Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis acknowledged in an interview that former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election after long appearing to dodge the question.
“Whoever puts their hand on the Bible on Jan. 20 every four years is the winner,” DeSantis, who is trailing Trump in the crowded field of 2024 Republican presidential candidates, told NBC News.
“Of course he lost,” DeSantis added after being asked directly about Trump, saying “Joe Biden’s the president.”
“I think what people in the media and elsewhere, they want to act like somehow this was just like the perfect election. … I don’t think it was a good-run election,” DeSantis said. “But I also think Republicans didn’t fight back. You’ve got to fight back when that is happening.”
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DeSantis also repeated criticism of mail-in ballots, laws that allow third parties to return ballots and other election procedures.
There is not evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, and research has shown that voting by mail does not specifically benefit Republicans or Democrats.
Trump pleaded not guilty last week to federal charges targeting his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The Florida governor has often carefully framed the events surrounding the 2020 election, possibly to avoid alienating voters who believe the former president’s unfounded claims of fraud, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, part of the USA TODAY Network, reported.
“When I look at the last however many election cycles, 2018 we lost the House … we lost the Senate in 2020, Biden becomes president, and has done a huge amount of damage,” DeSantis said in May, adding that Biden was “very unpopular in 2022, and we were supposed to have this big red wave and other than like Florida and Iowa I didn’t see a red wave across the country.”
“And so I think the party has developed a culture of losing. I think there’s not accountability.”
Last month, DeSantis said, Trump should have criticized the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol more strongly. He also called the deadly riot not an insurrection but instead a “protest” that “ended up devolving, you know, in a way that was unfortunate.”
Contributing: The Associated Press
