Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance still doesn’t want to talk about Donald Trump’s baseless claims that he was the true winner of the 2020 presidential election.
In a video clip released Friday from an upcoming podcast episode with The New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Vance refused five times to say whether he backs Trump’s conspiracy theory about that year’s vote, even though the former Republican president continues to espouse the claim as he campaigns to retake the White House.
The first time Garcia-Navarro asked Vance, he said he wanted to move forward from the issue ― a go-to line for him lately.
“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,” he said, proceeding to list off campaign talking points.
Garcia-Navarro asked Vance the same question a second, third and fourth time. Vance responded in a variety of ways but never answered the question directly. At one point, he tried to pivot the conversation to President Joe Biden’s son and his laptop. At another, he claimed that technology companies acted to “censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes.”
The fifth time Garcia-Navarro prompted Vance to answer, she got visibly frustrated with him.
“I have asked this question repeatedly,” she reminded him. “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.”
Vance then accused her of “repeating a slogan rather than engaging with what I’m saying,” and suggested he doesn’t care that multiple courts ruled against Trump’s election claims.
“I’m worried about Americans who feel like there were problems in 2020,” he said. “I’m not worried about the slogan that people throw: ‘Well, every court case went this way.’”
Eventually, he said that he would have voted against certifying the results of the last presidential election.
The full episode of Garcia-Navarro’s podcast, The Interview, is scheduled for release on Saturday.