JD Vance Finally Answers That Crucial V.P. Debate Question

Republican vice presidential pick JD Vance might have successfully skirted explaining whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 election during Tuesday night’s debate, but his answer eventually came to light.

While being chased down by comedian Jason Selvig, the MAGA politico admitted that he did believe the former president won the 2020 election. Still, Vance managed to avoid the immediate concern of the question: whether he would support a similar attempt to overturn the November election results if the Republican presidential nominee loses.

“If your opponent gets more votes, will you concede?” Selvig asked, to silence as Vance walked away, in a video posted Thursday.

Vance deflected the direct line of questioning Tuesday while on stage opposite Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. He brought up just about every hot-button topic under the sun—from inflation to Facebook’s content moderation policies—to avoid admitting whether he believed Trump won, and whether he would place his oath of office above his loyalty to the top of his ticket.

Vance still refused to yield, even during a heated back and forth with Walz, who noted that former Vice President Mike Pence’s decision to certify the election results was the reason why Vance was on the stage instead of the Indiana politician.

“Where is the firewall, if he knows he can do anything including taking an election, and his vice president’s not going to stand to it?” Walz asked on Tuesday. “That’s what we’re asking you, America. Will you keep your oath of office, even if the president doesn’t?

“So, America, I think you’ve got a really clear choice on who is gonna honor that democracy and who is gonna honor Donald Trump,” Walz said.

An unlikely state is spelling trouble for Republicans up and down the ballot this election cycle.

Polling by the Independent Center conducted this week shows independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn with a five-point lead over Republican incumbent Deb Fischer, with Osborn receiving 47 percent of the vote to Fischer’s 42 percent. Ten percent of voters say they are unsure. Other polls show Fischer with a slight lead, but independent and undecided voters will be a key group for this Senate race. As of this week, Nebraska is the second-closest Senate race in the country, according to 538.

With a thin 51–49 Democratic majority in the Senate today, Osborn could be the key for making sure Republicans don’t take control of the chamber. There is no Democratic candidate running in the Nebraska Senate race, but Osborn’s policies make it likely he’ll caucus with the party.

Osborn has made headlines for his working-class messaging, union leadership, and independent candidacy. “I hadn’t been a very political person until corporate greed came knocking on my door a few years ago, when I was president of my local union, and we went out on strike, at a time where the company was making record profits,” he told Semafor in September. As the president of his local union at the Kellogg’s plant, in 2021 he led 500 workers on strike for nearly three months to end a two-tiered benefits system and stop plant closings.

Nebraska, and the most populous city of Omaha, will be integral to securing victory for Democrats in the Senate, Congress, and White House. Nebraska is one of only two states that splits its electoral votes by congressional district (the other being Maine). One of Nebraska’s five electoral votes belongs to the blue dot of Omaha. Biden won Nebraska’s 2nd district in 2020, while Trump clinched the vote in 2016. (The Democratic House candidate for the district is also leading in the polls.)

The same poll that showed Osborn winning also showed Trump leading Kamala Harris by 11 points in the state, but Harris leads Trump in the Omaha-based district by nine points. Republicans, including Trump, are well aware of the importance of this one electoral vote. That’s why MAGA sought to change the state to a winner-take-all system this election cycle. That effort was thwarted by Nebraska Republicans in September.

Republicans may be in for a surprise in Texas this November, according to voter registration data that shows the Lone Star State has seen a surge of new voters since 2018.

Nearly 2.6 million people have registered to vote in the state since then-Representative Beto O’Rourke narrowly lost the midterm election to Senator Ted Cruz, adding roughly the size of Connecticut’s entire voter roll to the books. The bulk of those new voters originate from some of Texas’s most liberal territories, including the areas surrounding Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Austin, reported the San Antonio Express-News.

And while that may not translate to an obvious win in a state with more than 30 million people, it has certainly caught the attention of local Republicans, who have diverted considerable attention toward maintaining their stronghold in the historically red state.

“We are in a competitive state and we are not going to win just sitting on our laurels,” Texas Republican strategist Dave Carney told the Express-News.

Rodney Ellis, a county commissioner in liberal Harris County, summed it up a little differently: “They’re terrified,” Ellis told the Express-News.

