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’s seventh-most-populous state, aiding Donald Trump’s 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 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’s all irrelevant.
What’s important is that Vance claimed that Trump didn’t lose the election and that Vance unquestionably understands that Trump did lose the election.
The exchange was triggered when Vance invited questions from reporters at a rally in Pennsylvania. Gray Television’s Peter Zampa asked Vance “what message … it sends to independent voters when you do not directly answer the question: Did Donald Trump lose in 2020?�
So, after a flurry of booing from the audience, Vance directly answered the question.
“First of all, on the election of 2020, I’ve answered this question directly a million times: No. I think there are serious problems in 2020,� he said. “So did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use. Okay?�
“But look, I really couldn’t care less if you agree or disagree with me on this issue,� he continued. “And here’s the thing that I focus on because, what the media will do, they’ll focus on the court cases or they’ll 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.�
The audience cheered.
“Now, let’s take that as a baseline reality. Even the journalists who constantly fact-check me admit that that’s real,� Vance said. “Well, okay, you could say — well, let’s 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’s the substance of what we’re focused on. And that’s what we care the most about.�
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a graduate of Yale Law deftly navigates between Trump’s breathless insistences about his 2020 victory and a superficially defensible claim that can also serve as an attack on his political opponents.
The first tell, of course is “not by the words that I would use.� Well, sure. Because the words an honest person would use when asked if Trump lost are “yes� or “of course.� But Vance will not use those words because — well, see Job Number Three above.
“What the media will do,� Vance says, is “focus on the court cases or they’ll focus on some crazy conspiracy theory.� Put another way, when adjudicating whether there is any reason to think that Trump didn’t 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 — often also dismissing the purported evidence offered by the pro-Trump side. We will also note that those “conspiracy theories� — like the ones elevated constantly by Vance’s running mate — are meritless.
But — as a Yale Law graduate might presumably know! — it is not up to the media to offer the evidence here. It’s up to Trump and his allies. They’re the ones saying the election was stolen, not us, and so they’re 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’s the-election-was-stolen side has never come close to making its case.
In his response, though, Vance tries to make the case — or at least enough of a case to justify his not-in-my-words response, that the “baseline reality� is that “large technology companies censored Americans from talking about things like the Hunter Biden laptop story� which “had a major, major consequence on the election.�
This is, for lack of a pithier way to put it, an intensely dumb argument.
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’s son Hunter that was blocked by the social media company then known as Twitter, while Facebook made it less prominent.
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’s efforts to (however modestly) destabilize the country. So the government and these companies were wary of again elevating stolen material — and the provenance of the New York Post story was nebulous enough to trigger a cautious response.
Either way, this not only didn’t have a “major, major consequence on the election,� it’s 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 — predicated on people revisiting their vote choice months later, already a dubious proposition — didn’t 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.
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! “Censorship is bad. And that’s the substance of what we’re focused on,� Vance said. “And that’s what we care the most about� — a phrase that reads slightly differently given the context of the preceding sentence.
Vance, like many Trump-allied Republicans, knows that the former president’s claims about 2020 are false. And, like many Trump-allied Republicans, he’s cobbled together an argument in which he can amplify some politically useful wrongdoing on the part of his opponents when pressed on the question.
Unlike every other Trump-allied Republican, though, he gets asked this question a lot, in part because, as Trump’s vice president, he may be put in a position where he’s forced to choose between reality and what Trump wants to believe. Trump’s 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.
Vance’s real answer, the important one, is that he would choose Trump.
