Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ latest attempt to position himself as a more plausible GOP presidential contender than Donald Trump without criticizing the former president is working as predicted.
DeSantis called the Republican Party’s previous electoral struggles “a culture of losing” while in Iowa on Saturday.
Twitter users noted the Florida governor is still hesitant to criticize a past president.
DeSantis said “the time for excuses is over” and that the party “can’t focus the election on the past or on other side issues,” but he didn’t reference the 2020 election-denying former president.
Still, he liked that “culture of losing” term so much that he used it again on Monday during a news conference in Florida when a reporter urged him to recognize that Trump lost and there was no election fraud.
The news conference supported state legislation to limit or eliminate state college expenditure on race and diversity initiatives, according to AlterNet. DeSantis also sought to warn prospective college students who wanted to study “gender ideology” to leave Florida.
“I think the party has developed a culture of losing,” DeSantis said of Trump, but not young college students pursuing professional objectives.
On Monday, Twitter mocked DeSantis for his hesitancy to criticize Trump.