In a new interview with NBC News, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has rejected Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen.” DeSantis told NBC’s Dasha Burns that “whoever puts their hand on the Bible on January 20 every four years is the winner.”

DeSantis, who trails Trump in early Republican polling, seemed to deflect questions about the 2020 election, saying last week that the election “is what it is,” and Trump’s claims of election fraud “did not prove to be true.”

In the NBC interview, part of which aired Monday morning on Today, Burns pushed DeSantis to “put this to bed so you don’t have to be asked about this a million more times: yes or no, did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”

“Of course he lost,” DeSantis said. “Joe Biden’s the president.”

Even so, DeSantis did stress that he believes there were problems with the 2020 election, pointing to widespread availability of mail-in ballots, state laws that allow third parties to collect and return ballots, and social media that DeSantis believes minimized a story about a laptop belonging to President Biden’s son Hunter.

"I think what people in the media and elsewhere, they want to act like somehow this was just like the perfect election. ... I don’t think it was a good-run election," DeSantis said. "But I also think Republicans didn’t fight back. You’ve got to fight back when that is happening."

Asked about Trump’s legal troubles, DeSantis declined to attack the former president, telling NBC “it’s not really about Donald Trump,” and saying the justice system “is not fair if it is weaponized.”