Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has started to say it out loud: former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.
Former Vice President Mike Pence is more aggressively rebutting Mr. Trump’s insistence that the VP had the constitutional authority to block the certification of President Biden’s victory.
And former Gov. Chris Christie is jumping at every opportunity to lay into Mr. Trump, lambasting him as a “completely self-centered, self-possessed, self-consumed, angry old man.”
The field of 2024 GOP presidential candidates is sharpening their attacks against Mr. Trump as they prepare for the race’s first debate, which is set for Aug. 23 in Milwaukee and which the former president may skip.
Mr. Trump, who is beating all of his rivals by at least 25 points in the polls, is mostly ignoring the attacks. He has kept focused on President Biden whom he expects to face in the general election.
In a Truth Social post on Monday, Mr. Trump railed against Mr. Biden, who he called “my corrupt political opponent,” for putting him on trial during the campaign.
“IS THIS GOING TO BE THE FUTURE OF ELECTIONS IN AMERICA? CAN A PRESIDENT ORDER HIS DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE TO INDICT AN OPPONENT JUST PRIOR TO AN ELECTION? WHY DIDN’T THEY DO THIS 2.5 YEARS AGO? WHY NOW? NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE IN THE USA. THIS IS ALL ABOUT ELECTION INTERFERENCE!”
Still, Mr. Trump’s rivals are increasingly willing to take shots at him.
In an interview with NBC News, Mr. DeSantis said “Of course” Mr. Biden defeated Mr. Trump in the 2020 election.
“Joe Biden is the president,” he said. “Whoever puts their hand on the Bible on Jan. 20 every four years is the winner.”
Mr. DeSantis has been viewed as Mr. Trump’s top rival but has struggled to chip away at the ex-president’s lead in the polls.
The DeSantis campaign is working to reboot its strategy in a bid to try to close in on Mr. Trump’s enormous lead.
Mr. DeSantis is holding smaller events that allow the governor to speak more directly to voters and he’s taking extra time to answer questions from reporters and hold sit-down interviews as he travels throughout the early voting states.
He is planning to visit all 99 counties in Iowa, where his support for ending abortion and his anti-woke agenda resonates with the state’s heavily evangelical base of Republican caucus voters.
Mr. Pence, who has yet to qualify for the debate, has taken a firmer stand against Mr. Trump in the wake of the new federal charges against his former boss, this time for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
The Pence campaign recently started selling “Too Honest” T-shirts and baseball hats. The phrase refers to an episode, detailed in the latest federal indictment, in which Mr. Trump chastised Mr. Pence for being “too honest” for refusing to stop Congress’ certification of the 2020 electoral votes.
Mr. Pence also tried to shoot down the version of post-election events the Trump world pushed in response to the latest criminal charges, the third set of charges heaped upon him.
“They were asking me to overturn the election,” Mr. Pence said on CNN. “I had no right to overturn the election.”
In another interview, Mr. Pence said if he bowed to pressure from Mr Trump and “his gaggle of crackpot lawyers” then “literally chaos would have ensued.”
For his part, Mr. Christie is hyping up the idea he plans to beat Mr. Trump up on the debate stage.
“Me and Donald Trump, how much fun will that be?” he said in a recent CBS News report. “He has never gotten his ass kicked by somebody from Jersey before, right? … We know how to do that.”
Mr. Christie, a former federal prosecutor, also is eschewing the Trump camp’s charge he will not receive a fair trial in Washington.
“Yes, I believe jurors can be fair. I believe in the American people. And I believe in the fact that jurors will listen fairly and impartially,” he said on CNN.
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