Cruz, meanwhile, has turned to begging for help in his own reelection campaign against  Democratic challenger Representative Colin Allred. In an interview with Newsmax on Tuesday, Cruz emphasized Democratic spending in his state, as well as his diminishing odds of taking the race.

“I want to encourage your viewers this morning: I need your help,” Cruz said, urging people to “contribute” to his campaign website.

“Chuck Schumer and George Soros are flooding cash into the state of Texas,” Cruz said. “There have been multiple polls in the last three weeks that show it as a four-point race, a three-point race, a two-point race, and there have been two polls that show it as a one-point race.”

But rather than appeal to the surge of new liberal voters in his state, Cruz has spent the last few months doubling down on far-right conspiracies. He helped to elevate a disturbing and baseless lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, and has refused to say whether he would accept the outcome of the November election if it doesn’t go Donald Trump’s way. 

Cruz has also continued to idolize Trump, even after enduring possibly the ugliest verbal beating in Trump’s circle during the 2016 Republican presidential primary, which included Trump mocking the unpopular Texas senator for being so short he would need heels to reach the podium and plainly calling his wife ugly.

One gruesome detail in Jack Smith’s sweeping legal brief about Donald Trump’s involvement in January 6 has shocked legal experts.

The 165-page filing, which was unsealed Wednesday by Judge Tanya Chutkan, provides new details about the co-conspirators and specific allegations connected to the former president’s 2020 election-subversion scheme—including one about former Vice President Mike Pence.

As MAGA rioters swarmed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, chanting their demand to “Hang Mike Pence!” a Trump aide received word that his running mate had been moved to a secure location for his safety, according to the filing.

The aide “rushed into the dining room to inform [Trump] in hopes that [Trump] would take action to ensure Pence’s safety.”

Instead, after the aide delivered the news, Trump allegedly replied, “So what?”

MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin said Wednesday night, during an interview with MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace, that she was taken aback by multiple moments described in the filing, but Wallace plucked that one out as the most disturbing.

“I’ll read first what made Lisa Rubin gasp. Why make everybody wait?” said Wallace, before reading from page 142.

“The cavalierness with which Donald Trump received that news certainly is news to me,” Rubin said.

During an interview on CNN Wednesday, Harvard constitutional law professor Lawrence Tribe told host Erin Burnett he also found that quote to be one of the most outlandish.

“There are lots of jaw-dropping things; you’ve named some of them. You know: ‘So what’ if this vice president is hung? ‘It doesn’t matter’ whether we’ve won or lost. That’s just a sampling; it’s the tip of a horribly large and scary iceberg,” Tribe explained.

In the filing, Trump allegedly made a comment to his family members that “it doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election, you still have to fight like hell.”

Donald Trump is not taking the release of new evidence in his 2020 election fraud case well.

The 165-page motion from special counsel Jack Smith was released to the public on Wednesday, and it detailed not only the former president’s efforts to overturn the election but also his indifference to the violence of the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Trump took to Truth Social to complain almost immediately.

“The release of this falsehood-ridden, Unconstitutional, J6 brief immediately following Tim Walz’s disastrous Debate performance, and 33 days before the Most Important Election in the History of our Country, is another obvious attempt by the Harris-Biden regime to undermine and Weaponize American Democracy, and INTERFERE IN THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION,” Trump wrote in one long-winded post.

“Deranged Jack Smith, the hand picked Prosecutor of the Harris-Biden DOJ, and Washington, D.C. based Radical Left Democrats, are HELL BENT on continuing to Weaponize the Justice Department in an attempt to cling to power,” the former president added.

Trump made several other posts into Thursday morning complaining that Democrats were interfering in the election, “Weaponizing the Justice Department against me,” and calling the Justice Department “THE DEPARTMENT OF INJUSTICE.”

The former president is famously thin-skinned, but he also has reason to be worried. Smith’s legal filing includes wild details about Trump blatantly presenting lies and showing indifference to rioting in his name, as well as his plans to undermine the election results before they took place. It also is tailored to the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, in an effort to ensure Trump faces accountability for his attempts to overturn the election. Trump’s outbursts online might be his attempt to distract the public from the damning proof against him.

MAGA allies are trying to move on from their cataclysmic reaction to losing the 2020 presidential election—but that doesn’t mean that their leader is trying to do the same.

