Ron DeSantis faces battle against Trump for Republican nomination after Twitter launch descends into farce – live

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Not to be outdone by Joe Biden’s social media team, Donald Trump posted on his Instagram account a parody of DeSantis’s Twitter Spaces campaign launch yesterday – featuring the Florida governor alongside the devil, Adolf Hitler and rightwing conspiracy world fixations George Soros and Klaus Schwab.

It nonetheless manages to be kind of funny:

DeSantis roasted for Twitter breakdown — which few heard

Say what you will about the botched Twitter Spaces launch of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, it certainly made for some great zingers. One of the best came from the surprisingly feisty Twitter account of Joe Biden, which seized on the glitches to direct supporters to his fundraising page:

Later that evening, they used the botched launch and DeSantis’s previous statements to produce a video mocking the Florida governor:

DeSantis paid a price for Twitter’s breakdown. According to CNN, there were few actual listeners left when the Spaces event finally got under way:

After battling Twitter glitches, DeSantis's next fight is with Donald Trump

Good morning, US politics blog readers. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign kickoff descended into farce on Wednesday evening, after the Florida governor opted to make the bid official with an announcement on Twitter’s Spaces audio streaming feature. But there’s a reason White House aspirants usually unveil such things in speeches to cheering crowds, rather than with appearances on social networks known lately for their unreliability: the former are much harder to mess up. And that’s exactly what happened on Twitter, with DeSantis silenced for minutes while the website’s employees could be heard trying to fix whatever was wrong with Spaces, before they restarted the event and many listeners went elsewhere. So we can say his campaign launch didn’t go well, and the Twitter debacle will be fodder for talk shows and rival candidates for weeks, if not months, to come. DeSantis’s ultimate objective nonetheless remains the same: He still needs to close the big gap in Republican voter support between him and Donald Trump if he ever wants to appear on the same ballot as Joe Biden.

Here’s what else is going on today:

• Debt ceiling negotiations are ongoing in between Republicans in the House of Representatives and the White House. The first days of June remain the estimated deadline for a deal to be reached to avoid a catastrophic default. There’s been no breakthrough yet, but we’ll let you know if one is at hand.

• Today is the third anniversary of George Floyd’s death, and Biden has issued a statement asking Americans to “build on the progress we have made thus far and recommit to the work we must continue to do every day to change hearts and minds as well as laws and policies.”

• White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief reporters at 1pm eastern time.