In an interview Monday with the hosts of the podcast “All-in,” Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance of Ohio said that if he’d been vice president on Jan. 6, 2021, he would have gone along with then-President Donald Trump’s attempts to delay Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s victory.
That may be the most dangerous thing Vance has said since he joined Trump’s ticket in July. The problem isn’t just that Vance is clinging to the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that there were legal avenues to change the results; Vance’s statement doubles as a bright clear warning that he’ll go along with whatever Trump orders him to do.
Vance’s statement doubles as a bright clear warning that he’ll go along with whatever Trump orders him to do.
When asked what he would have done if he’d been in then-Vice President Mike Pence’s shoes on Jan. 6, Vance didn’t say he’d have outright declared Trump the victor. He instead said he “would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had.”
That was the goal of the “fake electors plot,” a key component of Trump’s failed attempt to reverse his loss to Biden. Having failed in court, Trump’s accomplices dreamed up a plan to have Republicans in states he lost illegally cast Electoral College ballots for him anyway. Those ballots would then be submitted both to the National Archives and Congress, prompting confusion over which slate to certify.
Option A in that case was to have Pence accept the fake electors as real and declare Trump the winner. The backup that Trump-allied lawyer John Eastman pitched was to have Congress send the matter back to state legislatures to decide what to do with those “contested” slates. The idea was that Republican state lawmakers would succumb to pressure and say Trump won, despite vote tallies that showed he hadn’t.
It’s not clear whether that would have worked, given the reluctance of those same GOP legislators to get behind Trump’s chicanery earlier in the process. But having the imprimatur of Congress to give them cover to throw the election to their candidate would certainly have helped the plot’s chances of success. Once those “alternative” slates were returned after the delay, the plot called for Pence to either declare Trump victorious, or let Congress decide, as Vance has previously suggested he’d have done.
“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance told ABC News’ “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos in a February interview, months before he was tapped to join the GOP ticket.
It’s only rarely happened, but the 12th Amendment does allow for the House to make the final call on who has won a contested presidential election. The process requires a vote by state delegation, and Republicans had the majority in enough House delegations to throw the presidency Trump’s way if it came down to it.
But what is the law to someone like Vance, who has decided that proximity to power is more important?
However, Pence refused to pretend he had the authority to go along with Trump’s plot while presiding over the certification process. Trump’s speech ahead of the attack on the Capitol, and his tweet claiming that “Mike Pence could still do the right thing,” made his vice president a target of the rioters. And yet Vance, who knows that Trump put Pence’s life in danger, still said Monday that “Mike Pence could have done more to sort of surface some of the problems in the 2020 election.”
If anything, the opposite was true. Pence’s silence about the lies that Trump was telling may have helped those lives take hold in the minds of MAGA believers. As I have written before, the fact that Pence eventually did the right thing on Jan. 6 doesn’t make him a hero. He followed the law only after letting Trump pretend for two months that rampant fraud had existed.
Pence, who made a short-lived attempt to win the 2020 Republican nomination, has said he won’t endorse Trump this time. Vance provided a laughable theory Monday as to why that might be. “In reality, 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,” he said. “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 we should start stupid wars in foreign countries and that’s why they all hate him.”
The idea that Trump is a peace candidate is absurd, as there are plenty of hawkish Republicans, such as Vance’s colleague Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who’ve been more than happy to continue to support him. And there are still more, like Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who were willing to back Trump’s attempts to delay certification without endorsing his most blatantly false conspiracy theories.
Vance stands out, though, even among his fellow shape-shifting Republicans for the eagerness to mold himself to fit Trump’s will. Congress has changed the law that Trump tried to exploit to clarify the vice president’s ceremonial role in certifying elections. But what is the law to someone like Vance, who has decided that proximity to power is more important? His cowardice in the face of Trump’s bullying made him an ideal running mate, and his assertion that he’d have done what Pence did not is a promise to Trump that his cowardice will always win out.