” Mr. Biden posted a donation button to his re-election campaign with the words, “This link works.” The audience when Mr. DeSantis did deliver his remarks was smaller than it had been during the initial minutes when no one was speaking.Despite his inauspicious start on Wednesday and having slipped well behind Mr. Trump in polls in recent months, Mr. DeSantis retains a host of strengths: a mountain of cash, a robust campaign operation and a series of conservative policy victories in Florida after a landslide re-election triumph last fall. The governor, who rose to national prominence with his restriction-averse handling of the coronavirus pandemic, argues that his “Florida Blueprint” can be a model for reshaping the United States in a starkly conservative mold, especially on social issues.“American decline is not inevitable,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It is a choice. And we should choose a new direction, a path that will lead to American revitalization.” He accused Mr. Biden of taking “his cues from the woke mob.”Mr. DeSantis did not mention Mr. Trump by name. But he did sketch out some of the contrasts he is expected to sharpen in the coming months. “We must look forward, not backwards,” he said on the Twitter Space livestream. “We need the courage to lead and we must have the strength to win.”The DeSantis campaign had invited prominent donors to Miami on Wednesday for a fund-raising event, hosting them at a conference space at the Four Seasons as the Twitter discussion was projected onto a large screen. Then they waited. And waited.“Elon’s got to staff up a little more to boost that server capacity,” said Brandon Rosner, a donor from Milwaukee. He was not discouraged. “Once we got through the original glitch there, I think people were very excited,” he said.Mr. DeSantis is confronting the daunting endeavor of toppling a former president whose belligerence and loyal base of support have discouraged most leading Republicans from making frontal attacks against him. Mr. Trump, who has a mounting list of legal troubles, clearly sees Mr. DeSantis as a political threat and has unloaded on him for months, mocking him as “Ron DeSanctimonious” and slamming his stewardship of Florida.“Trump is not as invincible as he once seemed and DeSantis is a serious contender,” said Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican strategist. “There are Republican voters looking for someone who can move beyond Trump, someone who can fight the liberals but also win elections. That’s the space DeSantis is trying to inhabit.”Mr. DeSantis’s chances of capturing the nomination may depend on whether the Republican primary becomes a crowded, Trump-dominated food fight — something similar to what unfolded in 2016 — or if he can turn the contest into a two-man race. The Republican field has slowly ballooned, with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina announcing a bid this week and Vice President Mike Pence expected to join soon.To winnow the field back down, Mr. DeSantis is likely to need strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two nominating states, with anti-Trump voters coalescing around him. His advisers and allies see a victory in socially conservative Iowa as a must, and believe he needs to follow with at least a close second-place finish in more moderate New Hampshire.Mr. DeSantis has the financial ammunition to compete: He is likely to start with more money in an outside group than any Republican primary candidate in history. He has more than $80 million expected to be transferred from his state account to his super PAC, which says it has also raised $40 million, in addition to having tens of millions more in donor commitments, according to people familiar with the fund-raising.A key focus of the primary, and the general election should Mr. DeSantis make it that far, will be his record as governor. He and a pliant Florida Legislature have passed contentious laws that have excited the right and angered many Democrats, including Black and L.G.B.T.Q. people, students and abortion-rights supporters in Florida. The bills seem to reflect Mr. DeSantis’s plan to run to the right of Mr. Trump in the primary, which could leave him vulnerable with moderates and independents.In the most recent legislative session alone, Florida Republicans banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy; expanded the use of the death penalty; allowed Floridians to carry concealed guns without a permit; restricted gender-transition care for minors; limited teaching about gender identity and sexual orientation; defunded diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public colleges; and shielded records of his own scrutinized travel from the public.Mr. DeSantis has also shown a willingness to use executive power in ways little seen before in Tallahassee, the state capital, leading some Democrats and civil rights leaders to worry that he shares Mr. Trump’s strongman style but has a greater ability to carry out that vision.He has picked a long-running fight with Disney, one of Florida’s largest employers and a canny political adversary. He removed a local prosecutor