Conservative Columnist Slams Republicans for Stumbling Over Questions About 2020 Election: ‘Stuck’ With Trump’s Lies
Jacquelyn Martin, AP Photo
Ramesh Ponnuru, the editor of the conservative magazine National Review and a Washington Post columnist, slammed Republicans for stumbling over questions about the 2020 presidential election in a new opinion piece for the latter on Tuesday.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) was asked by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos to acknowledge that Joe Biden won and Donald Trump lost the 2020 election over the weekend, and responded to the inquiry by accusing Stephanopoulos of playing “a gotcha game.”
“You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we’re talking about the future,” Johnson complained. “Joe Biden has been the president for four years. There’s not a question about this, okay?”
Ponnuru characterized Stephanopoulos’s question as one “that should not have fazed a high-schooler with a moderate degree of civic awareness.”
“What’s absurd is not the question but the fact that it has to be asked. All Johnson had to do to be able to move on to the topics he prefers was tell the truth, which can be done succinctly: Biden won,” he continued before knocking Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance (R-OH) for keeping “his distance from Trump’s most outlandish assertions” and “changing the subject to other complaints about the 2020 election.”
“Modern parties usually abandon presidential candidates who lose. Trump’s barrage of falsehoods about the election saved him from that fate and helped him cruise to the Republican nomination. The larger voting public, in 2022, seems to have held Republicans’ indulgence of 2020 mythology against them. In a recent poll, 63 percent of respondents thought Biden had won legitimately in 2020,” concluded Ponnuru. “Only 30 percent of Republicans agreed. No wonder Republican politicians don’t like having to talk about it. At least through the end of this campaign, they seem to have concluded, they are stuck with the lie. A fantasy about 2020 has the potential to cause them to lose another election in 2024.”
At last week’s vice presidential debate, Vance dodged a question about the 2020 election before professing to believe that Trump had won it the next day.
