Donald Trump and J. D. Vance are running to win the 2024 election, not the 2020 election. Perhaps someone should remind them of this.
During last week’s debate with Kamala Harris, when asked if he acknowledges that he lost in 2020, Trump dug in at length:
They should have sent it back to the legislatures for approval. . . . There’s so much proof. All you have to do is look at it. . . . No judge looked at it. . . . They said we didn’t have standing . . . a technicality. Can you imagine a system where a person in an election doesn’t have standing, the president of the United States doesn’t have standing? That’s how we lost. If you look at the facts, and I’d love to have you . . . do a special on it. I’ll show you Georgia and I’ll show you Wisconsin and I’ll show you Pennsylvania. . . . We have so many facts and statistics.
Trump is still wrong, of course. There remains no remotely plausible evidence of fraud or illegality of sufficient scale to change the outcome in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, or any other state he lost by 10,000 or more votes in 2020. No state legislature was prepared to conclude otherwise, and none should have been asked to. Moreover, Trump would have needed to overturn at least three different state losses to deny Joe Biden the presidency. And the dismissal of many of Trump’s lawsuits for lack of standing was not a “technicality”: Numerous courts concluded that he simply hadn’t presented any evidence challenging enough Biden votes to call the outcome into question. That doesn’t mean the 2020 election was free of fraud or illegality; it just means that courts hearing challenges to elections don’t sit to grade the election, only to determine if there’s a basis to throw out the result. There wasn’t.
More to the immediate point, nobody who isn’t already voting for Trump is going to be persuaded by this. Looking backwards to 2020 helps remind swing voters skeptical of the Biden-Harris record why they have justifiable concerns about trusting Trump with power again. It also helps discourage Trump’s own die-hard supporters from voting by rekindling suspicions that the election system is rigged. And it ate up valuable time that Trump should have been using to define Kamala Harris before an audience of nearly half the electorate in what may have been their only debate. Only belatedly did Trump arrive on the answer he should have given in the first place: “You know what? That doesn’t matter. Because we have to solve the problem that we have right now. That’s old news.”
Vance, at an event the day before the debate, took the same bait. Asked if he would have overturned the election results if he’d been in Mike Pence’s shoes, Vance, too, went into a lengthy explanation of how “I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors. . . . We would have had a big debate. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that the results would have been any different, but we at least would have had the debate in Pennsylvania and Georgia about how to better have a rational election system where legal ballots are cast.”
As Vance ought to know, Pence had no legal authority under either the Twelfth Amendment or the Electoral Count Act to reject the slates of electors the states submitted. Nor should he have attempted such a drastic step without being certain that the resulting constitutional crisis was necessary to alter an incorrect outcome. Yet, Vance professes to be agnostic even today on this point. Vance says he wanted “a debate” about how to “have a rational election system,” but as the events of January 6 dramatically demonstrated, protracting the contest of the election produced the opposite of rational debate, and obscured in a fog of acrimony and violence every legitimate concern over how that year’s elections were run.
Worse, Vance insisted on slandering the honorable man Trump chose twice as his running mate, and whom 74 million Americans voted to reelect in 2020:
I have no personal problem with Mike Pence. I’ve never really talked to him. But I think that the idea that the reason Mike Pence isn’t on board with Donald Trump is over the election of 2020 . . . I think in reality that if Donald Trump wanted to start a nuclear war with Russia, Mike Pence would be at the front of the line endorsing him right now. And fundamentally, the reason the old guard of the Republican Party hates Donald Trump, it’s not because of January 6, 2021, whatever your views on it. It’s because Donald Trump doesn’t think that we should start stupid wars with foreign countries, and that’s why they all hate him.
Vance is entitled to his foreign-policy views, and even to suspect that differences with Trump over foreign policy have been a significant factor in his estrangement from traditional Republicans. But it is a calumny to claim that Pence desires nuclear war with Russia, and a double calumny to suggest that he is therefore lying about why he can no longer support his old boss. Pence served Trump loyally during the years when many foreign-policy hawks were criticizing him. He kept his counsel private even when many Trump critics wished him to speak out. After Trump demanded that Pence violate his oath of office and his conscience, and riled up a mob that stampeded into the Capitol amid cries to hang Pence, one can hardly blame him for deciding not to sign up for a repetition. He has been admirably forthright about this, even at great cost to his own presidential bid, and shame on Vance — who admits that he hasn’t even spoken to Pence — for calling him a liar.
Vance should also recall that his own foreign-policy views are far from unanimously held among potential Republican voters, and neither are they unanimously held by down-ballot Republican candidates whose success or failure will have a large influence on the next administration’s capacity to govern. Vitriolic attacks on the motives of anyone who supports aid to Ukraine are not apt to unite the GOP coalition at this late date.
Like Trump, Vance should simply have said that this was old news. It won’t win any votes, and it stands to lose them. If convictions of honor and good sense are not enough to get Trump and Vance to stop tilting at the windmill of 2020, at least political calculation ought to enter into their thinking less than two months from Election Day.