More of This, Please

By Noah Rothman

Friday, August 04, 2023

 

Ron DeSantis gave a surprisingly direct and adversarial response to a reporter’s question on Friday regarding the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s claims regarding the 2020 election.

 

“All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” DeSantis said of the former president’s “unsubstantiated” allegations of outcome-determining electoral malfeasance, during a campaign stop in Iowa. “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.”

 

It may be premature at this stage of the race to remind Republican voters in no uncertain terms that he lost fair and square, but it had to happen eventually. None of Trump’s challengers will succeed the former president as leader of the Republican Party by arguing that Trump is effectively the GOP’s incumbent. If Republican primary voters are going to reject alternatives to Trump because they failed to properly endorse the idea that he was cheated out of his rightful victory in 2020, they might as well hang it up now.

 

But DeSantis didn’t stop there. When DeSantis was asked if he had caught any of the coverage of the former president’s arraignment on Wednesday for charges involving Trump’s conduct leading up to the January 6 riots, the Florida governor didn’t pretend he hadn’t (which has become unconvincing form for Republican lawmakers following a Trump-related media spectacle). “I saw a little bit,” he confessed. “Unfortunately,” DeSantis added, “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.”

 

Maybe a not-so-subtle reminder to Republican primary voters that DeSantis has an executive-level day job already — one that keeps him from tweeting his inner monologue because he’s busy executing the law with extreme prejudice — but perhaps the time for subtlety is over?

 

More of this, please.