‘Shame’: National Review Slams Trump-Vance Ticket for Doubling Down on Election Denialism and ‘Slandering’ Mike Pence
A new editorial from National Review condemns Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance (R-OH), over their election denialism and “slandering” of Mike Pence on Monday.
Under the headline “2020 Is Over,” the flagship conservative magazine’s editors noted that Trump again insisted that he had won the 2020 race during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris last week before observing that “Trump is still wrong, of course.”
After rejecting his claims on the merits, they also argued that “looking backwards to 2020 helps remind swing voters skeptical of the Biden-Harris record why they have justifiable concerns about trusting Trump with power again.”
Then they turned to Vance, who recently boasted about how he would have plunged the country into chaos had he been entrusted with former Pence’s role on January 6, 2021, and “insisted on slandering the honorable man Trump chose twice as his running mate.”
Last Monday, Vance said the following:
I have no personal problem with Mike Pence. I’ve never really talked to him. But I think that the idea that the reason Mike Pence isn’t on board with Donald Trump is over the election of 2020 . . . I think in reality that if Donald Trump wanted to start a nuclear war with Russia, Mike Pence would be at the front of the line endorsing him right now. And fundamentally, the reason the old guard of the Republican Party hates Donald Trump, it’s not because of January 6, 2021, whatever your views on it. It’s because Donald Trump doesn’t think that we should start stupid wars with foreign countries, and that’s why they all hate him.
“It is a calumny to claim that Pence desires nuclear war with Russia, and a double calumny to suggest that he is therefore lying about why he can no longer support his old boss,” wrote the editors. “After Trump demanded that Pence violate his oath of office and his conscience, and riled up a mob that stampeded into the Capitol amid cries to hang Pence, one can hardly blame him for deciding not to sign up for a repetition. He has been admirably forthright about this, even at great cost to his own presidential bid, and shame on Vance — who admits that he hasn’t even spoken to Pence — for calling him a liar.”
“If convictions of honor and good sense are not enough to get Trump and Vance to stop tilting at the windmill of 2020, at least political calculation ought to enter into their thinking less than two months from Election Day,” they concluded.
Pence has declined to endorse Trump’s third bid for the White House, telling Fox News that there are “profound differences between me and President Trump on a range of issues. And not just our difference on my constitutional duties that I exercised on January 6.”
