Maddow Blog | Trump buys into Vance’s message and clings to ‘rigged election lies’

At the very end of this week’s vice presidential debate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz asked Ohio Senator JD Vance a question, the relevance of which lingered long after the event. ‘He did [Donald Trump] lose the 2020 election?” the Democratic candidate asked.

His Republican rival declined to answer — the senator would only say he was “focused on the future” — and the Harris campaign quickly turned Vance’s dodge into a campaign ad.

A day later, the Republican vice presidential candidate was asked the same question, which he again dodged, accusing news organizations of being “obsessed” with the election four years ago. That same evening, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer appeared on CNN and asked Kaitlan Collins, “What are you doing, talking about something that was four years ago?” The Minnesota Congressman addedreferring to the 2020 race: “This is something that you, in the media, want to focus on on a regular basis.”

It was against this background that Trump made his running mate and congressional colleague look rather foolish a day later. NBC News reported:

“We won. We won,” the former president declared despite the reality. “We won. It was a rigged election. It was a rigged election.”

It’s not exactly a secret that Republican officials have publicly and privately begged Trump to stop pushing his ridiculous conspiracy theories about his 2020 defeat — what many have called the former president’s “big lie” — because it is in large part is a lost message. the electorate doesn’t want to hear it.

But Trump simply can’t do anything about it. Despite Vance and other leading voices in the Republican Party occasionally telling the public that the party and its destiny are “focused on the future,” Trump has a habit of fixating on the past.

Indeed, it is an important part of the Republican candidate’s message. A HuffPost report noted, even before Vance dodged the 2020-related question: “Trump had already brought up the stolen election repeatedly over the past week — he brings up 2020, unprompted, virtually every time he speaks in public , although he doesn’t.” I don’t always say explicitly that it was ‘rigged’.”

However, that was the word he used at his last event in Michigan. It was also the word he used via his social media platform Wednesday night, after Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s brutal trial was unsealed. “I didn’t rig the 2020 election, they did!” the former president wrote, pointing to a version of reality that bears no resemblance to our own.

The problem isn’t just that Trump is lying. Furthermore, the fact that the Republican presidential candidate and the vice presidential candidate are expressing conflicting messages about the 2020 race is surprising, but not the most important detail.

Ultimately, what matters most is the fact that Trump, who laid the groundwork to reject the results of his re-election bid long before Election Day 2020, is doing the same thing again.

As we discussed, the former president refuses to say whether he will accept the results of this year’s competition. He does that on a routine basis falsely tells the public That his enemies are deceivers and the election results are suspect – unless he says otherwise.

As NBC News reported, Trump has also started calling virtually everything “election interference,” damning evidence, as part of a multi-pronged effort to preemptively delegitimize the 2024 race, in case he loses.

The Republican’s efforts four years ago were a deliberate attack on democracy. As he reads from the same script, the scam has not improved with age.

If the Democrats are lucky, Trump won’t change course at all, and in the final 32 days of the election cycle, the Republican candidate will, in one event after another, spout the same whining lie that most Americans tired of a while ago.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com