DeSantis says ‘of course’ Trump lost the 2020 election

In an NBC News interview that aired in part Monday, Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., said former president Donald Trump clearly lost the 2020 election, escalating his pushback in recent days against Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen from him.

DeSantis, who has long dodged questions about the legitimacy of the 2020 race, at first tried to sidestep a question about whether Trump had lost his re-election campaign to Joe Biden.

“Whoever puts their hand on the Bible on Jan . 20 every four years is the winner,” DeSantis told NBC News.

When pressed, however, the governor indicated that there was no question Trump lost in 2020.

“No, of course, he lost,” DeSantis said. “Of course. Joe Biden’s the president.”

DeSantis tempered his response by suggesting that the 2020 race was not “the perfect election.” Still, his remarks were part of an increasingly strong rejection of Trump’s notion of a stolen election, as the governor struggles to gain momentum in his challenge to front-runner Trump for the 2024 presidential nomination.

Representatives for the DeSantis campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday.

“Ron DeSantis should really stop being Joe Biden’s biggest cheerleader, it’s very unbecoming of him,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement Monday.

On Friday, one day after Trump was arraigned on charges that he conspired to overturn the 2020 election, DeSantis said the claims that Trump and his allies pushed about a stolen election were false.

“I’ve said many times: The election is what it is,” DeSantis said, according to audio from an Iowa campaign event Friday. “All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true.”

DeSantis did not call out Trump by name in his comments, first reported by the New York Times. And, as he did in the NBC News interview, he hedged his answer somewhat by saying that the 2020 election was not “conducted the way I think that we want.”

Instead, DeSantis pointed to Florida’s as an example of a well-run election, describing a “transparent” vote-counting process and no “ballot harvesting” – a disparaging term to describe the legal practice of collecting and submitting mail ballots from others.

At another stop in Iowa on Saturday, DeSantis ducked a question about whether, like former vice president Mike Pence, he would have rejected Trump’s call to overturn the election results. Trump has turned much of his base against Pence for taking that stand.

DeSantis didn’t answer directly but suggested that a vice president does not have the power to block the counting of electoral college votes.

Vice President Harris will affirm the submitted electoral votes in 2025, he said, and “she’s not going to have the opportunity to overrule what the American people say.”

“I don’t think that Kamala Harris has that authority,” the governor added.

However, DeSantis criticized elements of the election process in his swing through Iowa. When a reporter asked whether he blamed Trump for Republicans’ distrust of “alternative forms of voting,” DeSantis said, “Not necessarily.” And he argued that the coronavirus pandemic became an “excuse” to improperly change voting rules.

DeSantis has also gone further than usual in criticizing Trump in recent days. At a New Hampshire town hall with WMUR that aired Friday, he blasted Trump’s often-crude and personal insults as “phony” and “juvenile.”

“That is not the way a great nation should be conducting itself. That is not the way a president of the United States should be conducting himself,” the governor said. “I wouldn’t teach my kids to treat people like that.”

In response to DeSantis’s latest comments, the Democratic National Committee issued a statement Monday that accused him of “trying to spin his years-long record of supporting election conspiracy theories,” pointing out that as recently as this summer, he refused to answer whether Trump had lost the 2020 election.

At a town hall in New Hampshire in June, DeSantis ducked a question on whether Trump “violated the peaceful transfer of power,” even as he showed a new willingness to criticize the former president on other fronts.

Many Republican presidential candidates have tiptoed around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack. But DeSantis stands out for how carefully he has avoided placing direct blame on the former president, even as he has gone after him on other matters. He has responded to questions about the Jan. 6 insurrection by calling it everything from “unacceptable” on the day of the attack to, later, “a dead horse” and simply a media obsession.

At a campaign event last month, DeSantis shifted course and knocked Trump for his behavior on Jan. 6 – but he did not endorse a criminal investigation or charges against Trump and reiterated now-common Republican allegations that the Justice Department is politically biased.

In an interview on the “Megyn Kelly Show” last month, DeSantis suggested that, if elected, he would pardon Trump on any federal charges.

“I don’t think it would be good for the country to have an almost 80-year-old former president go to prison,” DeSantis said on the podcast.