There has been a lot of interest in the 2024 race about the prospect of post-election political reprisals. Republican Senator JD Vance of Ohio, however, was keen to reassure voters.
Over the summer, for example, the senator appeared on Fox News and said that Donald Trump is “not a vengeful man,” despite all evidence to the contrary. Last weekend, Vance followed the same line a little furtherwith a straight face on ABC News’ ‘This Week’:
“[Trump] was president for four years and did not go after his political opponents. You know who went after her political opponents? Kamala Harris, who has tried to arrest everything from pro-life activists to her political opponents… and used the Justice Department as a weapon against people.”
Look, I realize Vance lies a lot. By some measures, it appears he has taken lessons from his running mate on how to mislead the public on a daily basis, and the lessons have gone tragically well.
But this is just straight up gaslighting.
Let’s quickly set aside the obvious absurdity of the Vice President using the levers of federal power to attack her perceived political enemies. If Vance or anyone else in Republican politics has any evidence to support such a bizarre claim, they have kept the evidence well hidden.
The bigger problem, of course, is Trump’s record, which Vance pretends he knows nothing about.
There are basically three elements to the story that are worth keeping in mind: the recent past, the present, and the near future.
In the recent past, Trump was in the White House, where the then-president spent a bizarre amount of time and energy exacting revenge on perceived political enemies—both in the political and private sectors—seeking worthless prosecutions of opponents. All of this has been thoroughly documented and confirmed by officials who worked closely with the Republican during his tenure.
Today, Trump is a private citizen with no access to government power, but he has nonetheless tried to use his political influence to exact revenge — even against members of his own party.
As for the immediate future, the former president is essentially running on a 2024 retaliation platform: Trump wants to prosecute his perceived domestic political enemies, and he doesn’t seem particularly interested in hiding his intentions. On the contrary, he speaks of his desire to continually abuse presidential power, even raising the specter of military tribunals for his opponents.
When The Washington Post pressed Vance’s aides for some explanation, they said the Republican senator was referring to federal criminal charges when he said Trump “didn’t go after his political opponents.”
But that also makes no sense, in part because there is literally no evidence that Harris is even trying to secure federal criminal charges against her political opponents, and in part because there is overwhelming evidence that Trump has gone to great lengths during his time in office to demand that prosecutors to file charges against his alleged domestic enemies.
In other words, Vance made a patently false claim, which his team defended with another false claim.
This message updates our related previous reporting.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
