The 2024 GOP primary season has only just begun, and already Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems to have lost his way, unable to articulate a clear position on the most important issue of the primaries, which is what happened in 2020.
In an NBC News interview that aired Monday, DeSantis was asked by correspondent Dasha Burns, “Yes or no, did Trump lose the 2020 election?” It was a sneering, commie, gotcha question that DeSantis could have easily swatted away, refused to dignify with a response, or simply said, “Biden won, but unfairly,” and then explained how the 2020 election was rigged in Biden’s favor.
Instead, after Burns idiotically pressed for a “yes or no” answer, DeSantis took the bait. “Well, of course — no, of course he lost,” DeSantis stammered. “Joe Biden’s the president. But the issue is, 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. But I also think Republicans didn’t fight back. You’ve got to fight back when that is happening.”
He then went on to blame Trump for basically everything that happened in the 2020 cycle: pandemic-inspired mass unrestricted mail-in voting and ballot-harvesting, “Zuckerbucks,” the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, and so on. Trump, he said, “turned the government over to Fauci,” citing the CARES Act, “which funded mail-in ballots across the country.”
Here we have what’s now a familiar formula from DeSantis: say
