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Ron DeSantis, Florida's governor and candidate in the Republican race: "Of course he lost"

Photo: Charles Krupa / AP

Donald Trump, the ex-president, and Ron DeSantis, Florida's governor, are not considered the best of friends. Both are vying for the post of Republican presidential candidate – and do not shy away from attacks on their competitors. Now DeSantis has attacked a narrative that Trump has been peddling since the last US presidential election and that has caught on with many Republican supporters. That of the "stolen election".

"Of course he lost," DeSantis said of Trump's fall 2020 election results in an interview with NBC News. "Joe Biden is the president."

Change of course at DeSantis

In the Republican camp, this is a kind of crucial question: Since his defeat, Trump has been spreading the lie that the election was "stolen" and that votes were counted incorrectly. Several of his followers, who had helped spread the lie that a manufacturer of voting machines was to blame, have since been sued for defamation for millions of dollars in damages.

DeSantis himself had so far dodged questions about the legitimacy of the last election. The fact that he is now positioning himself so clearly against Trump's narrative is a novelty. Similar to Trump, however, DeSantis also castigated the mail-in vote as error-prone, although there is no evidence for this.

The changed rhetoric is likely to be the next trick to score points in the Republican camp against Trump. So far, the governor has tried to trump Trump's strictly conservative course with his "fight against wokism" – but so far without too much success. Just recently, he caused a sensation with the announcement that he wanted to rewrite the curricula in Florida in order to interpret the time of slavery differently, i.e. less critically.

So far, however, Trump remains ahead in the polls, and he is popular with the rank and file despite – or because of – his lies and now several indictments. According to the latest polls by the New York Times, Republican voters' approval of DeSantis rose to 17 percent, but Trump's to 54 percent.

Mrc