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At the end of Tuesday night’s debate, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance declined to give a straight answer when Democrat Tim Walz asked whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.
“I’m focused on the future,” Vance said, before quickly trying to change the subject: “Has Kamala Harris censored Americans from expressing their opinions in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?”
Walz called it a “damn non-answer” and went on to say that voters in the upcoming election had a clear choice between “who is going to honor that democracy and who is going to honor Donald Trump.”
Aside from one stray comment that he later dismissed as sarcasm, Trump has never conceded his loss in the 2020 election and has continued to insist, without evidence, that it was stolen.
As Trump’s running mate, it is not surprising that Vance would turn away from Trump’s alleged criminal behavior in connection with the election. But what does the pandemic-era Biden administration’s “censorship” have to do with elections that took place before he took office?
Republicans have accused the Biden administration of illegally “suppressing” social media companies to suppress dubious content about the COVID-19 pandemic since the outbreak began. However, the Supreme Court this year dismissed a lawsuit from social media users and two Republican attorneys general, claiming their First Amendment rights had been violated. Trump-appointed Judge Amy Coney Barrett ruled that prosecutors failed to show that anyone in the government actually forced platforms to impose their content moderation rules on certain posts.
Yet Republicans see a pattern of collusion between Big Tech and the Deep State, their central example being the Hunter Biden laptop controversy. In 2020, Facebook and Twitter added 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, amid concerns about the material’s provenance and memories of 2016, when Russia hacked and leaked Democratic National Committee emails in an attempt to undermine the candidacy of Trump to increase. Republicans labeled the alleged cover-up as election interference on behalf of Biden.
Vance did not mention Hunter Biden on Tuesday, but he has done so before in the same context.
“October surprises are part of American democracy, and whether you think Hunter Biden is as big a problem as I am or disagree with him, in American democracy you let the voters decide,” Vance told the New York Times. “That was a way in which America’s fundamental democratic will was stymied.”
The material from Hunter Biden’s laptop has since been authenticated, investigated and used against him in criminal cases and even in an impeachment effort against his father, although the central accusation that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s business dealings has remained unsubstantiated. The laptop was legitimate, but the material on it turned out to be less of a bomb than Republicans thought.
On Tuesday, Vance tried to spin the alleged censorship into a scandal even bigger than Trump’s mob riot at the Capitol. Vance portrayed Harris as pursuing censorship “on an industrial scale” and calling it “a far greater threat to democracy than what Donald Trump said when he said protesters should protest peacefully on January 6.”
That, of course, is a complete mischaracterization of the events of January 6, 2021. In the speech he gave that roiled his supporters near the White House that day, Trump used the word “peaceful” once. The speech was also full of false claims of fraud and incitements to fight.
“We’re going to walk to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen, and some of them we probably won’t cheer for as much. Because you will never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and be strong,” Trump said at the time.
He continued, “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight hard, you will no longer have a country.”
Thousands of his supporters then marched on the Capitol and besieged the building for hours, scaling walls, breaking windows and doors, storming the legislative chambers, interrupting election certification and injuring dozens of police officers. More than 1,500 participants have now been charged with crimes.
Debate moderators asked Vance on Tuesday whether he and Trump would try to cast doubt on the election results this year, as Trump did in 2020 and 2021, but Vance would only say he is focused on the future. He also offered a timeline of events from January, with one glaring omission.
“Remember, he said the protesters should protest peacefully on January 6. And what happened on January 20? Joe Biden became president. Donald Trump left the White House,” Vance said, omitting the actual events of January 6.
In response, Walz noted that Trump’s previous vice president, Mike Pence, who refused Trump’s pleas to block congressional certification of Biden’s victory on January 6, was not on stage because Trump had replaced him as his running mate.
“What I worry about is where is the firewall with Donald Trump?” Walz said. “Where is the firewall when he knows he can do anything, including organizing elections, and his vice president won’t comply. That’s what we’re asking you, America. Would you like to get up?”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a top Democrat on the Jan. 6 committee and the House committee investigating corruption allegations against Joe Biden, told HuffPost that Trump only chose Vance because Vance showed has shown loyalty to the former president. Vance has even said he would have done what Trump wanted if he, instead of Pence, had presided over the certification.
“Walz’s devastating question last night exposed all of Vance’s acrobatic contortions, flips, reversals, contradictions and lies for what they are: the apparatus of his exaggerated and reckless ambition,” Raskin said. “As I like to say, JD Vance has no convictions, but that’s OK because Trump has 34 and he can share them.”
