DeSantis, who is trailing Trump in average Republican primary polls, said the last election was not perfect but dismissed allegations of fraud by Democrats.
“Of course he lost. Of course, Joe Biden is the president,” DeSantis said in an interview with “NBC” that will air on Monday, clips of which were shown by the network on Sunday.
Polls show that a majority of Republican primary voters incorrectly believe Trump won the last election.
Strengthening the former president’s allegations of fraud has become a critical test for those wishing to rise in the ranks of the party.
DeSantis’s remarks, 44, are his clearest expression of support for the legitimacy of the election, which Trump’s cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency described as “the most secure in American history.”
But DeSantis objected to what he called the 2020 election’s over-reliance on mail-in voting, a practice Trump falsely described as vulnerable to fraud but which has GOP support and is widely available in Florida.
Trump currently finds himself accused of 3 different criminal cases: lying about paying sums of money to buy the silence of a porn star, mishandling confidential documents after leaving the White House, and attempting to overturn the results of the presidential election.
There is also the possibility of charging him in a fourth case related to his contact with an election official in Georgia and pressure on him to “find” 11,780 votes that would have overturned the outcome of the 2020 elections in his favor in the southern state.
According to DeSantis, who conducted the interview alongside his wife Casey, Trump’s legal troubles and heavy focus on the former president’s multiple trials would mean a defeat for the Republicans.
He added, “If the elections are a referendum on Joe Biden’s policies and the failures that we have seen, and we present a positive vision for the future, we will win the presidency and we will have an opportunity to change the situation in the country.”
He continued, “But if the elections are not related to January 20, 2025, but rather to January 6, 2021, or to any document that was left in the toilet in Mar-a-Lago, and if it is a referendum on that, we will lose.”
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