There’s been a considerable amount of interest in the 2024 race about the prospect of post-election political retaliations. Republican Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, however, has been eager to put voters’ minds at rest.
Over the summer, for example, the senator appeared on Fox News and said that Donald Trump is “not a vengeful guy,” all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. This past weekend, Vance took the same line a little further, delivering this line on ABC News’ “This Week” with a straight face:
He [Trump] was president for four years, and he didn’t go after his political opponents. You know who did go after her political opponents? Kamala Harris, who has tried to arrest everything from pro-life activists to her political opponents … and used the Department of Justice as a weapon against people.
Look, I realize that Vance lies a lot. By some measures, he appears to have received tutorials from his running mate about how to deceive the public on a daily basis, and the lessons have gone tragically well.
But this is just straight-up gaslighting.
Let’s quickly discard the obvious absurdity that the vice president used the levers of federal power to target her perceived political foes. If Vance or anyone in GOP politics has any evidence to substantiate such a bizarre assertion, they’ve kept the proof well hidden.
The larger problem, of course, is Trump’s record that Vance is pretending to know nothing about.
There are basically three elements to the story that are worth keeping in mind: the recent past, the present and the near future.
In the recent past, Trump was in the White House, where he spent an outlandish amount of time and energy retaliating against perceived political foes — both in the political and private-sector realms — seeking meritless prosecutions against opponents. All of this has been thoroughly documented, and confirmed by officials who worked closely with him during his tenure.
In the present, Trump is a private citizen who lacks access to governmental power, but he has nevertheless tried to use his political influence to seek revenge — even against members of his own party.
As for the near future, the former president is effectively running on a retaliatory 2024 platform: Trump wants to prosecute his perceived domestic political enemies, and he doesn’t seem especially interested in hiding his intentions. On the contrary, he talks about his desire to abuse presidential powers all the time, even raising the specter of military tribunals for his opponents. When The Washington Post pressed Vance’s aides for some kind of explanation, they said the Republican senator was referring to federal criminal indictments when he said Trump “didn’t go after his political opponents.” But that also doesn’t make any sense, in part because there’s literally no evidence of Harris even trying to secure federal criminal indictments against her political opponents, and in part because there’s overwhelming evidence that Trump, while in office, went to great lengths to demand that prosecutors file charges against his perceived domestic foes. In other words, Vance peddled a plainly false claim, which his team defended with another false claim. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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