J.D. Vance Says Trump Was Right to Try to Steal the Election, Because of Twitter
The reason J.D. Vance has a chance to become vice-president of the United States is that, unlike Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s running mate on his two previous campaigns, he’s willing to repeat Trump’s false claim to have won the 2020 election. His support for the Big Lie is the essential act that has thrust him into his upward trajectory.
But Vance knows perfectly well that Trump did legitimately lose the 2020 election. And unlike Trump, who is unable to articulate linear arguments, Vance is a Yale-trained lawyer who holds a certain pride in his standing among fellow intellectuals, even as he postures as their class enemy. And so, even as he supports Trump’s lies, he cannot simply parrot them. He feels compelled to wrap them in a pseudo-intellectual veneer.
A new interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times put Vance’s sweaty dishonesty on vivid, almost uncomfortable display. When first asked whether he believes Trump lost the 2020 election, Vance tries to deflect, as he did during the vice-presidential debate: “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.”
Deflection is a familiar move for use when one’s allies do something unacceptable. A hackish response is to insist the unacceptable position should not be discussed because it is a distraction — a move that allows you to avoid endorsing it directly but avoids a breach within your own coalition. Conservatives hardly have a monopoly on the form of argument “Why are you angry about a bad thing done by my allies when you should be angry about a bad thing done by my opponents?” You’ll see some progressives pull it out any time the left does something indefensible. In the Trump era, though, this reflex has become possibly the most dominant tic of conservative rhetoric.
In addition to deflecting, Vance suggests that Trump is also moving beyond the 2020 election (“Donald Trump and I have both raised a number of issues with the 2020 election, but we’re focused on the future”). That is flatly untrue, of course — Trump continues to raise the 2020 election routinely.
When Garcia-Navarro repeats the question, Vance pivots to a different claim. Trump’s rhetoric is true, or at least justified, he suggests, because Facebook and Twitter briefly blocked news stories about the Hunter Biden laptop.
“Let me ask you a question,” he asserts. “Is it okay that big technology companies censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, which independent analysis have said cost Donald Trump millions of votes?” Vance, finding this argument easier to maintain, continues repeating it as Garcia-Navarro drills down.
Very few people will defend the social-media response to the Hunter Biden laptop story. However, the notion that it justifies Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election is absolutely absurd, as Vance is surely capable of understanding.
First, the block on laptop stories — a hasty decision, made in an uncertain environment shaped by the experience of Russian efforts to help Trump in 2016 by hacking and leaking his opponent’s emails as well as circulating false information — held up only for a short period of time. As Philip Bump showed, the social-media block probably drew more attention to the story, search interest in which soared after social-media companies took down links to it. There’s no reason to believe social-media companies even reduced public exposure to the story at all.
Second, Vance repeatedly asserts that “independent studies” found that the social-media policy swung the election. This is even sillier than the previous claim. The “independent studies” Vance refers to is a poll by the Media Research Center, a partisan Republican interest group that spams out attacks on media bias. The poll employs the transparently unsound method of feeding respondents loaded language and asking if they would change their vote if they knew it at the time. (“At the time you cast your vote for president, were you aware that evidence exists, including bank transactions the FBI is currently investigating, that directly links Joe Biden and his family to a corrupt financial arrangement between a Chinese company with connections to the Chinese Communist Party that was secretly intended to provide the Biden family with tens of millions of dollars in profits?”)
The Hunter Biden laptop did not actually contain evidence for these wild allegations, which Republicans tried and failed to prove. Even if those allegations were true, there’s no validity in giving people one-sided presentations and then asking how they’d vote. That is a tool used by interest groups to manufacture the appearance of public support for their cause, not a valid way to measure public opinion.
Third, the same day the Times interviewed Vance, it reported that Elon Musk, a Trump megadonor, blocked links to reports of hacked Trump-campaign emails. “After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month,” the Times discovered, “the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.”
So Twitter, in consultation with the Trump campaign, literally did the same thing that Vance says provides justification to deny the legitimacy of the election. So now if Harris loses, are we to believe Vance will support Harris if she attempts to overturn the election result?
It’s obviously untenable to allow a justification this feeble to support negating an election result. Things as unfair as Twitter and Facebook very briefly blocking a news story happen in every election. If the losing party was able to seize on any grievance of this scale to justify a coup attempt, democracy would be unworkable.
Vance is intelligent enough to understand this. But he’s also smart enough to grasp that insisting upon democracy and the rule of law stands between him and his ambitions.