Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Sunday rejected Donald Trump’s claim that he was the true winner of the 2020 presidential election in his most forceful comments to date on the matter.
“Whoever puts their hand on the Bible on Jan. 20 every four years is the winner,” DeSantis told NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns in his first broadcast network interview since he launched his presidential campaign.
DeSantis continued to discuss all the ways he believed the previous presidential election was not perfect. But pressed further, he clearly stated that Trump lost.
“But respectfully, you did not clearly answer that question,” Burns said. “And if you can’t give a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on whether or not he lost —”
“No, of course he lost,” DeSantis said, adding, “Joe Biden’s the president.”…
Still, DeSantis made sure to point out in Sunday’s interview that he saw a number of problems with the 2020 election, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s grants for election administration, the widespread availability of mail-in ballots, state laws that allow third parties to collect and return voters’ ballots, and how social media outlets de-emphasized a story about the laptop of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
“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.”