EXCLUSIVE: Ron DeSantis rejects Trump’s 2020 election claims, says “Of course he lost”
In an NBC News exclusive interview with @DashaBurns, the Florida governor made his most definitive comments that Trump did not win in 2020.
“Joe Biden’s the president,” DeSantis said. pic.twitter.com/7AUT7vqXWI
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) August 7, 2023
This is new. Republicans have heretofore been caught in a trap with regard to Trump’s election lies. These claims are obviously bogus, and Trump’s constant complaining on the matter is a big reason he’s been a drag on his party’s dismal electoral performance. And yet Republicans do largely believe that the 2020 election was “stolen.” Which probably explains why what DeSantis did next was try to to square the circle. “Here’s the issue that I think is important for Republican voters to think about: Why did we have all those mail votes? Because Trump turned the government over to [Dr. Anthony] Fauci,” DeSantis said. “They embraced lockdowns. They did the Cares Act, which funded mail-in ballots across the country.”
This is too clever by half. As New York’s Ed Kilgore persuasively argued, while DeSantis has amended his rhetoric, he is still trying to have it both ways, claiming that Trump lost the election while at the same time blaming him—as opposed to a shadowy cabal of Democrats and elites—for his election loss. “The suggestion that Biden didn’t legitimately win but that Trump helped rig the election for him sure does make the former president look like a loser, all right, without for a moment legitimizing President Biden, who just watched the White House fall into his lap,” Kilgore writes, hitting the nail on the head.
Still, this is a way of attacking Trump’s inevitability that is potentially fruitful. Going toe-to-toe with Trump on insults never ends well for anyone—just ask Marco Rubio. And yet Trump’s lack of electoral success—and the fact that he, you know, lost the last election against the guy Republicans will be facing again in 2024—is arguably his biggest weakness with GOP voters. These voters like the fact that Trump is erratic. They like the fact that he’s bombastic and uncontrollable. But at the core of his political identity is the argument that this is what it takes to win; that the only way to take down a corrupt, liberal establishment is by embracing chaos and fighting dirty. No other Republican candidate can take on that mantle.