From this morning's Bulwaark:

J.D. Vance Wanted a Constitutional Crisis
The Ohio senator makes his vice-presidential pitch to the New York Times.
ANDREW EGGER
JUN 17

J.D. Vance’s Constitutional Crisis

Why is Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance shooting up the Trump veepstakes power rankings, as our Marc Caputo reported last week? Lots of reasons. He hails from theoretically-still-swingy Ohio. He’s a leading figure in MAGA populist thought. He pals around with Don Jr.

Above all, though: He’s easily the most gifted and most enthusiastic shit-shoveler on the shortlist.

Last week, Vance sat for a largely friendly interview with the New York Times’s Ross Douthat. They talked about lots of things: class struggle in America, Vance’s old book Hillbilly Elegy, the war in Ukraine.

Then they got to 2020. “What’s your take,” Douthat wanted to know, “on the legitimacy of the 2020 election?”

Vance is no moron: He knew this was the make-or-break portion of the interview. Trump is on the cusp of making his running-mate decision, and willingness to boost his stolen-election lies is the first and last question on his vetting sheet. So Vance launched in, talking about tech censorship, the Hunter Biden laptop story, COVID-era changes to voting procedures. The RNC should have been fighting harder in advance of the election against all this, he said.

Okay, Douthat pressed—but what about after the election? “Did it make any sense,” he asked, “to use the office of the vice presidency to shift the outcome of the election?”

Vance replied:

The vice-presidential thing—look, here’s what this would’ve looked like if you really wanted to do this. You would’ve actually tried to go to the states that had problems; you would try to marshal alternative slates of electors, like they did in the election of 1876. And then you have to actually prosecute that case; you have to make an argument to the American people . . .

I think the entire post-2020 thing would have gone a lot better if there had actually been an effort to provide alternative slates of electors and to force us to have that debate. I think it would’ve been a much better thing for the country. Do I think Joe Biden would still be president right now? Yeah, probably. But at least we would have had a debate. And instead what we had was the Jenna Ellis legal clown show and no real debate about the election. And now every time we bring it up, it’s like, ‘Well, yeah, we litigated all these things.’ No, you can’t litigate these things judicially; you have to litigate them politically. And we never had a real political debate about the 2020 election . . .

Even under a circumstance where the alternative-electors thing works, and [Trump’s] president again, he would have served four years and retired and enjoyed his life and played golf. The idea that this sets off a sequence where Donald Trump becomes the dictator of America is completely preposterous. He was using the constitutional procedures.

I am not kidding: This might be the most impressive piece of election bullshitting I have ever seen. It’s a tour de force that does three things at once: It endorses the most aggressively abusive strategy for stealing the election Trump contemplated in 2020, it absolves Trump of the strategies that didn’t work, and it works in some sneering at libs who think that wielding naked political power to steal an election might qualify as a step toward dictatorship.

In case you’ve somehow forgotten, here is Donald Trump’s narrative of what happened in the 2020 election. He defeated Joe Biden easily—or he would have, if it weren’t for dastardly Democratic cheating across a suite of swing states, which resulted in untold Trump votes going uncounted and untold phony Biden ballots counted from thin air. He and his lawyers had unbelievable heaps of evidence proving this fraud—but election officials and the courts were too cowardly to let them win their cases. Result: Biden to the White House, Trump to Mar-a-Lago.

This narrative has taken an almighty pummeling since the day Trump and his allies first rolled it out, for the simple reason that every specific accusation of fraud they tried to bring forward collapsed at the first whiff of scrutiny. Their lawsuits crumpled by the dozens. Their promised reams of definitive evidence kept going up in smoke.

Vance knows all this, and he knows Douthat knows it, too; he’s too slippery to try to fight the battle on this hill. So, in his telling, Team Trump’s post-2020 lawsuits become “the Jenna Ellis legal clown show”—as though it wasn’t Trump leading the charge, but some random outside lawyer. (Not just any outside lawyer, either—one who last year abandoned Team Trump to admit many of her post-election claims had been lies and later went on to endorse Ron DeSantis for president. In other words, a very good scapegoat for a VP hopeful performing for an audience of one.)

Trying to go to court to prove fraud at all was strategically foolish, Vance maintains—“you can’t litigate these things judicially.” Instead, “you have to litigate them politically.” He mourns that “we never had a real political debate about the 2020 election.”

This might seem an odd claim, since all of us, including Ross Douthat and J.D. Vance, have spent insane amounts of time debating the 2020 election ever since it happened. But to Vance, “political debate” isn’t just having a robust public discourse about what factually happened. “Political debate,” in Vance’s telling, is something that couldn’t really happen in 2020 unless Mike Pence, rather than certifying Biden’s win, endorsed Republicans’ fraudulent “effort to provide alternative slates of electors.”

In other words, Vance is being euphemistic. What he refers to as “political debate” is what the rest of us would call a constitutional crisis.

It was a mistake, Vance maintains, to spend all that time trying to prove fraud. The fact that millions of Republicans believed there had been fraud was enough: Republicans should’ve jumped straight into trying to seize the presidency by political force. Otherwise, Vance argues, “an entire section of our democratic republic would’ve had their concerns ignored.”

The cherry on top here is Vance’s final claim. He imagines a world where Republicans had gone forward with this insane plan, and it worked—Trump remained the president because the Republican Congress decided to honor alternate slates of fake electors despite having failed to prove the slightest whiff of fraud.

And in this universe—where Trump has unshackled himself from the will of the voters and forced his way to another term without ever proving an ounce of fraud—here’s Vance, still whining that liberals would have the gall to call him an authoritarian! After all, Trump would have just “served four more years and retired”—why are you all getting so bent out of shape?

A couple last stray thoughts on this. One: I know he’s not the most popular guy around here, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Douthat, and I think he provided a valuable service with this interview.

The liberal line on interviewing MAGA lunatics is usually that the interviewers let them get away with too much—that the interviewer needs to get adversarial and hostile. It’s a hard balance to strike, because of course letting your subject dissemble with no pushback is a disservice to your audience. But push back too hard, and the interview devolves into a meaningless shouting match. Vance doesn’t get nearly as insane here if Douthat doesn’t give him gentle pushback, then give him the space to yak.

Two: If you’re Trump, what’s the point in keeping looking? The perfectly pliable, highly intelligent, utterly morally bankrupt option is right in front of you, just waiting for the tap-in.

“If he asked me, certainly I would be interested,” Vance told Douthat. “I’m not trying to think too much about it until he actually asks.”

—Andrew Egger