Hello. I’m Ron DeSantis and I approve of the following message.

As you may have heard, I’m running for President of the United States. You could only have heard it because I announced it on an audio-only platform called Twitter Spaces, which my friend Elon Musk assured my staff is futuristic and will therefore appeal to hipster kids. We also like it because no one got to see my face and my face scares people.

I own it: I have the face of a torturer. That’s because I am a torturer.

If you see my face, there’s a chance you are being tortured.

So audio is better.

Some guys say they didn’t choose the torture lifestyle, torture chose them, but that’s not true about me. I was obsessed with the movie “A Few Good Men,” which takes place at Guantánamo. When Jack Nicholson barked at Tom Cruise, “you can’t handle the truth!” I was hooked. Like Tom Cruise, I became a JAG and volunteered to go to Gitmo. But I was more into the Jack Nicholson character. His character carefully cultivated a culture of abuse I couldn’t wait to sink my teeth into. Evil is so cool.

When I got to Gitmo, hundreds of terrorist Muslim scumbags—OK, they’ve pretty much all been released because none of them actually did anything, but whatever—were on hunger strike. My C.O. asked me: “How do I combat this?” I was, like: “Hey, you actually can force-feed. Here’s what you can do. Here’s kind of the rules for that.”

It was awesome! They strapped the dudes into a chair. Then they stuffed a rubber tube down their nose and poured down two cans of some protein drink. (There was also “rectal rehydration” but I officially didn’t get to see that, wink wink, “would” have been so rad!)

I watched this terrorist dude—OK, they never charged him and the wusses at the Pentagon he was “innocent” or whatever—named Mansoor Adayfi getting force-fed. He wrote that “a male nurse forced that huge tube into my nose. No numbing spray. No lubricant. Raw rubber and metal sliced the inside of my nose and throat. Pain shot through my sinuses and I thought my head would explode.” Hilarious! He totally remembered me, especially me grinning and making fun of him.

            Like I said: if you see my face, you might be getting the hardcore business end of Uncle Sam.

            If elected, I will personally torture anyone who annoys me, even if they are innocent —especially if they are innocent. I will torture migrants and gays and abortion sluts. I will torture Mickey Mouse.

            I won’t lie: it’s not going to be easy. Trump is ahead of me among Republican primary voters 58% to 16%, and his lead keeps increasing. My plan is to let Trump get up to 100%. He has nowhere to go but down after that.

            My other plan is to spend $200 million on my campaign. If nothing else, I’ll stimulate the economy in the crucial campaign worker sector. Maybe my campaign workers will repay my generosity by voting for me.

            If those don’t work, I’ve got my ace in the hole: torture.

            I’m an outstanding torturer, but I’m only one man. I can’t torture all the voters I need to become the Republican nominee, much less all the swing voters in key states I’ll need in the general election while evading process servers from the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. But I don’t need to torture everyone in order to win.

            If you’re thinking about voting for someone else, however, consider this: I may torture you. Do you want to wake up in the middle of the night, strapped to a chair rubber hose, jammed down your throat? Do you want to gag and scream, then catch a glance of my smirking face with my dead piggy eyes and bloated cheeks and realize you could have avoided all this pain by donating generously to my campaign and wearing nothing but my T-shirts, and covering your car with my stickers and voting for me? Believe me, the answer is no.

            Do not make me torture you. Actually, go ahead.

            It’s more fun than being president.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)