DeSantis Says He 'Didn't Enjoy' Deadly Jan. 6 Insurrection, But Urges People To Move On

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, on Tuesday said he “didn’t enjoy seeing what happened” at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but urged Republicans to move past the deadly insurrection and focus on President Joe Biden’s mistakes instead.

Asked by a high school student whether Donald Trump violated the peaceful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election, DeSantis did not directly answer and instead offered what he thinks would be a winning strategy for Republicans in 2024.

“If this election is about Biden’s failures and our vision for the future, we are going to win,” he told an audience in Hollis, New Hampshire. “If it’s about relitigating things that happened two, three years ago, we’re going to lose.”

DeSantis didn’t reference Trump and pointed to his own reelection in Florida last year, when he managed to defeat his Democratic challenger, Charlie Crist, by nearly 20 percentage points.

“And at the end of the day, you know, we need to win, and we need to get this done,” DeSantis said. “So I wasn’t anywhere near Washington that day. I have nothing to do with what happened that day. Obviously, I didn’t enjoy seeing what happened, but we’ve got to go forward on this stuff. We cannot be looking backwards and be mired in the past.”

In the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, DeSantis condemned the violence during a press conference on Jan. 7, 2021.

“It was totally unacceptable and those folks need to be held accountable,” he said at the time. “And it doesn’t matter what banner you’re flying under, the violence is wrong, the rioting and the disorder is wrong.”

But more recently DeSantis has sought to downplay the events of that day and hasn’t ruled out pardoning the rioters or even Trump himself.

Trump’s efforts to undo the 2020 presidential election are the subject of a wide-ranging Justice Department investigation led by special counsel Jack Smith. Smith is reportedly close to completing the probe.

In an interview with Clay Travis, the host of “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show,” in May shortly after the announcement of his presidential campaign, DeSantis pledged to look at “any example of disfavored treatment” if elected president.

“I will have folks that will get together and look at all these cases ... people [who] are victims of weaponization or political targeting, and we will be aggressive at issuing pardons,” he said.

Over 1,000 people have been charged with Jan. 6-related offenses, according to The Associated Press.

On the one-year anniversary of Jan. 6, DeSantis said media would use the occasion to “smear” Trump supporters, adding that “this is their Christmas.”

“When they try to act like this is something akin to the Sept. 11 attacks, that is an insult to the people that were going into those buildings,” he said.

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