“Whoever puts their hand on the Bible on Jan. 20 every four years is the winner,” DeSantis said in an interview with NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns. Pressed to be more precise, DeSantis added in his first broadcast network interview since he launched his presidential campaign.

Thus spoke DeSantis, definitively, “No, of course [Trump] lost. Joe Biden’s the president.”

Developing nickname for the battle-scarred chaser of Orange Man Bad: Ron DeathWishantis. Does Gov. Ron tease scorpions and tempt water moccasins in his spare time?

OK, we hyperbolize. Because that’s what you do during presidential campaign season. In the Age of Trump (or Obama or Biden, but especially Trump), nuance is for losers and scalawags and fans of Jeb!

It’s a bold gambit, says The Grey Lady:

Mr. DeSantis’s remarks — his first blunt acknowledgment of the 2020 outcome after three years of hedging — were the latest sign that Mr. Trump’s rivals are seeking to use his growing legal troubles against him. In the days since Mr. Trump was indicted on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, both Mr. DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence have more sharply broken from the former president over his actions leading up to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

No, do what DeSantis has been doing for weeks (at least) — explain that even as he plugged up the swamp he’d vowed to drain, No. 45 baited his own trap (election provisions of the CARES Act), then stepped right into it — and MAGA claps hands over its ears while babbling Trump-Trump-Trump-Trump-Trump! MAGA does not do nuance. MAGA does not to contextual analysis.

What MAGA does is secularize the old bumper sticker, replacing the Almighty with their temporal prophet: Trump said it. I believe it. That settles it. Check it out:

“Any politician that says that Donald Trump lost that election and Biden really won is done,” Mike Lindell, the pillow company founder who has been a vocal promoter of conspiracy theories about election machines, said in an interview on Monday with The New York Times. “Their campaign is basically over when they make a comment like that.”

Never mind that this is another of those times when two thoughts that seem to be in conflict can be simultaneously factual. The 2020 election was a botched job. But the outcome was not decided by widespread fraud.

In a bold attempt to look forward rather than flog decaying mules, DeSantis grasps the truth of both.

“The issue is, 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, but I also think Republicans didn’t fight back. You’ve got to fight back when that is happening,” he said.

Democrats aggressively pulled all the levers available: ballot harvesting, maximizing mail-in ballots, feeding unattended drop boxes, welcoming Zuckerbucks, and proactively urging elected officials and courts alike into novel, pandemic-inspired interpretations of election laws.

Republicans — the RNC and the Trump campaign —  responded, mostly after-the-fact and ineffectively, learning, again, courts hate to toss out certified ballots, never mind how they earned their stamps of approval.

In Florida, DeSantis responded this spring by challenging the Legislature to outlaw practices readily subject to abuse. In May, he signed Senate Bill 90, toughening voter ID provisions, banning ballot harvesting, prohibiting the mass mailing of unsolicited ballots, blocking private money from administering elections (Zuckerbucks), and increasing election transparency.

If that makes DeSantis a RINO — a curious accusations launched from the keyboards of those defending a documented Friend of Hillary — the GOP could use a lot more like him.

Here’s hoping DeSantis can, in these early weeks of the presidential debate season, find sufficient numbers of Republican primary voters — including Trump sympathizers — with ears to hear, and appreciate, the hard truths of 2020. The next election is too precious to waste on revenge schemes.