Politico’s Jonathan Martin Mocks Vance’s Trump Stolen Election Take on Bill Maher Show: ‘That Was Never Trump’s Argument!’

Senior Politico political columnist Jonathan Martin mocked Vice President JD Vance’s take on President Donald Trump’s stolen election claims during his Bill Maher interview, ridiculing the “sleight of hand” response.

Vance was a guest on Friday night’s edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, during which Maher challenged him on Trump’s false claims, and Vance made his own pivot:

VANCE: I’m trying to make the more middle-ground argument here.

MAHER: No.

VANCE: The biggest criticism I had of the 2020 election is that you had technology companies that were quite literally censoring negative information about the left and promoting negative information about the right. So, in a fundamental sense, like, if the First Amendment says that we have a free and open debate and then the American people judge based on that free and open debate, the sense in which I think the election in 2020 was rigged, I’m sorry, is that you had technology companies that were putting their thumb on the scale in a way that completely obliterated the real open exchange of ideas. By the way, it didn’t happen in 2024, but it happened in 2020, and it was a problem.

MAHER: Well, you’re gonna get a big pat on the back when you go back to the White House.

On Monday morning’s edition of MS NOW’s Morning Joe, Martin called out Vance’s response as lacking the “courage” to contradict “Trump’s craziness” by making an entirely different argument:

POLITICO’S JONATHAN MARTIN: Let me go back to that clip you played at the start of this segment. I think it’s really important for your viewers to see what Vance was doing, because it’s a really slick sleight of hand, what Vence was doing.

He has a studio audience there in Hollywood that skews liberal. He’s got a host who definitely skews liberal in Bill Maher. So Vance does not have the courage to sit there and echo Trump saying 2020 was stolen and Democrats literally stole the election.

Because he knows that can’t play with that audience and that he’s gonna be laughed at and mocked if he says it out loud.

So he doesn’t echo what Trump actually said, he just argues something else entirely. So he won’t carry Trump’s water there because he know he’ll be laughed at it before a studio audience.

But he also won’t alienate Trump or disagree with Trump.

So he just argued something else entirely from the question that was posed, which is talking about what social media companies did on speech in the lead up to 20.

But that was never Trump’s argument! Trump wasn’t talking about that! Trump said no it was literally stolen from me, they literally stole the election from me.

But Vance won’t litigate that so instead he talks about something else and hopes that Trump won’t notice.

And this is a stand-in for the entire game for the last decade.

What Vance was doing there is what the party does writ large which is you just try to this as least humiliating as possible, change the argument–.

“Well I’m talking about the broader case, the broader case,” because if you litigate what Trump is actually saying…

A, it’s embarrassing, and B, obviously, it doesn’t stand up on the facts, either.

And what Vance was doing there is that game they play every time. It’s a high-brow Trumpism. It’s an uptown version of Trumpism.

He won’t say they stole the election directly. I’ll just say something else that won’t piss Trump off. He won’t notice that I’m actually walking away from his craziness, and I can just live for one more day.

Boy, that is the order of the decade for the GOP.

Watch above via MS NOW’s Morning Joe.

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