In an interview Wednesday night with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer brushed off concerns about the Republican reaction to the last election, claiming that no one but Collins was still focused on the election conspiracy.

“In 2020, you did sign onto that brief supporting a Texas lawsuit that would have invalidated the election results in four states,” Collins said. “But you ultimately chose to certify the election, you broke with some of your Republican colleagues, and you chose to certify.

“You said in a statement that ‘Congress does not have the authority to discard an individual slate of electors certified by a state’s legislature in accordance with their Constitution,’” Collins continued. “And you yourself said, ‘Doing so sets a precedent that I believe undermines the state-based system of elections that defines our Republic.’ Do you still feel that way tonight?”

“Again, Kaitlan, we’re talking about an election that’s going to take place in 35 days,” Emmer responded. “What are you doing talking about something that’s four years ago? We can have this debate at some other time going forward, but the people are hurting.”

But Collins had a point.

“Donald Trump is still talking about it,” the CNN anchor threw back.

Trump was posting about the election he lost as recently as Wednesday night, writing on Truth Social that he “didn’t rig the 2020 Election, they did!”

Some of Trump’s closest allies have refused to admit that the former president lost the 2020 election, dodging direct questions about whether they plan to reenact the same political violence after November’s election results roll in.

During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Ohio Senator JD Vance refused to concede that the Republican presidential nominee lost the last election before doubling down during a heated exchange with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

“He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said, turning to face Vance. “I would just ask that: Did he lose the 2020 election?”

“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance responded, twisting his argument into a weird tie-in about Vice President Kamala Harris and Facebook’s content moderation policies during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“That is a very damning nonanswer,” Walz said.

In a Virginia Senate debate Wednesday night, Democratic Senator Tim Kaine’s Trump-endorsed opponent Hung Cao took the stage with some unhinged remarks about drag queens, alpha males, and DEI.

Cao, a Navy veteran, was asked about his previous statements about what he sees as the “growing obsession” with diversity, equity, and inclusion in the military—and somehow answered with a cannibalistic rant.

“When you’re using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that’s not the people we want,” said Cao. “What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them and ask for seconds. Those are young men and women that are going to win wars.”

It’s unclear what Cao meant in the cannibalistic part of the rant, beyond scorning drag queens and anyone he doesn’t see as “alpha.”When NBC News reached the Republican’s office for comment, he doubled down about his debate remarks: “I just said what everyone believes as fact.”

In the debate, he also parroted Trump’s lines about immigration and the so-called migrant crisis. Cao, whose family came to the U.S. from Vietnam, did not push back against the moderator’s question about deporting all undocumented immigrants. Instead, he made a call for assimilation. “Don’t ask for the American dream if you’re not willing to obey American laws and embrace the American culture.” On his campaign website, the candidate promises to “repel this invasion.”

According to the RealClearPolitics poll average, Kaine leads Cao by 10 points in the state.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page unsealed motion included revelations about Donald Trump in his January 6 election interference case and a plea for the judge overseeing it to carefully consider the boundaries of what constitutes an “official act” under the new, expanded definition of presidential immunity.

But it also included a jab at the nation’s highest court, using Trump’s private phone calls to underscore that the Supreme Court had extended its aid to a former president who had no appreciation for its labor.

In a section of the document outlining the similarities between Trump’s private rhetoric and that included in his January 6 Ellipse speech, Smith’s office highlighted how Trump, even then, was attacking the nation’s highest court for “not stepping up to the plate” in his legal woes.

“I’m not happy with the Supreme Court. They are not stepping up to the plate. They’re not stepping up,” Trump said in a private conversation.

Then, at the Ellipse, he shared a near-verbatim gripe: “I’m not happy with the Supreme Court. They love to rule against me.”

The Supreme Court handed Trump one of the biggest wins of his career in July, when it ruled 6–3 to expand a president’s immunity and redefine what constitutes an “official act,” effectively deciding that Trump could not be held accountable for some of his behavior with regard to attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor feared for the future of a country that legally permits the executive branch authority to commit crimes under the cloak of the office, arguing that the court’s decision made a “mockery” of the constitutional principle that “no man is above the law” and that the court’s “own misguided wisdom” gave Trump “all the immunity he asked for and more.”

It’s official: Donald Trump’s plan for massive deportations would apply to legal immigrants, as well as undocumented immigrants.

