Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida plunged into his first full day of presidential campaigning on Thursday after his sputtering Twitter rollout the night before, holding a series of interviews with friendly conservative commentators and announcing a series of in-person events in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina next week.
For Mr. DeSantis, the immediate challenge appeared to be moving past the rough kickoff and appealing to a mainstream Republican audience, after a Twitter discussion with the billionaire Elon Musk that often strayed into online right-wing grievances and away from the issues voters say they care about most, like the economy.
In part, the governor sought to do so by turning attention back to his brewing clash with former President Donald J. Trump, whose devoted supporters are one of the biggest hurdles to Mr. DeSantis’s candidacy. As he began his media blitz, Mr. DeSantis took a series of jabs at Mr. Trump, noting how frequently the former president attacked him.
“I think a lot of what he’s doing is showing everybody that he understands that I’ve got a good chance to beat him, because he doesn’t criticize anybody else now,” Mr. DeSantis told a New Hampshire radio station. “It’s only me.”
Mr. Trump’s team “wouldn’t do that if they didn’t think that I had a chance,” added Mr. DeSantis, who argued that he had a better chance of winning independent voters.
The governor had avoided mentioning Mr. Trump during his rollout on Wednesday, a delayed livestream Twitter Spaces event with Mr. Musk, the platform’s owner, that was plagued by technical glitches, causing dead air and an intermittently hot mic.
One of the people listening to the Twitter announcement was Mr. Trump himself — at least for a while.
“I tried for the first half-hour,” Mr. Trump said in an interview as he moved toward the seventh tee on his golf course outside Washington. “After that, everybody just turned it off.”
Mr. Trump crowed about the rollout, calling it a “disaster” and saying, “I don’t know if it’s recoverable.”
“He’s very disloyal, but he’s got no personality,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. DeSantis. “And if you don’t have personality, politics is a very hard business.”
Next up for Mr. DeSantis is a return to more traditional campaigning, with planned stops in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the first three nominating states, from May 30 to June 2. The campaign bills this four-day swing through 12 cities and towns 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 on Tuesday. He will remain in Iowa on Wednesday before traveling to New Hampshire on Thursday and to 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, especially early on, is usually a grip-and-grin affair.
How Mr. DeSantis interacts with people on the trip will be closely watched. He has had some awkward moments while meeting voters on the trail, leading to mockery from Mr. Trump and other detractors.
Mr. DeSantis is expected to need a victory in Iowa and at least a close second-place finish in New Hampshire to show that he can effectively challenge the former president, especially as other candidates, potentially sensing a political opening for a bid, jump into the race.
On Thursday night, Mr. DeSantis is scheduled to attend a reception with major donors at a hotel in Miami as his team ramps up its 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.
Mr. DeSantis’s team had gathered the donors in a conference room at the Four Seasons Miami, in the city’s financial district, to listen to the Twitter Space.
It did not go well at first, according to two attendees. The hotel’s audiovisual system was just as glitchy as the livestream, leaving donors trying to listen on their phones while getting drinks at the bar and chatting among themselves. But the overall mood was one of excitement, the people said.
On Thursday, Mr. DeSantis’s top campaign staff members told donors they thought the night had gone well, even if it not quite according to their original script. The campaign has signaled that it wants to move quickly, take risks and confound its doubters.
Still, the decision to make the announcement on Twitter — and to talk more about things like diversity programs at public universities than, say, inflation — baffled many Republicans.
“He was appealing to .2 percent of likely Republican voters with that kind of announcement,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. “His strategy is on a different dimension than anything I have understood in the past.”
Maggie Astor contributed reporting from New York.