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JD Vance Asserts that He and Trump Cannot Win Legitimately

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There’s a fetish in the traditional media for asking Republicans to disavow crazy things Trump has said or done. This involves Tom Cotton so frequently I’m thinking of naming the phenomenon “Cotton swabs.” Marco Rubio and — since he became Speaker — Mike Johnson are other frequent participants in “Cotton swabbing.”

Perhaps Manu Raju confronts the person in the halls of Congress, perhaps they get invited to a Sunday show. And then the reporter asks them to be outraged about something outrageous that Trump said. Rather than disavowing it, the Republican blurts out some kind of propaganda instead.

Instead of serving as an opportunity to get Republicans to distance themselves from Trump, Republicans exploit the “Cotton swab” to perform obeisance to Trump’s fascism and air propaganda on the mainstream media.

It works every single time.

Yet journalists keep trying it, never varying their method.

Because he’s a smooth and shameless liar, JD Vance is especially adept at exploiting “Cotton swabs.”

In the past week, JD’s “Cotton swabs” have involved questions about whether JD would have certified Joe Biden’s victory. It started when NYT’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked JD the question five times.

Last few questions. In the debate, you were asked to clarify if you believe Trump lost the 2020 election. Do you believe he lost the 2020 election? I think that Donald Trump and I have both raised a number of issues with the 2020 election, but we’re focused on the future. I think there’s an obsession here with focusing on 2020. I’m much more worried about what happened after 2020, which is a wide-open border, groceries that are unaffordable. And look, Lulu —

Senator, yes or no. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? Let me ask you a question. Is it OK that big technology companies censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, which independent analysis have said cost Donald Trump millions of votes?

Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes? I think that’s the question.

Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? And I’ve answered your question with another question. You answer my question and I’ll answer yours.

I have asked this question repeatedly. It is something that is very important for the American people to know. There is no proof, legal or otherwise, that Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election. But you’re repeating a slogan rather than engaging with what I’m saying, which is that when our own technology firms engage in industrial-scale censorship — by the way, backed up by the federal government — in a way that independent studies suggest affect the votes. I’m worried about Americans who feel like there were problems in 2020. I’m not worried about this slogan that people throw: Well, every court case went this way. I’m talking about something very discrete, a problem of censorship in this country that I do think affected things in 2020. And more importantly, that led to Kamala Harris’s governance, which has screwed this country up in a big way.

Senator, would you have certified the election in 2020? Yes or no? I’ve said that I would have voted against certification because of the concern that I just raised. I think that when you have technology companies —

The answer is no. When you have technology companies censoring Americans at a mass scale in a way that, again, independent studies have suggested affect the vote. I think that it’s right to protest against that, to criticize that, and that’s a totally reasonable thing.

Two other journalists imagined they could do better. After letting JD claim that Trump’s lies about Aurora have some truth to them and insisting that he knows better about disparate assistance in North Carolina, for example, Martha Raddatz again gave JD a chance to claim that the two-day delay of letting people see Hunter Biden’s dick pics swung the 2020 election, and utterly predictably, he took the opportunity to falsely claim that “big tech” had “censored” Hunter Biden’s dick pics and that that was cause enough to declare the 2020 election invalid.

RADDATZ: Senator, we’re just about out of time here. We’re just about out of time here. And I want to end with this — in interview after interview, question after question, and in the debate, you refused to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

So I’m just going to assume that if I ask you 50 times whether he lost the election, you would not acknowledge that he did. Is that correct?

VANCE: Martha, you’ve — you asked this question, I’ve been asked this question 10 times in the past couple of weeks. Of course, Donald Trump and I believe there were problems in 2020. You haven’t asked about inflation, the —

(CROSSTALK)

RADDATZ: No, I’m sorry, let’s stick to this. I know — I know —

VANCE: The American people want us to talk about how to make their lives better. They don’t want us to —

RADDATZ: Why won’t you say that? Why won’t you say that?

VANCE: Because — because, Martha, I believe that in 2020, when big tech firms were censoring American citizens, that created very serious problems. And by the way, Martha, you’re — you’re a journalist. You represent the American media.

Look at the polling on this. A lot of Americans feel like they were silenced in the run-up to the 2020 election. That is such a bigger issue. That fundamental problem —

(CROSSTALK)

RADDATZ: If you — I just want to —

VANCE: — that me and Donald Trump talking about it, and unfortunately, Martha —

RADDATZ: But I don’t understand why you want to say that you believe it?

(CROSSTALK)

VANCE: She’s — well, won’t just say what, that I think the 2020 election had some problems? I’ve said that repeatedly.

RADDATZ: Did Donald Trump lose? That’s the question, and you know that’s the question.

