JD Vance Remembers Trump's Peaceful Transfer Of Power. You Know, AFTER The Coup Failed.
He was a defender of democracy, after he wasn't!
Last night after the vice-presidential debate, Lawrence O’Donnell elicited uproarious laugher from the panel on MSNBC when he said JD Vance is the first vice-presidential candidate in history who doesn’t know who won the last election.
But it was true. It wasn’t an exaggeration. You know, unless JD Vance is a two-faced troll who knows exactly who won the last election, but was scared to say it for fear of invoking the wrath of his boss Donald Trump and his white fascist tech bro patrons.
It was toward the end of the debate, after 88-someodd minutes of a frankly weird collegiality that developed between the candidates. The word “agree” appears an obnoxious number of times in the transcript, often in sentences like “I agree with him,” or “we’re in agreement on this.”
But finally at the very end, the moderators decided to ask about threats to democracy, and that’s when the whole thing went off the rails. You see, the preceding minutes in many ways had been the Sanewashing Of JD Vance, as Vance erected a carefully constructed facade of moderation. It was all absolute lies, of course, but even on issues like abortion, Vance was desperately trying to pay lip service to the idea that voters have it all wrong, that he and Donald Trump are reasonable guys who deserve your trust.
But then it was time to answer really simple questions, like who won the last election. And JD Vance’s mask slipped all the way off, and you could see the fascist MAGA puppet come out.
Tim Walz asked, “Did he lose the 2020 election?” referring to Trump.
“Tim, I'm focused on the future,” said JD Vance, humiliating himself.
He added, weirdly, “Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?” That was his deflection from talking about January 6 and Donald Trump’s coup to overthrow the government and overturn the results of the election he lost. Some bizarre fever dream about Kamala Harris personally censoring Americans from saying words after COVID. One of those things that might make sense if you mainline Maria Bartiromo while you’re waking up from eating too much paste with Peter Thiel last night, but normal Americans are like what is this fucking lunatic babbling about?
Norah O’Donnell gave the history of 2020, of Trump losing pretty much every clownsuit he filed to overturn the election, noted that Vance has said he would not have done his constitutional duty to certify the election had he been in Mike Pence’s position, and asked Vance if he would challenge the results of this year’s election. (Notable to remember that Vance is in this position as Trump’s running mate because Mike Pence committed the cardinal sin of displaying loyalty to the Constitution over Donald Trump.)
Vance started babbling about Kamala-flation and Kamala-groceries. He lied and said that all he or Trump have ever said is that there were issues with the 2020 election (there weren’t) and that people should debate them peacefully.
And then he dropped a kneeslapper when he said Trump had preserved the peaceful transfer of power, by leaving on January 20 after all his coup attempts had failed:
“And on January 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the President. Donald Trump left the White House.”
That was where JD pivoted to his incredibly weird tangent about Kamala Harris doing “censorship” to Americans, his allegation that Democrats’ “censorship” was the real threat to democracy. It got real loopy, like a Donald Trump indigestion babble, but JD whined about “Americans casting aside lifelong friendships because of disagreements over politics” (translation: normal people shunning MAGA Nazis) and imaginary hallucinations about Kamala Harris censoring the internet, and then he went on a sidebar about how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, those universally mocked lunatics, are just two regular “lifelong leaders in the Democratic coalition.” We’d spend time debunking that, but we’re too busy laughing at the notion that those losers were ever our real friends.
And that was when, after all the Midwest niceness of the debate, Tim Walz was like yeah dude, sorry, I can’t sanewash January 6 with you. He recounted what really happened on January 6, how people even threatened his governor’s residence in Minnesota that day. The crowds trying to find and hang Mike Pence. How Donald Trump’s lies about that election are still hurting America today.
WALZ: A President's words matter. People hear that. So I think this issue of settling our differences at the ballot box, shaking hands when we lose, being honest about it, but to deny what happened on January 6, the first time in American history that a President or anyone tried to overturn a fair election and the peaceful transfer of power. And here we are four years later in the same boat. I will tell you this, that when this is over, we need to shake hands, this election, and the winner needs to be the winner. This has got to stop. It's tearing our country apart.
In response, JD Vance again asserted that Trump had preserved the peaceful transfer of power, after all his attempts to overthrow the government had failed.
VANCE: Tim, first of all, it's really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th, as we have done for 250 years in this country.
Then he tried to say Democrats are the real election deniers, because they claimed Vladimir Putin stole the election “because the Russians bought, like, $500,000 worth of Facebook ads.”
It was not $500,000 of Facebook ads, according to the then-Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee.
That’s when Walz asked Vance point blank if Trump lost the election, and Vance completely humiliated himself lying and avoiding the question. And for any Americans who had stuck around that long — probably not many, honestly, it was so boring — it was the moment when Vance’s real face was revealed, when he reminded people who he really is.
Tim Walz got the last word:
WALZ: What I do know is I see a candidate out there who refused, and now again. And this, I'm pretty shocked by this. He lost the election. This is not a debate. It's not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump's world, because, look, when Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that's why Mike Pence isn't on this stage. What I'm concerned about is where is the firewall with Donald Trump? Where is the firewall if he knows he could do anything, including taking an election, and his Vice President's not going to stand to it. That's what we're asking you, America. Will you stand up? Will you keep your oath of office even if the President doesn't? And I think Kamala Harris would agree. She wouldn't have picked me if she didn't think I would do that because, of course, that's what we would do. So, America, I think you've got a really clear choice on this election of who's going to honor that democracy and who's going to honor Donald Trump.
So that’s what happened with that.
As for the rest of the debate, it was a giant draw, according to all the snap polls, and we doubt it moved a single vote. (A Politico poll found that independents mostly didn’t watch.) Tim Walz basically did what he needed to do, which was to make sure he didn’t hurt the Harris/Walz ticket in any way. But JD Vance needed to make people give the Trump/Vance ticket a second look, and we don’t think anything he did achieved that goal.
Vance gave the Harris campaign a lot of fodder for rapid response campaign commercials, though:
So we guess Tim Walz won after all.
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“Tim, I’m focused on the furniture”
Vance can go on about the peaceful transfer of power on January 20th all he wants, but there's two things that voters must be made to remember:
1) Several people, including a few police officers, died as a result of the January 6th riot, which would not have happened without Trump's Big Lie. Many more police officers were severely, in some cases permanently, injured. Show this again and again. It wasn't just some nonsense shit from Trump that everyone's used to. There are lives lost and ruined thanks to this. No waving it away.
2) We were in the middle of a pandemic in which thousands were dying every day in this country from COVID, and the economy was in fuckville as a result. And Trump was the only modern president to refuse to allow his administration to help the incoming administration with the transition. This is no small matter, even in normal times, but especially so in middle of a deadly crisis. More lives were at risk, possibly lost, thanks to Trump's shit.
Make people remember it. No waving it away.