from office in what records show was a decision motivated by politics, installed his allies at a public liberal arts university in a bid to transform it into a bastion of conservative thought, said he would reject a high school Advanced Placement course on African American studies for “indoctrinating” students and had state law enforcement officers monitor holiday drag shows for lewd behavior.While his stump speech focuses on a lengthy recounting of those and other conservative policy achievements, Mr. DeSantis is expected to start talking more about his biography, with help from his wife, Casey DeSantis, a former television journalist who plays an influential role in his office and decision-making.Raised in Dunedin, a suburb of Tampa, Mr. DeSantis grew up in a working-class home. He excelled at baseball, captaining the squad at Yale University as a hard-hitting outfielder.He later enrolled at Harvard Law School, then served in the Navy as a military lawyer, deploying to Guantánamo Bay and Iraq. He worked as a federal prosecutor in Florida before winning election to Congress in 2012. He was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of anti-establishment conservatives.After three terms in Washington, he ran for Florida’s open governorship, winning the Republican primary largely thanks to an endorsement from Mr. Trump. But they fell out when Mr. DeSantis began making noises about running for president in 2024.The pandemic turned Mr. DeSantis into a Fox News fixture. He has criticized social distancing measures, masks and vaccines — tools fitfully employed by the Trump administration — and has already hinted that he will contrast his actions in Florida with Mr. Trump’s approach. In particular, Mr. DeSantis has gone after Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who led the nation’s pandemic response.But the step-up from a statewide campaign, even one as successful as Mr. DeSantis’s nearly 20-percentage-point romp, to a presidential campaign is not easy. As the initial Twitter Space floundered on Wednesday, Mr. Musk was forced to post a new link, severely reducing the audience for Mr. DeSantis’s announcement.While more than 500,000 people tuned in to the first Twitter Space, the second one had only 163,000 listeners by the time Mr. Musk and the technology entrepreneur David Sacks began interviewing the governor. The conversation quickly turned into a surprisingly dry discussion about the overreach of federal agencies, the merits of Twitter and occasionally bizarre tangents like the license plate number of Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis and joined the online conversation.Mr. DeSantis’s campaign tried to put a positive spin on the technical mishaps, writing on Twitter: “It seems we broke the internet with so much excitement.” An aide announced they had raised $1 million in an hour. All the while, Mr. Trump’s team rejoiced. “This is criminal for a campaign,” said Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser to the former president.Mr. DeSantis had waited months to declare his candidacy, citing a need for Florida’s Legislature to first complete its session in early May. The delay allowed Mr. Trump to test out attacks on Mr. DeSantis and secure the endorsement of numerous members of Congress, including several from Florida.As Mr. DeSantis ramped up his presidential preparations this year with a book tour and a trip abroad, he has seemed to struggle at points.Awkward moments — including cringeworthy facial expressions — generated negative headlines. So did some poorly calculated policy pronouncements, particularly his declaration that defending Ukraine from the Russian invasion was not a vital U.S. interest. Some major donors who once saw him as the most suitable Trump challenger backed away.At the heart of the criticism is the perception that Mr. DeSantis, a supreme believer in his own abilities, can seem aloof and quick to anger. Even his allies acknowledge he is not the backslapping, baby-kissing type — concerns he has tried to address by spending more time greeting voters and taking selfies.“He is an introvert in an extrovert’s job,” said Alex Andrade, a Republican state representative from the Florida Panhandle who says he admires the governor’s reserved and analytical approach.In recent weeks, Mr. DeSantis has seemed to recover from his wobbles, hitting back with more force against Mr. Trump. He has criticized the former president for not endorsing Florida’s six-week abortion ban and has described a “culture of losing” overtaking the Republican Party under Mr. Trump. He also told donors in a private call that Mr. Trump could not beat Mr. Biden.In the Twitter event, Mr. DeSantis took some sideswipes at the former president, a onetime reality television star, at one point saying, “Government is not entertainment. It’s not about building a brand or virtue-signaling.”As they wrapped up the hourlong conversation, which meandered from Article 2 of the Constitution to Bitcoin, Mr. DeSantis said, “We should do it again. I mean, I think it was fun.”Mr. Sacks concurred. “It’s not how you start,” he added, “it’s how you finish.”Jonathan Swan More