VANCE: Martha, I’ve said repeatedly I think the election had problems. You want to say rigged. You want to say he won. Use whatever vocabulary term you want — I want to focus on the fact that we had big technology firms censoring our fellow citizens in a way that violated our fundamental rights.

Thankfully, Phil Bump laid out the absurdity behind JD’s answer so I don’t have to. What JD claims was a question about censorship was, in fact, a question about whether, if the hard drive that right wingers claim is a laptop yielded information about China that Congress never managed to find in two years of trying, would it have changed their vote.

It is not the case that tech companies censoring a story — specifically, a New York Post story about an email attributed to a laptop owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter — cost Trump the election.

This, too, has been explored at length in the past, but it should immediately fail the smell test anyway. The 2020 election was a referendum on Trump, on his presidency and particularly on his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. It is ridiculous to suggest that this would have changed had Twitter (as it was then known) not briefly limited the sharing of a New York Post story about how one of Hunter Biden’s business partners sent him an email thanking him for getting him in the room with his father.

The “independent studies” which Vance mentioned presumably refer to one poll conducted on behalf of the right-wing Media Research Center after the election. It presented respondents with a sweeping claim linking Biden to foreign business interests, asking whether awareness of that purported link would have led people to reconsider their votes. A chunk of self-reported Biden voters said they would have.

Setting aside the vast inaccuracies inherent in having people assess what they would have done had the conditions of their decision-making been slightly different, the question didn’t even center on the New York Post story! It was about purported Chinese investors and used the same “Biden family” framing on which the failed Republican impeachment probe depended.

Even ignoring all the other false premises — that the hard drive he claims was a laptop was “censored,” that the right wing poll is accurate — not even the laptop itself, in federal hands, has substantiated illegal conduct beyond a known crack addiction and a gun purchase.

I would add that, in his answer to NYT, JD justifies a claim about what he would have done in 2021 with a partisan poll not taken until two years later. His answer is based on false premiise after false premise and a time machine.

But, as Bump also lays out, this answer is especially ridiculous given the confirmation that Trump’s campaign has done what JD falsely insinuates the Biden campaign did in 2020: Ask a tech company (probably all tech companies) to censor data.

As Ken Klippenstein described when declaring victory, Elon Musk personally made the decision to reverse his permanent suspension when NYT exposed the Trump campaign’s involvement.

Late last night, X (née Twitter) reinstated my account after banning me on September 26 for publishing the J.D. Vance dossier. Elon Musk personally intervened, in the name of “free speech principles,” according to correspondence I’ve seen. Musk had previously declared me “evil” before X suspended me in a move we now know was coordinated with the Trump campaign.

“I’ve asked X Safety to unsuspend him, even though I think he is an awful human being,” Musk told political commentator Brian Krassenstein (and frequent doppelgänger of mine) on October 11. “Important to stay true to free speech principles.”

The reinstatement of my account later that day reversed what X had previously informed me was a “permanent” suspension. The only explanation I’ve received from X came in an email from Twitter Support last night. The email reiterated my alleged violation of X’s policy on posting private information, but also said that the incident may have been a mistake on my part, for which reason I was being un-suspended.

Note, Klippenstein’s account is back. The links to the JD dossier are not. Xitter is still doing what Elon Musk claims is an affront to free speech, suppressing true information.

It is a testament to the voluntary impotence of the press that they don’t make JD pay a price for these ridiculous claims.

After all, if he believes his premise — that the throttling of content based on stolen information is such a severe abuse that it makes the entire election illegitimate — then he has already conceded that he and Trump cannot score a legitimate victory. If it is the case that “big tech” “censorship” can delegitimize an entire election — even ignoring that Trump’s campaign made demands and Biden’s campaign only asked for non-consensual dick pics to be taken down — then he has conceded all legitimacy.

To be sure, I’m not saying this. I think Vance and Trump might still win this, fair and square.

But Vance, based on his comments, has already stated that if Trump wins, Trump’s victory will be illegitimate based on his success at censoring the JD Vance dossier.

“My Beautiful Christians:” Trump’s Pandering to Christian Nationalists

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The other day, during an address to a Turning Point conference, Trump implored,

Christians, get out to vote. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore my beautiful Christians. I love you. I’m [not/a] Christian.You have to get out and vote. In four years, you won’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.

Horse race journalists didn’t care. They found it more important to repeat and therefore magnify Trump’s latest slur on Vice President Harris.

When I first looked at how NYT covered it at 3:37AM ET, this was their headline.

At 8:311AM, this story from Michael Gold was published. It still focused on magnifying the slurs Trump used against Harris.

