Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday that Donald Trump will probably lie about the outcome of the 2024 primary contests in Iowa and New Hampshire if he doesn’t win them.
“If Trump loses, he will say it’s stolen no matter what,” DeSantis said on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, responding to a reporter’s question about whether he expects Trump to accept the election results in the first two presidential nominating states. “He will try to delegitimize the results. He did that against Ted Cruz in 2016,” referring to the Texas senator who beat Trump in the Iowa caucuses.
“I don’t think there’s been a single time he’s ever been in competition for something and he didn’t get it, where he’s accepted [it],” DeSantis said, joking about the former president’s reality show, “The Apprentice,” not winning an Emmy despite a handful of nominations.
Trump, of course, has never conceded his loss in the 2020 presidential election, which he tried to overturn. He’s also never committed to supporting the 2024 GOP nominee if it’s not him.
Trump is well ahead of DeSantis in both Iowa and New Hampshire. The Iowa caucuses, the official start to the presidential primary season, are a month away, on Jan. 15. DeSantis and his allies have directed much of their resources toward winning Iowa, where the latest Iowa Poll had Trump capturing more than 50% of the ballots.
DeSantis, who once shied away from attacking Trump, is now fully leaning into criticizing the former president — but it hasn’t made a difference.
In a CNN town hall this week, DeSantis also blamed Trump for exacerbating the economic effects of the COVID pandemic by ordering lockdowns. DeSantis has used his handling of the pandemic to argue that he’d run the country like he’d run “the free state of Florida.”
“The first three years of the Trump administration, the economy is better than it has been. But that last year with COVID I think was mishandled dramatically. Shutting down the country was a huge mistake. Printing trillions and trillions of dollars was a huge mistake that set the foundation for the inflation that we see,” DeSantis said.
