DeSantis acknowledges that Biden won the 2020 election and amends the plan to Trump: "Of course he lost"

Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis looks at a group of supporters of former President Donald Trump during a rally in Iowa this weekendJOSEPH CRESS/USA TODAY NETWORK (via REUTERS)

Florida Gov. and Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis has made a significant shift in his campaign strategy. For the first time he has declared flatly and unambiguously that his main rival in the primaries, Donald Trump, was defeated in the 2020 elections. "Of course he lost," he said in an interview with NBC television broadcast Monday. "Joe Biden [Democrat] is the president."

For months, Republican candidates for the White House have almost unanimously avoided criticizing Trump or flatly rejecting the former president's conspiracy theories that he was the actual winner of the 2020 election. All of them face a dilemma: if they do not distance themselves from the former president, they do not present their own profile or make it clear why a voter would have to opt for them and not for the tycoon. And if they contradict him, they risk facing the staunch supporters of the former head of state, a huge bloc within the party.

But months pass, the primaries are approaching, and Trump continues to defy logic. He has already been indicted three times: in New York for accounting forgery; in Miami, for illegal possession of classified material, a crime under the Espionage Act; in Washington, for trying to alter the results of the 2020 election. Only one of those cases would have led to the fall from grace of any other politician. Instead, the former president remains unsinkable despite hitting so many legal icebergs. Each court appearance makes him rise in the polls. "I need one more indictment to win the election," he boasted last week after special prosecutor Jack Smith filed charges against him for the great electoral hoax of 2020 and the subsequent assault of his supporters on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

According to polls, Trump is light years ahead of DeSantis, his closest rival. The average of the main polls, according to the website RealClearPolitics, gives him a vote intention among Republicans of 53.7%. The governor of Florida, on the other hand, receives only 15.7%. No other candidate, whether former Vice President Michael Pence or former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Halley, reaches 10 percent.

DeSantis' comments to NBC point to a change in his strategy, in an attempt to close the gap in the polls. For years he avoided directly answering the question of whether he considered there had been electoral fraud in 2020; In the midterm elections last year, he campaigned for candidates who explicitly backed the hoax. Now he wants to accentuate one of the arguments he has been using: that with Trump, Republicans lose elections again and again.

A day after the former president returned to court on Thursday, this time in Washington to plead "not guilty" to four charges related to attempts to alter the 2020 results, DeSantis declared that "the hoaxes spread by his rival, according to which the former president was the true winner of the election, have not been proven."

But in his public speeches the governor tries not to totally oppose the man who still maintains immense influence over his party. He refuses to criticize Trump or speak out about his legal problems. Like many Republicans, he insists that the judicial system is "politicized." And he considers that there were "problems" in the elections three years ago.

In his interview for NBC, recorded on Sunday, he listed among others the great facilities to vote by mail – one of the usual complaints of Trump, who for months before the elections assured that the system would facilitate the tongo – state laws that authorized third parties to collect and deposit the ballot of others, or the scarce coverage that was given to alleged irregularities of Hunter Biden, the son of the current president.

"I think people in the media and elsewhere want to behave like it's been the perfect election... I don't think it was a well-managed election," DeSantis said in the interview. "But I also think Republicans didn't stand up. You have to stand up when those things happen."

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