With the first Republican presidential debate coming up on August 23rd, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is eager to boost his poll numbers. Trailing former president Donald Trump by a large margin in the field of Republican candidates, DeSantis is visibly using sharper rhetoric to attack his opponent and has once again denied claims by Trump that the 2020 elections were rigged.
“Of course he lost. Joe Biden’s the president,” said the governor in an interview with NBC News on Monday, August 7th, echoing a similar statement he made on Friday, when he said fraud theories “did not prove to be true.” DeSantis was referring to claims made by Donald Trump that the presidential elections in 2020 were stolen, resulting in Trump’s defeat to Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
“But what I’ve also said is the way you conduct a good election that people have confidence in, you don’t change the rules in the middle of the game,” DeSantis also said on Friday, blaming both the Trump administration and the Democrats for the way the elections were organised. He pointed out that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had donated $400 million to two nonprofit organisations that distributed grants to state and local governments to help them conduct the 2020 election during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conservative groups have argued that the funds disproportionately went to Democratic-leaning counties in key states.
DeSantis also blamed social media companies for suppressing news coverage just before the election of Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s suspicious foreign business dealings. The increase in people voting by mail during the pandemic benefited the Democrats, according to the governor, accusing Trump of being partially responsible. “They embraced lockdowns. They did the CARES Act, which funded mail-in ballots across the country,” DeSantis told NBC News, referring to the CARES Act, a bill passed in response to the pandemic. The bill included $400 million for states to help with the elections, with many states making voting by mail more widely available.
DeSantis is clearly increasing his attacks on Trump, as the latest polls forecast an easy victory for the former president in next year’s Republican primaries. Even Trump’s latest indictment doesn’t seem to have had an effect, as a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll shows 47% of Republican voters backing Trump and 13% backing DeSantis, with other candidates lagging way behind in single digits.
Speaking about the indictment, DeSantis told NBC that it was “not really about Donald Trump,” but a distraction from the failures of Joe Biden’s presidency. He also accused officials in the U.S. justice system of having “weaponized” the rule of law for electoral advantages.
Reacting to the Florida governor’s words, the Trump campaign told the New York Post that “Ron DeSantis should really stop being Joe Biden’s biggest cheerleader.”
