Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida stated that claims concerning the 2020 election being stolen have been false, straight contradicting a central argument of former President Donald J. Trump and his supporters.
The feedback went additional than Mr. DeSantis sometimes goes when requested about Mr. Trump’s defeat. The governor has usually tried to hedge, refusing to acknowledge that the election was pretty carried out. In his response on Friday, Mr. DeSantis didn’t point out Mr. Trump by title — saying merely that such theories have been “unsubstantiated.” But the implication was clear.
“All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” Mr. DeSantis stated in response to a reporter’s query after a marketing campaign occasion at a brewery in Northeast Iowa.
The extra aggressive response comes a day after Mr. Trump was arraigned on costs associated to his plot to overturn the 2020 election. As he has courted Mr. Trump’s voters, Mr. DeSantis has blasted the prosecution as politically motivated and has stated that he didn’t wish to see Mr. Trump charged. His new feedback recommend that Mr. Trump’s authorized peril might have altered his political calculation.
The governor has beforehand been much more circumspect about 2020, typically utilizing such questions on the topic to speak about electability, lament the “culture of losing” that has developed amongst Republicans underneath Mr. Trump’s management and boast concerning the safety of Florida’s elections.
On Friday, Mr. DeSantis did criticize facets of the 2020 election, together with modifications to voting procedures made due to the coronavirus pandemic. But he particularly dismissed one notably far-fetched principle that Venezuela, now led by President Nicolás Maduro, hacked voting machines.
“It was not an election that was conducted the way I think that we want to, but that’s different than saying Maduro stole votes or something like that,” he stated. “Those theories, you know, proved to be unsubstantiated.”
Mr. DeSantis additionally stated he didn’t have a lot time to observe protection of his chief rival’s arraignment on Thursday.
“I saw a little bit,” he stated. “Unfortunately, one of the things as governor that you have to do is oversee executions. So we had an execution yesterday, so I was tied up with that for most of the day.”
Source: www.nytimes.com