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At the end of Tuesday night’s debate, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance wouldn’t give a straight answer when Democrat Tim Walz asked whether Donald Trump lost the election in 2020.
“I’m focused on the future,” Vance said, before quickly trying to change the subject: “Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?”
Walz termed it a “damning non-answer” and went on to say voters had a clear choice in the upcoming election between “who’s going to honor that democracy and who’s going to honor Donald Trump.”
Aside from one stray comment he later brushed off as sarcasm, Trump has never conceded his loss in the 2020 election and has continued to insist, without any evidence whatsoever, that it was stolen.
As Trump’s running mate, it’s not surprising Vance would deflect from Trump’s allegedly criminal conduct related to the election. But what does pandemic-era “censorship” by the Biden administration have to do with an election that happened before he took office?
Republicans have accused the Biden administration of illegally “jawboning” social media companies into suppressing dubious content about the COVID-19 pandemic since the outbreak began. The Supreme Court this year threw out a lawsuit from social media users and two Republican state attorneys general, however, claiming their First Amendment rights had been violated. Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett ruled that the plaintiffs failed to show anyone in the government actually forced any platforms to impose their content moderation rules against certain posts.
Still, Republicans see a pattern of collusion between Big Tech and the Deep State, of which their central example is the controversy over Hunter Biden’s laptop. In 2020, Facebook and Twitter appended fact-checks to Trump’s posts. They also temporarily suppressed links to an October New York Post story about material obtained from President Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s laptop, due to concerns about the provenance of the material and memories of 2016, when Russia hacked and leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee in an effort to boost Trump’s candidacy. Republicans decried the supposed coverup as election interference on Biden’s behalf.
Vance didn’t mention Hunter Biden on Tuesday, but he has before in the same context.
“October surprises are part of American democracy, and whether you think Hunter Biden is as major an issue as I do or disagree, in American democracy you let the voters decide,” Vance told the New York Times in June. “That was a way in which the basic democratic will of America was obstructed.”
The material from Hunter Biden’s laptop has since been authenticated, investigated and used against him in criminal cases and even an impeachment attempt against his father, though the central allegation that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s business dealings has remained unsubstantiated. The laptop was legitimate, but the material it contained turned out to be less of a bombshell than Republicans thought.
On Tuesday, Vance tried to build the supposed censorship into a scandal even bigger than Trump’s mob riot at the Capitol. Vance portrayed Harris as pursuing censorship “at an industrial scale,” calling it “a much bigger threat to democracy than what Donald Trump said when he said that protesters should peacefully protest on January 6th.”
That, of course, is wildly mischaracterizing the events of Jan. 6, 2021. In the speech he gave that riled up his supporters near the White House that day, Trump used the word “peacefully” once. The speech was otherwise full of false claims about fraud and exhortations to fight.
“We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong,” Trump said at the time.
He continued, “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Thousands of his supporters then marched to the Capitol and laid siege to the building for hours, scaling walls, breaking through windows and doors, storming the legislative chambers, interrupting the election certification and injuring dozens of police officers in the process. More than 1,500 participants have since been charged with crimes.
Debate moderators asked Vance on Tuesday if he and Trump would try to challenge the election results this year, like Trump did in 2020 and 2021, but Vance would only say that he’s focused on the future. He also offered a timeline of events from that January with a glaring omission.
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“Remember, he said that on January 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully. And on January 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the President. Donald Trump left the White House,” Vance said, eliding the actual events of Jan. 6.
In response, Walz noted that Trump’s previous vice president, Mike Pence, who refused Trump’s entreaties to block the congressional certification of Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, wasn’t onstage because Trump had replaced him as his running mate.
“What I’m concerned about is where is the firewall with Donald Trump?” Walz said. “Where is the firewall if he knows he could do anything, including taking an election, and his Vice President’s not going to stand to it. That’s what we’re asking you, America. Will you stand up?”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a top Democrat from the Jan. 6 committee as well as the House committee that investigated corruption allegations against Joe Biden, told HuffPost that Trump only chose Vance because Vance has shown the former president loyalty. Vance has even said he would have done what Trump wanted if he, rather than Pence, had been presiding over the certification.
“Walz’s devastating question last night exposed all of Vance’s acrobatic contortions, somersaults, reversals, contradictions and lies for what they are: the apparatus of his overweening and reckless ambition,” Raskin said. “As I like to say, JD Vance has no convictions, but that’s OK because Trump has 34 of them and he can share.”
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