That story included Trump’s comment about voting, along with Gold’s spin of it as a claim that Trump would address the concerns of Christian voters sufficiently that they would no longer have to vote, buried in ¶14.

At the end of his speech, Mr. Trump urged the religious crowd to vote in November, suggesting that if elected he would address their concerns sufficiently enough that they would no longer need to be politically active. Earlier, he had lamented that conservative Christians do not vote proportionately to their size, a complaint he has made repeatedly in recent weeks.

“Christians, get out and vote. Just this time,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more, years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

Let it be noted that one of NYT’s allegedly professional horserace journalists believes that the white Evangelical Christians who have been among Trump’s most important supporters vote in disproportionately low numbers or that any Republican would forego that most important part of their coalition. (That said, for demographic reasons Trump can’t change with a speech, white Evangelicals make up an increasingly smaller proportion of the voting public, which poses an entirely different kind of threat than apathy.)

Only much later, around noon ET, did Gold figure out that the “not have to vote” stuff was far more newsworthy than Trump calling the Vice President a “bum.”

 

In spite of disinterest by journalists paid to write horserace stories, the clip went viral on social media, setting off a debate about what Trump meant. Right wing trolls pushed the same horseshit claims of low turnout (again, we’re talking about the in-person and TV audience for a Turning Point conference!) that Gold provided. Others attributed it to Trump’s narcissism, a suggestion that he only cares about votes so long as he would be on the ballot.

Three Sunday morning shows dealt with it — all abysmally.

Martha Raddatz for example, let Chris Sununu dismiss the comments as a “classic Trumpism,” without asking what he meant by “this stuff” when he said it “can be fixed.” Then she went back to the horse race.

There are several things people are ignoring.

First, Trump said something quite similar — and he said it at another Turning Point conference — just a month and a half ago, in Detroit.

Only, at that point, before Joe Biden had dropped out of the race, Trump said,

I said, we don’t need votes. And Charlie Kirk is helping. He’s got his army of young people. These are young patriots. They don’t want to see happen what’s been happening in our country.

Thank you Charlie.

[USA chants]

And I said to Charlie, and I said to Michael [Whatley], listen, we don’t need votes. We’ve got more votes than anybody’s ever had. We need to watch the vote, we need to guard the vote.

We need to stop the steal.

In mid-June, before Biden dropped out, Trump wasn’t concerned about turnout. Now he is.

This comment — to the people Charlie Kirk had assembled to listen to Donald Trump — is best understood as a comment about Trump’s plan to win. As the January 6 Committee discovered, when Trump decided in late December 2020 that he was going to speak and march to the Capitol, Carline Wren turned to Kirk to help turn out bodies. Turning Point was also allegedly used to launder speaking fees to Don Jr and his girlfriend. As it happened, Kirk backed out of attending and deleted his boasts about arranging dozens of busses so others could do so. He pled the Fifth rather than explain to the January 6 Committee anything about all that.

But nevertheless, Charlie Kirk got busloads of people to Trump’s insurrection.

To the extent that Trump needs lots of bodies to be somewhere, Charlie Kirk is a key part of that process. And in June, he wanted them out to surveil polling centers, once again mobilizing Stop the Steal. Friday, he emphasized he actually needs some people to show up to the polls.

Trump’s plans for the election — and how they may have changed with Biden’s departure — is an important background for this. As Tim Alberta described it, after Trump took over the RNC, he got rid of the field organization (potentially dooming down-ticket candidates), and replaced it with Big Lie perpetrators.

The Trump campaign’s takeover of the RNC in March—installing the former president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as the new co-chair, while establishing LaCivita as chief of staff and de facto chief executive, all of it long before Trump had technically secured the party’s nomination—didn’t sit well with many Republicans. Appearances aside, the imperatives of a presidential campaign are not always aligned with those of the RNC, whose job it is to advance the party’s interests up and down the ballot and across the country. “Party politics is a team sport. It’s bigger than Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump or any one candidate,” said Henry Barbour, a longtime Mississippi committeeman, who has fought to prevent the national party’s funds from going to Trump’s legal defense. “Nobody’s ever going to agree on exactly how you split the money up, but you’ve got to take a holistic approach in thinking about all the campaigns, not just one.”

The RNC under Ronna McDaniel, who chaired the national party from early 2017 until LaCivita’s takeover, had become a frequent target of Trump’s ire. He didn’t like that the party remained neutral in the early stages of the 2024 primary—and he was especially furious that McDaniel commissioned debates among the candidates. But what might have bothered him most was the RNC’s priorities: McDaniel was continuing to pour money into field operations, stressing the need for a massive get-out-the-vote program, but showed little interest in his pet issue of “election integrity.”

