Near the very end of this week’s vice presidential debate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz asked Ohio Sen. JD Vance a question, the relevance of which lingered long after the event. “Did he [Donald Trump] lose the 2020 election?” the Democratic nominee asked.
His GOP rival refused to answer — the senator would only say that he’s “focused on the future” — and the Harris campaign quickly turned Vance’s dodge into a campaign ad.
A day later, the Republican vice presidential nominee was asked the same question, which he dodged again, while accusing news organizations of being “obsessed” with the election from four years ago. That same evening, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer appeared on CNN and asked Kaitlan Collins, “What are you doing talking about something that’s four years ago?” The Minnesota congressman added, in reference to the 2020 race, “This is something that you folks, in the media, want to focus on, on a regular basis.”
It was against this backdrop that Trump, a day later, made his running mate and congressional ally appear rather foolish. NBC News reported:
Trump said toward the top of his remarks at a rally in Saginaw, Michigan, that if he thought he lost the 2020 presidential election, he wouldn’t be running again.
“We won. We won,” the former president declared despite reality. “We did win. It was a rigged election. It was a rigged election.”
Trump: We did great in 2016 and a lot of people don't know that we did a lot better in 2020. We won. We won. It was a rigged election. That is why I am doing it again. If I thought I lost I would not be doing this again. pic.twitter.com/2Yyo511SQw
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 3, 2024
It’s not exactly a secret that Republican officials have pleaded with Trump, publicly and privately, to stop pushing his ridiculous conspiracy theories about his 2020 defeat — what many have labeled the former president’s “big lie” — in large part because it’s a losing message that much of the electorate doesn’t want to hear.
But Trump simply can’t help himself. Despite Vance and other leading GOP voices occasionally telling the public that the party and its ticket are “focused on the future,” Trump has a habit of fixating on the past.
Indeed, it’s a staple of the Republican nominee’s message. A HuffPost report noted, even before Vance dodged the 2020-related question: “Trump had already brought up the stolen election repeatedly in the past week ― he brings up 2020, unprompted, pretty much every time he speaks in public, though he doesn’t always explicitly say it was ‘rigged.’”
That was, however, the word he used at his latest event in Michigan. It was also the word he used by way of his social media platform on Wednesday night, after special counsel Jack Smith’s brutal court filing was unsealed. “I didn’t rig the 2020 Election, they did!” the former president wrote, pointing to a version of reality with no resemblance to our own.








