JD Vance Refused 5 Times to Admit Donald Trump Lost 2020 Election in Podcast Interview

NEW YORK (AP) – Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance again refused to acknowledge that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election over former President Donald Trump, dodging the question five times in an interview with The New York Times, the newspaper reported on Friday. .

The Ohio senator repeated the response he used during his debate against Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, saying he was “focused on the future.”

“There’s an obsession here to focus on 2020,” Vance said in the interview. “I’m much more concerned about what happened after 2020, which is a very open border, groceries that are not affordable.”

Vance’s refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the 2020 election echoes the rhetoric pushed by his running mate. Trump has been criminally charged with knowingly pushing false claims of voter fraud and “resorting to crimes” in his failed bid to cling to power after losing to Biden. Judges, election officials, cybersecurity experts and Trump’s own attorney general have rejected his claims of massive voter fraud.

Vance spoke for an hour with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, host of the newspaper’s podcast “The Interview,” which will be published on Saturday. He offered an evasive answer every time I asked him if Trump lost the last election.

He blamed social media companies for limiting posts about the contents of a laptop once owned by Hunter Biden, the president’s son, and questioned whether censorship by tech companies cost Trump millions of votes .

“I answered your question with another question,” Vance said. “You answer my question and I’ll answer yours.”

When Garcia-Navarro said there was “no evidence, legal or not,” of voter fraud, Vance dismissed the fact as “a slogan.”

“I’m not concerned with this slogan that people throw around, ‘Well, all the court cases went that way,'” Vance said. impact things in 2020.”

Vance’s refusal to say whether Trump was widely seen as his weakest moment in the debate against Walz, the Minnesota governor, who called Vance’s response “a damning non-response.” Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign quickly turned the exchange into a television ad.