As the old saying goes, there is no such thing as bad publicity, and Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis says despite the delay in his Twitter Spaces campaign launch, he would not "trade" it for a speech.
It did, after all, create historic, headline-grabbing buzz.
"I would not have traded doing a speech," DeSantis told Newsmax's "Eric Bolling The Balance" on Thursday night. "I think that this has been something that a lot of people are talking about, and I think it's something as we go forward we need to be able to speak directly to people, and that's what we did."
It is true DeSantis was major news worldwide, something even Twitter CEO Elon Musk acknowledged in a tweet despite the embarrassment of the event crashing for over 21 minutes before having to switch to another Twitter Spaces location.
"Because Elon was involved, Twitter was involved, we got way more play about it than we would have if I would have just given a speech," DeSantis said, as his campaign was pitching the delayed launch as the popularity of his campaign "broke the Internet" and saying "Washington is next."
"They were very confident they had the ability to get a lot of people, and they were anticipating a lot of people, but there were more people that were trying to sign up than even what Twitter had anticipated," DeSantis told host Eric Bolling.
"I was just in a room in Florida, so I didn't really know necessarily what was going on. I think it had to do with Elon's account. They called an audible and then they were able to get it done."
There were reports Fox News and Fox Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch was frustrated losing the broadcast spectacle of the popular Florida governor's campaign launch.
DeSantis heard the reports but said he had not heard from Murdoch. However, he added that Twitter is becoming a destination for conservatives after years of having banned, censored, and throttled down dissent against liberal ideology for years.
"Given what Elon and Twitter represent to conservatives, given how we've been censored," DeSantis said was his line of reasoning for why he chose to accept Musk's Twitter Spaces invite to launch his campaign.
"So the fact that Elon has bought that and opened it up, that's been really significant, because you can't have a society in which government's colluding with these massive companies to try to stifle dissent," DeSantis added.
Despite the love for social media's influence in modern politics, and Twitter's now-more welcoming environment for conservatives, DeSantis admitted he still is a traditionalist in getting his message out through television.
"I'm actually not a big social media guy; I would rather watch you than be on some app, but it is important to a lot of people," he concluded.
"But then the free speech component" inspired him to use Twitter Spaces, he said, adding, "and really this is an example of conservatives having a voice again and fighting back against the entrenched legacy media."