Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) currently has three jobs. Listed in order of increasing importance they are: serving as one of two senators for America\u2019s seventh-most-populous state, aiding Donald Trump\u2019s bid to regain the presidency, and keeping Trump from being mad at him.<\/p>\n
Given the importance of that last role, we should not be at all surprised that, when he finally offered a concrete position after weeks of being asked, Vance asserted that Trump had in fact not lost the 2020 presidential election. He attempted to rationalize and defend his response, as we will explain in a moment, but that\u2019s all irrelevant.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s important is that Vance claimed that Trump didn\u2019t lose the election and that Vance unquestionably understands that Trump did lose the election.<\/p>\n
The exchange was triggered when Vance invited questions from reporters at a rally in Pennsylvania. Gray Television\u2019s Peter Zampa asked Vance \u201cwhat message \u2026 it sends to independent voters when you do not directly answer the question: Did Donald Trump lose in 2020?\u201d<\/p>\n
So, after a flurry of booing from the audience, Vance directly answered the question.<\/p>\n
\u201cFirst of all, on the election of 2020, I\u2019ve answered this question directly a million times: No. I think there are serious problems in 2020,\u201d he said. \u201cSo did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use. Okay?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut look, I really couldn\u2019t care less if you agree or disagree with me on this issue,\u201d he continued. \u201cAnd here\u2019s the thing that I focus on because, what the media will do, they\u2019ll focus on the court cases or they\u2019ll focus on some crazy conspiracy theory. What I know, what verifiably I know happened is that, in 2020, large technology companies censored Americans from talking about things like the Hunter Biden laptop story and that had a major, major consequence on the election.\u201d<\/p>\n
The audience cheered.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow, let\u2019s take that as a baseline reality. Even the journalists who constantly fact-check me admit that that\u2019s real,\u201d Vance said. \u201cWell, okay, you could say \u2014 well, let\u2019s say your view is that happened and we still think Trump lost or that happened and we think that means Trump won. Who cares? It happened. Censorship is bad. And that\u2019s the substance of what we\u2019re focused on. And that\u2019s what we care the most about.\u201d<\/p>\n
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a graduate of Yale Law deftly navigates between Trump\u2019s breathless insistences about his 2020 victory and a superficially defensible claim that can also serve as an attack on his political opponents.<\/p>\n
The first tell, of course is \u201cnot by the words that I would use.\u201d Well, sure. Because the words an honest person would use when asked if Trump lost are \u201cyes\u201d or \u201cof course.\u201d But Vance will not use those words because \u2014 well, see Job Number Three above.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat the media will do,\u201d Vance says, is \u201cfocus on the court cases or they\u2019ll focus on some crazy conspiracy theory.\u201d Put another way, when adjudicating whether there is any reason to think that Trump didn\u2019t win in 2020, the media will assess the evidence for and against that idea. We will point out that the Trump campaign and its allies attempted to get courts to intervene, with courts almost uniformly rejecting the idea that results were tainted \u2014 often also dismissing the purported evidence offered by the pro-Trump side. We will also note that those \u201cconspiracy theories\u201d \u2014 like the ones elevated constantly by Vance\u2019s running mate \u2014 are meritless.<\/p>\n
But \u2014 as a Yale Law graduate might presumably know! \u2014 it is not up to the media to offer the evidence here. It\u2019s up to Trump and his allies. They\u2019re the ones saying the election was stolen, not us, and so they\u2019re the ones who bear the burden of proof. Vance is saying, Oh, the media dismisses all of this by lazily waving at these stale arguments, to which I, a member of the media, say: Yeah! We are. Because having debunked and dismantled nonsense and misdirection for nearly four years, we have the luxury of simply noting that Vance\u2019s the-election-was-stolen side has never come close to making its case.<\/p>\n
In his response, though, Vance tries to make the case \u2014 or at least enough of a case to justify his not-in-my-words response, that the \u201cbaseline reality\u201d is that \u201clarge technology companies censored Americans from talking about things like the Hunter Biden laptop story\u201d which \u201chad a major, major consequence on the election.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is, for lack of a pithier way to put it, an intensely dumb argument.<\/p>\n
Yes, there was a period of several hours in mid-October 2020 during which a New York Post story focused on an email purportedly sourced to a laptop owned by Joe Biden\u2019s son Hunter that was blocked by the social media company then known as Twitter, while Facebook made it less prominent.<\/p>\n
This was not because the story indirectly targeted Joe Biden. It was because the 2016 election had seen the elevation of information stolen by Russia and injected into the political conversation, aiding Russia\u2019s efforts to (however modestly) destabilize the country. So the government and these companies were wary of again elevating stolen material \u2014 and the provenance of the New York Post story was nebulous enough to trigger a cautious response.<\/p>\n
Either way, this not only didn\u2019t have a \u201cmajor, major consequence on the election,\u201d it\u2019s probable that it had next to no consequence. Vance has in the past elevated a poll conducted on behalf of a right-wing organization to claim that the suppression of this story affected huge swaths of votes, but the poll \u2014 predicated on people revisiting their vote choice months later, already a dubious proposition \u2014 didn\u2019t even ask about the laptop story! Instead, it asked whether people would have changed their votes had they believed some false\/exaggerated claims about Biden and China.<\/p>\n
And never mind that his campaign also pressured the company now known as X to muffle information about him that was allegedly stolen by Iranian hackers! \u201cCensorship is bad. And that\u2019s the substance of what we\u2019re focused on,\u201d Vance said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s what we care the most about\u201d \u2014 a phrase that reads slightly differently given the context of the preceding sentence.<\/p>\n
Vance, like many Trump-allied Republicans, knows that the former president\u2019s claims about 2020 are false. And, like many Trump-allied Republicans, he\u2019s cobbled together an argument in which he can amplify some politically useful wrongdoing on the part of his opponents when pressed on the question.<\/p>\n
Unlike every other Trump-allied Republican, though, he gets asked this question a lot, in part because, as Trump\u2019s vice president, he may be put in a position where he\u2019s forced to choose between reality and what Trump wants to believe. Trump\u2019s first running mate was put in such a position on Jan. 6, 2021, and he chose reality, which is why Trump has a new running mate.<\/p>\n
Vance\u2019s real answer, the important one, is that he would choose Trump.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) currently has three jobs. Listed in order of increasing importance they are: serving as one of two senators for America\u2019s seventh-most-populous state, aiding Donald Trump\u2019s bid to regain the presidency, and keeping Trump from being mad at him. Given the importance of that last role, we should not be at all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":11256,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11255","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\/11255","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=11255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11255\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}