No one dwells on the 2020 election nearly as much as Donald Trump, who reminds supporters of his refusal to concede at nearly every campaign stop. But in an hour-long interview with The New York Times, Trump's latest running mate wanted to talk about anything but the former president's central, animating grievance.
"Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?" is the simple question that the Times' Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, five times during an interview that is set to be published in full on Sunday. Five times Vance refused to answer.
"There's an obsession with focusing on 2020," Vance said at one point, trying to shift the conversation to the serial falsehoods that the Trump campaign has spread about immigrants.
Asked again, Vance came close to conceding that Trump lost by blaming Twitter, now X, for limiting links to a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop.
"Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes?" Vance responded (the Trump-Vance campaign itself has had X, now led by supporter Elon Musk, remove links to a story about its own allegedly hacked campaign material, the Times reported Friday).
“Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again," Garcia-Navarro continued, "did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”
Again, Vance — chosen to replace former Vice President Mike Pence after saying he would have denied certification of Trump's loss — refused to say "yes" or "no."
"I've answered your question with another question," Vance insisted. "You answer my question and I'll answer yours."
The Ohio senator went on to dismiss the fact that there was no evidence of mass fraud in the last presidential election as a mere "slogan." As for 2024, he said if "there are problems" then voters can expect a repeat "in the same way that Democrats protested in 2004 and Donald Trump raised issues in 2020."
In a statement, Sarafina Chitikia, a spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign, argued that Vance was only demonstrating why he was picked for the job.
"Donald Trump chose JD Vance to be his running mate for one reason and one reason only: He will do what Mike Pence wouldn't and put Donald Trump over the Constitution," she said.
