Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

On Sunday, Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis rejected the notion that Donald Trump "won" in 2020, and if he wasn't somehow toast before in the GOP primary race, he's definitely finished now.

 

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."

"Ron DeSantis should really stop being Joe Biden’s biggest cheerleader," Trump spokesman Steve Cheung told NBC News.

DeSantis' comments come just days after Trump pleaded not guilty to charges that he broke the law by trying to overturn the 2020 election.

And at a campaign stop in Iowa on Friday, DeSantis also strongly dismissed theories that the election was stolen, saying they "did not prove to be true."

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."

 

Even when Ron's gone right a bit, he can't help being wrong. Trying to have his cake and eating it too is just going to piss off Republican primary voters even further.  MAGA is a Trump cult and has been for years now, and DeSantis just doesn't know how to play the game. He's sliding into Jeb Bush territory here.

Questioning election integrity, but rejecting Trump's "win" is the middle of the road that DeSantis is walking, and eventually he's gonna get flattened by a truck if he stays out there.