Ron DeSantis said charges against Donald Trump over his election subversion that culminated in the deadly January 6 attack on Congress would not be good for the US.
“I hope he doesn’t get charged,” the Florida governor told CNN in a much-trailed interview on Tuesday. “I don’t think it’ll be good for the country.”
DeSantis also sought to brush off concerns about the state of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, in which he trails Trump by around 30 points while reportedly experiencing fundraising problems and implementing staff changes.
Media outlets reporting such challenges were biased, DeSantis said, having “been saying that I’ve been doing poorly for my whole time as governor, basically”.
DeSantis did however perhaps unwittingly point to a perceived problem with his campaign: that it is largely based on attacks on “wokeness” in public life (loosely put, the pursuit of liberal policies meant to achieve equity on grounds of race and sexual and gender identity) when many Americans cannot define what he means.
“Not everyone really knows what wokeness is,” DeSantis admitted. “I mean, I’ve defined it, but a lotta people who rail against wokeness can’t even define it.”
DeSantis also remained reluctant to attack Trump, even as the former president labours under unprecedented legal jeopardy including, so far, 71 criminal indictments.
Earlier on Tuesday, Trump seized the news agenda when he said he had been told he was a target of the investigation by the special counsel Jack Smith into his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and had been told to appear before a federal grand jury in Washington on Thursday. Already facing charges over hush-money payments and his retention of classified information, the former president denies all wrongdoing.
But when asked on CNN if Trump should be held accountable for election subversion in battleground states that culminated in his incitement of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, DeSantis declined a chance to land a meaningful blow.
“So here’s the problem,” he said. “This country is going down the road of criminalising political differences. And I think that’s wrong.”
DeSantis repeatedly name-checked the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, and his indictment of Trump over his hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels, who claims an affair, and the investigation of links between Trump and Russia during the 2016 election, which closed in 2019.
The governor did not mention the charges against Trump and his valet, Walt Nauta, over the retention and handling of classified information after Trump left power.
“As president,” DeSantis said, reaching for a Republican party talking point, “my job [will be] to restore a single standard of justice, to end weaponisation of these [federal] agencies.”
He added: “This country needs to have a debate about the country’s future. If I’m the nominee I will be able to focus on President [Joe] Biden’s failures, then I’ll be able to articulate a positive vision for the future.
“I don’t think it serves us good to have a presidential election focused on what happened four years ago in January and so I want to focus on looking forward. I don’t want to look back, I do not want to see [Trump charged], I hope he doesn’t get charged. I don’t think it’ll be good for the country. But at the same time, I’ve got to focus on looking forward and that’s what we’re going to do.”
As the CNN interview was broadcast, a Michigan prosecutor charged 16 people over a fake electors scheme there.
DeSantis did look backwards to Trump’s election subversion earlier in the day, at a press conference in West Columbia, South Carolina, which was meant to focus on a promise to “rip wokeness out of the US military” but which featured repeated questions about Trump and his extreme legal predicament.
DeSantis said then: “Look, there’s a difference between being brought up on criminal charges and doing things. Like for example, I think it was shown how [Trump] was in the White House [on 6 January 2021] and didn’t do anything while things were going on [at the Capitol]. He should have come out more forcefully, of course.”
It was perhaps DeSantis’s strongest remark to date about the Capitol riot, which Trump incited in an attempt to block certification of his defeat by Biden, which Trump did nothing to call off for some hours, and to which nine deaths including law enforcement suicides are now linked.
But DeSantis qualified his remark, saying: “But to try to criminalise that [inaction], that’s a different issue entirely.”
That DeSantis was forced to repeatedly answer questions about Trump rather than his policy announcement showed that Trump had once again hijacked an attempt by his rival to make an impact on the campaign trail.
In his CNN interview, DeSantis dodged a question about an issue likely to feature heavily in the presidential election: whether he would seek to replicate the six-week abortion ban he signed in Florida on the national stage.
Strict bans in Republican states, introduced after the US supreme court removed the right to abortion last year, have rebounded on the GOP at the ballot box, with Democrats campaigning on protecting women’s right to make their own healthcare choices.
DeSantis told CNN: “I think the danger from Congress is if we lose the election, they’re going to try to nationalise abortion up until the moment of birth, and in some liberal states you actually have post-birth abortions, and I think that that’s wrong.”
There is no such thing as a “post-birth abortion”. Killing a baby after birth is against US law.
In a statement, Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser, called DeSantis “an unlikable candidate [with] no campaign message, and rapidly sinking poll numbers” and the CNN interview “an afternoon hit that nobody will watch”.
“The real story here,” Miller added, “is that the DeSantis campaign doesn’t know how to turn things around with their current candidate.”
