The Monday headline on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the New York Times said, unintentionally, exactly what is wrong with the GOP Establishment’s response to former President Donald Trump. The headline:
DeSantis Bluntly Acknowledges Trump’s 2020 Defeat: ‘Of Course He Lost’
The Times reports this:
Mr. DeSantis, who is polling well behind Mr. Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, had acknowledged on Friday that the former president’s false theories about a rigged 2020 election were “unsubstantiated.”
Say what? Allegations that the 2020 election were rigged are “unsubstantiated.” Really?
The governor failed to mention that journalist and Federalist editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway, among others, has extensively documented one episode after another of election rigging in 2020.
Indeed, Mollie’s book is titled Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.
Apparently, DeSantis hasn’t read the book — and he should.
As a Pennsylvania voter well familiar with my state’s repeated and thoroughly documented record of election fraud by Democrats in the elections of 2016, 2015, 2014, 2012, 2008, and even way back there in 1994 (when a federal judge overturned a Pennsylvania state Senate election because of a “massive scheme” by Democrats to steal the election), for a Republican presidential candidate — an elected governor at that — to not be familiar with just one state’s decidedly serious and well-documented record of election rigging is astonishing.
I have read Rigged from cover to cover, and it is worth quoting from just the fly leaf alone, in which the publisher writes the following of the “long disinformation campaign against President Trump”:
Never was there such heavy-handed meddling in an election by the most powerful institutions in the country. The press brazenly concealed unfavorable news about Joe Biden and his family while continuing its long disinformation campaign against President Trump. Big Tech censored dissenters from the established narrative, while the Democratic Party manipulated a public health crisis to change the voting process in ways that left it laughably insecure.
As accounts of irregularities aroused doubts about the integrity of America’s electoral system, the media marching in lockstep, dismissed every expression of skepticism as self-evidently baseless. But as Hemingway’s dogged reporting reveals, there are abundant reasons to suspect that the election was rigged at every step.
And there was also this from the book’s prologue:
What happened during the 2020 election must be investigated and discussed, not in spite of media and political opposition to an open inquiry, but because of that opposition. The American people deserve to know what happened. They deserve answers, even if those answers are inconvenient. They deserve to know the effect flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots had on their vote. They deserve to know how and why Big Tech and the corporate political media manipulated the news to support certain political narratives while censoring stories they now admit were true. They deserve to know why courts were allowed to unilaterally rewrite the rules in the middle of the contest, often without the consent of the legislative bodies charged with writing election laws.
With all of that and oh so much more, the response now from DeSantis is essentially a shrug, saying dismissively this, as also reported by the Times:
DeSantis Dismisses Trump’s 2020 Election Theories as False
The Florida governor went further than he has before in acknowledging that the election was not stolen as a major donor pressured him to appeal to moderates.
Got that? Some “major donor” to the Florida governor — a donor who is apparently completely clueless himself about the extensive documentation of the rigging of the 2020 election — is telling his candidate to ignore reality to “appeal to moderates.”
The governor, amazingly, also says this, as reported in the Times:
“All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” Mr. DeSantis said in response to a reporter’s question after a campaign event at a brewery in Northeast Iowa.
Say what? To pick but one example, the Big Tech suppression of the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story did, in fact, happen.
All of which means that DeSantis and his decision to ignore the rigging of the 2020 election in order to attack Trump is setting up the GOP to ignore what happened in 2020 — so that it can happen all over again in 2024.
Ya can’t make it up.
Not to mention that ignoring the reality of the rigging of the 2020 election simply to target Trump will backfire — on DeSantis and any other GOP presidential candidate determined to ignore reality.
And backfire big time.