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Well, that and Vance’s repeated willingness to buy into Trump’s rhetoric, no matter how negative it ends up later. In an interview Sunday, President Trump said on January 6, 2021, he did exactly what he wanted, blocking electors in states that voted for Joe Biden, posing a dangerous challenge to American democracy. Like when I said I was deaf.
Mr. Vance was speaking to ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, who seemed focused on testing the limits of senators’ loyalty to Mr. Trump. If there is a limit, Stephanopoulos has not found it.
For example, he was asked how he felt about Trump being found responsible for the sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll, one of the many women who accused him of wrongdoing. Mr. Vance waved it off.
“For victims of sexual assault, I believe that what Donald Trump is trying to do is restore prosperity, but electing Donald Trump as president has made their lives worse in some way. “I think it’s actually very unfair to say that it is,” Vance said.
As Mr. Vance envisions, the prospect of future financial benefits may not provide solace to assault victims.
Vance also disparaged the ruling by suggesting that New York is one of several “far-left jurisdictions” in which Trump has been charged, saying this is a sign of Trump’s alleged crimes during his stay. He hinted that it was not the result, but rather unfair treatment of Mr. Trump. their jurisdiction. Of course, the argument that a jury would rule against Trump solely for political reasons contradicts the popular right-wing idea that Democrats are part of a credulous collective consciousness.
(As an aside, the senator’s fervent disdain for wealthy donors who fund aggressive legal battles may not sit well with his chief political backer, Peter Thiel. do not have.)
Stephanopoulos then asked Vance about the 2020 election.
An ABC anchor asked, “If you were vice president on January 6th, would you have certified the election results?”
President Trump on the same day urged Vice President Mike Pence not to do so, and instead asked Pence to reject the electoral votes submitted by states supporting Biden. In the end, Vance said he would.
“If I had been vice president, I would have told Pennsylvania, Georgia, and many other states that they needed multiple electoral votes, and I think Congress should have taken the fight from there,” Vance said. “This is a legitimate way to address an election that many people, including myself, believe had a lot of problems in 2020.”
That’s not a legal method at all. This is especially true when considering the “problems” that Mr. Vance allegedly identified.
“Do you think it was a problem that big tech companies worked with intelligence agencies to censor President Donald Trump’s campaign? Yes,” he said at another point in the interview. “Do you think it’s a problem that Pennsylvania changed its voting rules in the middle of election season in a way that even some Pennsylvania courts have called illegal?” Yes, I think these were problems. , George. ”
Let’s address the second thing first. Pennsylvania expanded voting access to allow more mail-in voting by 2020, yes. But that happened in a bill passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2019, before the pandemic. Republicans attempted to challenge these changes, arguing they violated the state constitution, but a lower court ruled in early 2022 that the changes violated the state constitution. However, this decision was overturned by the state Supreme Court.
In fact, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court considered this issue in November 2020. Chief Justice Thomas Saylor said that even if the law is unconstitutional, “voters rely too much on the Supreme Court in good faith.”Create a no-excuse mail-in voting system [the law] This is to justify judicial consideration of the extreme and untenable remedies proposed by the appellants. ” In other words, people have already voted legally by the millions, and those legal votes should not be thrown away, even if the law should never have been enacted. is.
This is Vance’s argument. Since the rules were changed (more than a year before the election), the opinions of voters (most of whom probably went to vote in person for Trump) should be ignored. Because it was a “problem”.
Vance’s other argument is equally unnatural. He is rehashing a common right-wing claim that the government pressured social media companies to shut down information online. More precisely, he exaggerated This is a common allegation that suggests the Trump campaign was targeted.
All of this can be shortened to: Elon Musk stumbled into purchasing Twitter Inc. (now Company X), believing the company’s rhetoric that it was trying to crack down on right-wing accounts and views. He handed over internal documents to writers similarly motivated to believe in the origins of the rhetoric, and in December 2022, they published hand-picked reports suggesting the government had directed social media sites to silence right-wing voices. started creating a document. This includes negative coverage of Hunter Biden in October 2020, an event that has been thoroughly reviewed as clinching the election outcome in the collective memory of the right. (It wasn’t.)
In reality, the government was enlisting the help of social media companies to stop misinformation about voting and the coronavirus pandemic. There was also talk about being wary of potential foreign interference activity, given that in 2016 Russian hackers triggered a widespread release of stolen information intended to sway the election. When the Hunter Biden article broke just weeks before Election Day, it was (temporarily) silenced due to concerns that it was a similar effort.
X’s lawyer admitted that Vance’s claims were wrong. But consider his argument. The results of some states that favored Biden were rejected because some X accounts were muted for spreading misinformation or (again, briefly) for sharing the Hunter Biden story. Does that mean we should?
Moreover, it should have been rejected in January 2021 for that reason. So it took him almost two years. in front Were these dubious or debunked claims actually made?
That’s exactly the perk. Vance said there were no issues that would require him to reconsider the 2020 election results and give Trump a second term. What he’s saying, and what Trump has been saying all along, is that he wants Trump to serve his second term, which comes down to the counting of electoral votes on January 6th. This means that the reason for this is an after-the-fact justification. That would have been fine.
This is intellectually dishonest and a huge problem for democracy. If there was still any doubt, J.D. Vance revealed in this interview that he was willing to follow Trump into the “very negative places” that Trump once warned him about.
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