I filed this request in mid-October, but the outcome of the 2024 election will likely be known by the time you read these words. What is already clear, however, is how quickly Donald Trump’s Republican Party is approaching a tipping point where elections simply no longer matter – the dream that America’s authoritarian right pursues. is attached as she fantasizes about transforming America into a more powerful country. a richly armed and financed version of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

This project, like much of the rest of the MAGA agenda, fell into the hands of the designated heir of the Trump movement, JD Vance. The Ohio senator Trump chose as his running mate has accomplished many stunning U-turns and acts of intellectual self-cancellation in his new role as MAGA ideology czar, but the most painful of them all has been his emergence as an election denier.

Note that Vance’s election denialism is not the vulgar type of system destruction promoted by the government. Kari Lakes And Tina Peterses of the world. No, like his other works of demagogic convenience – the Deadly smears against pet eaters in SpringfieldOhio, or the proposals of intrastate menstrual surveillance— Vance’s attack on the conduct of our elections takes the form of the debate podcaster’s “just ask questions” ploy.

It’s telling that Vance rarely addressed the subject himself, but he was often asked about this in press interviews after failing to offer a clear answer to a vice-presidential debate question about the outcome of the 2020 presidential vote. And in such contexts, he usually engages in dodging another podcaster – a weak display of Whataboutism. During Vance’s now famous appearance on the show New York Times podcast The interviewhost Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked him five times if he thought Trump lost the 2020 election. After the second survey, he warded off the suggestion that big tech companies had colluded to remove the documents leaked from Hunter Biden’s laptop, a favorite MAGA lament that even if it turned out to be true, it’s several universes apart in terms of the significance of an election lie that fomented a coup attempt . Along with his various dodges, Vance returned to the robotic speech he intoned during the debate: that the obsession with the 2020 vote is a relic of the past and that his focus is on “the future.” At MAGA rallies, however, Vance was more outspoken: When asked by a voter at a Pennsylvania rally if he believed Trump lost in 2020, he replied: “I think there are serious problems with 2020. So did Trump lose the election? Not by the words I would use.

Yet the whole point of democratic elections is that they are not settled by the words you would use: the process is there to produce an unambiguous result, and anyone who deviates from it based on an outcome they don’t like not, as Trump and Vance did. , does not respect the most fundamental requirements of democratic governance. That’s why it would have been a great service to the interviewers who pressed the 2020 results to ask the crucial follow-up question: Would widespread impeachment of the ballot also mean that Republican senators and House representatives , together with state governors and legislators, also assumed office illegitimately? Or do allegations of fraud and embezzlement only apply when you lose?

It is this inability to follow the entire logic of election denial that allows Vance’s irresponsible “whataboutism” to flourish. Likewise, none of Vance’s press interlocutors asked him the equally obvious follow-up question to his empty assertion that he only thinks about the future: The claim that 2020 was rigged doesn’t Has she not prepared the ground for the same corrosive vigilantism to reject the results of the next elections? In other words, the entire sordid anti-democratic campaign of lies that led to the January 6 insurrection is the future of any Republican Party in which JD Vance plays a leadership role.

The great irony here is that Vance himself had dismissed most of the J6 conspiracy theory in real time, in yet another podcast interview: discovered by CNN. “I think when Biden is inaugurated, people will more or less accept him and that will be the next fight,” Vance said.

Presumably, this heresy of the past is why Vance continually claims to focus on the future. Like his long track record as a die-hard Never Trumper during the 2016 election cycle, this is a bad image for a MAGA political leader. The funny thing about this is that Vance’s opposition to the man who would become his boss has been the main line of analysis in the case. 271-page file that Trump campaign officials compiled about Vance when they considered him for vice president. And when the investigative journalist (and former Nation corresponding) Ken Klippenstein leaked this documentthe Trump-Vance campaign conspired with Big Tech mogul Elon Musk to suppress it. In other words, when Vance is confronted with his history of election denialism, his counterclaim (“Big Tech censored us!”) turns out to be something his own campaign has engaged in, for his personal benefit. Viktor Orbán could not have described the matter better.