During an exclusive interview with NewsNation, Trump said he planned to strip the legal status of the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, who have been granted Temporary Protected Status.

“Springfield is such a beautiful place; have you seen what’s happened to it? It’s been overrun. They have to be removed,” Trump said.

“So you would revoke the Temporary Protected Status?” asked the interviewer.

“Absolutely, I’d revoke it and I’d bring them back to their country,” Trump said.

During his first administration, Trump rescinded Temporary Protective Status orders for immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, Nepal, and Honduras, placing hundreds of thousands of legal residents at risk for deportation.

Now Trump plans to forcibly uproot this group of roughly 18,000 people who pay taxes, own homes, have jobs, and support their families. But that’s only the beginning: Up to 2.7 million people could lose protection from deportation if Trump allows immigration programs such as Temporary Protected Status, DACA, and humanitarian parole to lapse during a second term, according to Forbes.

It’s not surprising that Trump has gotten to this place. The former president has falsely claimed that Springfield suffered a “hostile takeover” by undocumented immigrants and that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield had begun eating their neighbors’ pets.

Last month, after practically admitting that he’d created the story about cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, JD Vance also said that he doesn’t care about the legal status of immigrants.

“Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally, and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien,” Vance said, during a campaign event in North Carolina. “An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works.”

During the vice presidential debate Tuesday, Vance echoed this rhetoric when he was fact-checked about the Haitian immigrants’ legal status. He ranted that Harris could grant citizenship “at the wave of a Kamala-Harris-open-border wand.”

Both Trump’s and Vance’s statements demonstrate that under a second Trump administration, no legal immigrant will be safe in the United States because the president could always decide that there are too many of them, create some story, and then kick them out.

While Donald Trump and his allies pushed lies about widespread voter fraud following the 2020 election, his former Vice President Mike Pence apparently urged him to admit defeat.

Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed Jack Smith’s 165-page motion pertaining to Trump’s January 6 trial Wednesday, which revealed details about the co-conspirators and specific allegations connected to the former president’s 2020 election subversion scheme. The details allege that Trump planned to declare victory regardless of the outcome or what anyone said to the contrary, including his own running mate.

Trump allegedly told his campaign advisers that he planned to take advantage of Democratic voters’ preference for mail-in ballots, which take longer to tabulate, and “simply declare victory before all the ballots were counted and any winner was projected.”

He then allegedly planted the seeds for such a plan by publicly undermining the results of the election before it had even taken place, claiming that all mail-in voting was inherently fraudulent.

In early November, Trump allegedly received an “honest assessment” stating that he “could not mount successful legal challenges to the election.” Trump was told by a White House aide who “served as a conduit of information from the campaign” that there was no way Rudy Giuliani would be successful in challenging the election results. Trump responded, “We’ll see.”

In a meeting with Trump and Giuliani, that staffer told them both that they would be unable to prove Giuliani’s “speculative” allegations of voter fraud in a courtroom. When the staffer privately repeated this concern to Trump later, Trump responded, “The details don’t matter.”

The filing detailed many conversations between Trump and Pence as running mates, “in which they discussed their shared electoral interests. This is distinct from conversations had between the two where they are acting in their official capacity as President and Vice President, which would be inadmissible as evidence, per the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States.”

As early as November 4, Trump allegedly asked Pence to “study up” on claims of voter fraud in the states that they had won in 2016. Pence said that Trump was already stating that the campaign was “going to fight.”

In the postelection period, Pence told Trump that “he had seen no evidence of outcome-determinative fraud in the election,” according to the filing, and repeatedly urged Trump to accept the results.

As media organizations began on November 7 to project that Joe Biden had won the election, Pence “tried to encourage” Trump to accept defeat, “as a friend.” Pence reminded him that he’d taken “a dying political party and given it a new lease on life.”

A few days later, on November 12, Pence said that Trump received a “sober and somewhat pessimistic report” on the status of his election challenges, and Pence urged Trump to give up. “Don’t concede, but recognize that the process is over,” Pence said, according to the filing.

In a conversation on December 21, Pence again “encouraged” Trump to “not look at the election ‘as a loss—just an intermission.’” Later in the day, Trump asked Pence what he thought they should do, and Pence replied, “After we have exhausted every legal process in the courts and Congress, if we still came up short, Trump should ‘take a bow.’”