“Tell you what,” Trump said to Wiles and LaCivita. “I’ll turn out the vote. You spend that money protecting it.”

The marching orders were clear: Trump’s lieutenants were to dismantle much of the RNC’s existing ground game and divert resources to a colossal new election-integrity program—a legion of lawyers on retainer, hundreds of training seminars for poll monitors nationwide, a goal of 100,000 volunteers organized and assigned to stand watch outside voting precincts, tabulation centers, and even individual drop boxes.

When someone fires all the field staff and instead hires Christina Bobb, it’s a pretty big tell that they don’t plan to win the election the democratic way.

They plan to double down on the Big Lie.

Or they did, before Biden dropped out.

As Alberta noted in a follow-up, Trump’s entire plan revolved around Biden. Now Trump is stuck plaintively reminding rally-goers of the six-year campaign, he and Russia, with the help of the entire Republican party, launched against Biden’s kid. “Where’s Hunter? … That was the big one.”

That’s a big part of the background that is missing from discussion of Trump’s comments.

The other is what it means that, after falsely claiming that Christians are being targeted by law enforcement right along with billionaires who engaged in fraud to cover up fucking a porn star, Trump told a bunch of Christian nationalists that they needed to vote just one more time.

As Sarah Posner laid out in a piece analyzing the way right wingers exploited the shooting attempt on Trump, these are people who use apocalyptic tropes to motivate voters and activists.

For the Trump faithful who believe God anointed him president and, after the attempt on his life, that God protected him from death, there are no coincidences — only miracles, signs, and wonders. Charlie Kirk, the founder of the far-right Turning Point USA and a fellow denizen of the conspiratorial fever swamps of X, chimed in on Posobiec’s tweet. “Armor of God,” he replied, just in case Posobiec’s meaning was lost on anyone. “The next verse is this: ‘For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.’” For good measure, Posobiec replied to Kirk, quoting the next verse, Ephesians 6:13. “Therefore, put on the armor of God,” he concluded, “that you may be able to resist on the evil day and, having done everything, to hold your ground.”

Posner added more in Bluesky this thread.

The point is, Trump’s audience of Christian nationalists do view taking over government in apocalyptic terms. They did, on January 6. And it nearly worked the first time.

This was only a Trumpism, as Sununu called it, to the extent that Trump is an epic conman who knows how to mobilize his audience, even Christian nationalists with whom Trump shares little more than a fondness for authoritarianism.

So sure: Perhaps this was just an attempt to juice more turnout out of a group that already turns out in high numbers, almost exclusively for Republicans. Or maybe — as his comments in June were — it’s part of a larger effort to delegitimize democracy.

But even beyond Trump’s last coup attempt, there’s a context here, one you need to at least acknowledge if you’re going to claim to assess his comments.

Update: I only very belatedly realized I put the context from the second NYT take after the third version of it. As made clear now, Gold did mention the “never vote again” comment, but he put it in ¶14.

Update: McKay Coppins has a piece in the Atlantic analyzing the prayers said at Trump events. A taste:

There are many ways to parse the text. You could compare the number of times Trump’s name is mentioned (87) versus Jesus Christ’s (61). You could break down the demographics of the people leading the prayers: 45 men and 13 women; overwhelmingly evangelical, with disproportionate representation from Pentecostalism, a charismatic branch of Christianity that emphasizes supernatural faith healing and speaking in tongues. One might also be tempted to catalog the most comically incendiary lines (“Oh Lord, our Lord, we want to be awake and not woke”). But the most interesting way to look at these prayers is to examine the theological motifs that run through them.

The scripture verse that’s cited most frequently in the prayers comes from 2 Chronicles. “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

Ryan Burge, a Baptist minister and political scientist I asked to review the prayers, told me that this verse—which is quoted 10 times—is regularly cited by evangelicals to advance a popular conservative-Christian narrative: that America, like ancient Israel before it, has broken its special covenant with God and is suffering the consequences. “The Old Testament prophets they’re quoting talk about sin collectively instead of individually—the nation has fallen into wickedness and needs healing,” Burge said. “The way they use this verse presupposes that we’re spiraling down the tubes.”

[snip]

[R]ather than asking God to make Trump an instrument of his will, most of the prayers start from the assumption that he already is. Accordingly, many of them drop any pretense of thy-will-be-done nonpartisanship, and ask explicitly for Trump’s reelection. “Lord, you have a servant in Donald J. Trump, who can lead our nation,” a woman offering a prayer in Laconia, New Hampshire, told God at a rally on the eve of the state’s Republican primary. “Help us to overcome any obstacles tomorrow so that we may deliver victory to your warrior.”