Ron DeSantis Calls Donald Trump’s Election-Related Conspiracies for 2020 ‘Unsubstantiated'

In his most forthright statements on the topic in almost three years following Donald Trump's loss, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared, "Of course" Trump lost the 2020 election. "Of course, he lost," DeSantis said of his opponent in an interview broadcast on NBC News on Sunday.

These statements come after DeSantis told reporters in Decorah, Iowa, on Friday that post-2020 election "theories" put forth by the former president and his allies were "unsubstantiated" and "did not prove to be true."

DeSantis has refrained from making any definitive statements regarding Trump's loss. Trump's inner circle publicly praised him for being the first to propose that state legislators may alter election outcomes in certain areas. But in the years following, DeSantis mostly avoided answering concerns regarding the legitimacy of the election results.

But DeSantis insists on calling it anything but a "perfect election," despite states' efforts to make voting easier during the pandemic, and he then criticized Trump for using the $2.2 trillion economic stimulus bill passed in 2020 in response to the coronavirus crisis to pay for mail-in ballots. DeSantis said to NBC, "But here’s the issue that I think is important for Republican voters to think about: Why did we have all those mail votes? Because of Trump turned the government over to (Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases). They embraced lockdowns. They did the CARES Act, which funded mail-in ballots across the country."

According to People, Trump refused to acknowledge the results of the 2020 presidential election, which he lost in both the popular and electoral votes, even though a bare-bones assessment of the victor and vanquished would normally not be newsworthy. The former president's unfounded allegations of "election fraud" impacted a sizable portion of the Republican electorate despite being repeatedly rejected by the courts and landing Trump in deep legal peril.

This is Trump's third indictment since he left office. The ex-president faces one charge each of conspiring to defraud the United States, obstructing an official process, attempting to impede an official proceeding, and violating the rights of others. After Trump's loss in the 2020 presidential election, the indictment claims he "was determined to remain in power." The indictment alleges the involvement of numerous others who "helped implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification" of ballots, including four lawyers, a Justice Department employee, and a political consultant who remains nameless.

While DeSantis told NBC News that he agreed with the charge against Trump for mishandling secret materials, he also attempted to change the issue, "If the election is a referendum on Joe Biden’s policies and the failures that we’ve seen and we are presenting a positive vision for the future, we will win the presidency. If, on the other hand, the election is not about Jan. 20, 2025, but Jan. 6, 2021, or what document was left by the toilet at Mar-a-Lago, if it’s a referendum on that, we are going to lose."

References:

https://people.com/ron-desantis-says-donald-trump-lost-2020-election-7570746

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/ron-desantis-of-course-trump-lost-2020-election-rcna98200?

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/03/politics/cnn-poll-republicans-think-2020-election-illegitimate/index.html