The reason that it is important to ask Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) whether he accepts that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election is not to establish whether Vance accepts reality. At least, that\u2019s not the primary reason. It is good to know, certainly, whether the guy who could be a 78-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency in four months is capable of admitting uncomfortable truths.<\/p>\n
Instead, the primary reason to ask Vance that question is to determine whether he will accept it if Trump loses the 2024 election. And based on Tuesday night\u2019s vice-presidential debate, it seems fair to assume that he will once again fall in line behind Trump \u2014 the former president who, at another point on Tuesday, made clear that he sees no urgency in declaring his acceptance of the process.<\/p>\n
Trump took several questions from reporters as part of an event in Milwaukee shortly before the debate began. At one point, he raised his purported questions about the last election and his concerns about the upcoming one.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll I want is a fair election,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s all. Just a fair, honest election. I hope we\u2019re going to get that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you trust the process this time around?\u201d a reporter asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll let you know in about, uh, 33 days,\u201d Trump replied.<\/p>\n
In other words, his trust in the electoral process necessarily depends on the outcome.<\/p>\n
As CNN\u2019s Daniel Dale delineated, Trump has elevated a number of claims in recent weeks that seem to be aimed at undermining confidence in the results. He\u2019s claimed that voting by noncitizens is a rampant problem, which it isn\u2019t. He\u2019s argued that Democrats are using overseas voting to commit fraud, which is false (as new research from the University of Washington\u2019s Center for an Informed Public explains). He argued that support for Vice President Kamala Harris is inflated, a way for him to later suggest that her vote totals are necessary artificial.<\/p>\n
In short, he\u2019s injecting skepticism about the results well in advance of Election Day, just as he did in 2020, so that he retains the ability to inject doubt about the outcome. Just as he did in 2020.<\/p>\n
His allies are lining up to bolster that effort. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), a central figure in Trump\u2019s effort to subvert the 2020 results, was asked last week if he committed to ensuring that the electoral-vote results would be tallied without incident even if Harris won.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, of course,\u201d Johnson replied \u2014 before adding an important caveat: \u201cif we have a free, fair and safe election, we\u2019re going to follow the Constitution.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2020, America had a free, fair and safe election, one that has grown only more obviously so as Trump and his allies have attempted to find weak points that might bolster his claims of fraud. But it is a central argument in Trumpworld that this didn\u2019t happen \u2014 or, at least, that it is necessary to insist that it didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Corey Lewandowski, a longtime Trump adviser who recently joined the 2024 effort, demonstrated how this works in an interview on CNN Wednesday morning.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy is this so difficult for the Trump campaign to answer?\u201d CNN\u2019s Jim Acosta asked. \u201cI mean, it\u2019s 2024. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?\u201d<\/p>\n
Lewandowski didn\u2019t answer, instead saying that voters were \u201cfocused on an election which is just under five weeks away.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can go back and re-litigate the 2020 election,\u201d he added, \u201cor we can look at what we can do to make America better for the everyday Americans who are struggling under Bidenomics.\u201d<\/p>\n
Acosta pressed him on it, noting that Trump was \u201cteeing up the same kinds of challenges after this election.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cJim, we know there was fraud,\u201d Lewandowski replied, referring to the contest four years ago. \u201cThere\u2019s no question there was some fraud that took place in the 2020 election. There\u2019s no question about that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Acosta replied that there was no \u201cwidespread\u201d fraud, prompting Lewandowski to ask what he meant by \u201cwidespread.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s worth an answer. The lack of \u201cwidespread\u201d fraud means that while, yes, there were isolated examples of people casting illegal ballots (including, multiple times, for Trump), there\u2019s no evidence that any systemic fraud occurred or even that any fraud occurred which might constitute any non-miniscule portion of the votes cast in a jurisdiction. Think of it like lightning strikes: yes, people sometimes get hit by lightning. Daily life, however, is not affected by this occurring.<\/p>\n
But Lewandowski can\u2019t say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fairly, both because he is a Trump loyalist who understands that Trump doesn\u2019t want people to say this and because he knows that Trump wants to keep the door open to making similar claims this time around.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t the debate moderators who asked Vance about the 2020 outcome, by the way. Instead it was Harris\u2019s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D). He asked Vance if he acknowledged Trump\u2019s loss in 2020, with Vance sidestepping the question. Walz described this as a \u201cdamning non-answer,\u201d which isn\u2019t inaccurate.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, Vance also attempted to rationalize Trump\u2019s actions after his 2020 loss. He trotted out a tired bit of whataboutism suggesting that Democrats had engaged in similar election denialism. (Lewandowski did this, too.) But he also downplayed what Trump did to a truly striking degree.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020,\u201d he claimed, \u2018and my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square, and that\u2019s all I\u2019ve said and that\u2019s all that Donald Trump has said.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were problems\u201d is very much not \u201call that Donald Trump has said.\u201d But even if it had been, there\u2019s never been any evidence that there were problems in the first place.<\/p>\n
Vance also shrugged that the effects of Trump\u2019s denialism, saying that you couldn\u2019t argue that Trump was a threat to democracy when \u201che peacefully gave over power on January the 20th as we have done for 250 years in this country.\u201d How can you say that the streaker disrupted the game when he left the field of his own volition?<\/p>\n
In the end, though, Vance did make a commitment on the subject.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we want to say that we need to respect the results of the election, I\u2019m on board,\u201d Vance said.<\/p>\n
Sure. At least until Election Day.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The reason that it is important to ask Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) whether he accepts that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election is not to establish whether Vance accepts reality. At least, that\u2019s not the primary reason. It is good to know, certainly, whether the guy who could be a 78-year-old heartbeat away from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10504,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}