JD Vance was asked five times if Trump lost the 2020 election. He refused to answer

With just three weeks left until the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump’s vice president has repeatedly refused to answer whether he believes the former president lost the last race.

JD Vance was asked five times The New York Times within two minutes if he believes Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, but he refused to acknowledge his loss.

When asked about the election results in an hour-long interview with The timesIn Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s report released Friday, Vance said he was instead “focused on the future” – repeating an answer to a similar question asked during his debate against Democratic rival Tim Walz.

“There’s an obsession here to focus on 2020,” Vance told Garcia-Navarro. “I’m much more worried about what happened after 2020: a wide-open border and food that is unaffordable.”

When pressed a second time, Vance suggested that Trump would have won if social media companies had not “censored” politically damaging stories, even though there was no evidence that there were restrictions on what could be on a laptop , which belonged to President Biden’s son Hunter, changed the outcome.

When asked again, he said he would answer her question with a question of his own.

He then dismissed Garcia-Navarro’s correct claim that there was no evidence of widespread fraud or corruption that changed the 2020 results as a “slogan.”

“I’m not worried about this slogan that people use: ‘Well, every trial went like this,'” he said. “I’m talking about something very discrete – a censorship issue in this country that I believe influenced things in 2020.”

He told it too The times that he had not certified the 2020 results.

In the Vance-Walz debate, the Republican senator from Ohio twice refused to answer the question of whether Trump lost in 2020, a ploy that Walz called a “fucking non-answer.”

Democrats pointed to his comments as evidence that the potential future vice president could pander to Trump’s anti-democratic impulses and do what former Vice President Mike Pence refused to do when he rejected Trump’s attempts to illegally block the certification of the 2020 election results.

Walz called his opponent a “coward” for refusing to concede Trump’s defeat.

In his interview with The timesVance said he would “commit to a peaceful transfer of power” in 2024, but was unsure whether he and Trump would accept the outcome if they lost.

He said they would “respect the results” but reiterated the conditions that Trump had repeatedly laid out throughout his 2024 campaign.

“Of course, if there are issues, like Democrats protested in 2004 and Donald Trump raised issues in 2020, we will make this election count,” he said. “That every legal ballot is counted. We have filed almost a hundred lawsuits [Republican National Committee] to try to ensure that every legal ballot is counted.”

Right-wing legal groups across the country have waged legal battles to challenge mail-in voting rules and voter eligibility – underscoring how far the former president’s allies will go, down to the local level, to challenge the results of an election he could lose.

Vance has “proven five more times that he will always put Donald Trump’s dangerous election conspiracy theories above our Constitution and the rule of law,” said Alex Floyd, director of the Democratic National Committee’s Rapid Response Committee.

“Even Vance knows Trump lost by more than 7 million votes in 2020, but protecting Trump’s attempts to undermine the will of the American people is more important to Vance than protecting our democracy,” he said in a follow-up Explanation The times Interview.