CHRIS CRUCIAL: JD Vance isn't an idiot. But... 🤦

PLUS: No more golf for Trump!

I am only 42 paid subscribers from 3,700!!! You can read what I am doing and why I am doing it here. A paid subscription comes with loads of perks including a 15-minute Zoom call with me! Join the movement today!👇

1. The 2020 litmus test

In the days, weeks and months after he lost the 2020 election, three things became very clear:

1. Donald Trump was never going to say publicly that he lost the election

2. He was, essentially, just going to keep running for president — straight through 2024

3. The price for admission to the Trump Republican party was that you could never, ever say that he lost the 2020 election

Trump (and his allies) enforced that third point with ruthless efficiency. If any elected GOP official said anything that suggested that Trump had lost in 2020, they were immediately targeted. Trump would attack them as a RINO (Republican In Name Only) and work to recruit a primary challenger against them.

It was a pure loyalty test. Say I won — or at least that I didn’t lose — or else.

Politicians, who are reactive animals, got the message. They would offer some gobbledygook about how there were some irregularities — there are always irregularities when 150+ million people vote! — in 2020 and how they couldn’t say anything for sure.

To which I say: Bullshit. There was not then nor is there now any evidence of widespread (or even un-widespread) voter fraud. Trump and his legal team filed 62 lawsuits related to the 2020 election. They lost 61 of those suits and the one they won had to do with whether Pennsylvania voters could go back and “cure” their ballots. It was a technicality.

Republican politicians knew — and know — this. But, again, Trump made election denialism a litmus test of whether you were with him. And if you weren’t with him well then you were against him. And he was going to take out everyone who was against him.

All of which brings me to an exchange between the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a host for “The Daily” franchise, and vice presidential nominee JD Vance. It came as part of an extended interview that will run over the weekend.

Here it is:

When asked about the previous election during an hourlong interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a host of “The Interview,” a Times podcast published each Saturday, the Republican vice-presidential nominee responded that he was “focused on the future.” It was the same phrase he used to evade the same question during his debate with his Democratic rival, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota.

“There’s an obsession here with focusing on 2020,” Mr. Vance said in the interview. “I’m much more worried about what happened after 2020, which is a wide-open border, groceries that are unaffordable.”

When pressed a second time, Mr. Vance pivoted to a complicated counterargument: He suggested Mr. Trump would have won more votes in 2020 had social media companies not limited posts about a New York Post story about the contents of a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son. Trump allies had maintained that documents on the laptop linked President Biden to corrupt business dealings, but those claims were unfounded.

“Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again,” Ms. Garcia-Navarro said. “Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”

“Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes?” Mr. Vance replied.

“Senator Vance,” Ms. Garcia-Navarro continued. “I’m going to ask you again, did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”

“And I’ve answered your question with another question,” Mr. Vance said. “You answer my question and I’ll answer yours.”

On her fifth request for a yes-or-no answer, Ms. Garcia-Navarro pointed out that there was “no proof, legal or otherwise,” of election fraud.

Mr. Vance dismissed that as “a slogan.”

FIVE times the reporter asked if Trump lost the election. And FIVE times Vance refused to answer.

Aside from the fact that we know that Trump lost fair and square, Vance’s spin about the “future” doesn’t even make sense.

Why not? Because Trump himself talks about the 2020 election in every single campaign speech he gives! He regularly insists that he got more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016 (true!) and that something happened that kept him winning (False!).

Vance, of course, knows all of this. (Say what you will about Vance but he is not dumb.) But he also knows that keeping in Trump’s good graces is absolutely critical to his future political ambitions. And so he lets ambition trump — ahem — facts.

He’s far from the only one to make that calculation. House Speaker Mike Johnson refused to say Trump lost in 2020 in an interview with ABC last Sunday.

“You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we are talking about the future,” Johnson said. “We are not going to talk about what happened in 2020, we are going to talk about 2024.”

Reminder: Trump talks about 2020. In every speech. Every day.

This is an intellectually indefensible position. There is simply NO evidence — like, none — that suggests anything other than normal vote-counting irregularities happened in 2020. And to the extent they happened at all, they were, in virtually every case, accidental and/or involved a handful of votes — at most!

Yes, we should want a system that counts votes perfectly the first time. But, there is a big difference between benign errors that are quickly corrected and the sort of overarching election conspiracy that Trump is alleging.

That the GOP has decided to capitulate to Trump on this point speaks very poorly of many of its “leader” who absolutely know better.

Ugh.

2. Trump’s golf habit paused

Donald Trump likes to golf. A lot. He played hundreds of round during his time in the White House; the Washington Post’s Philip Bump calculated that Trump spent 428 days of his presidency at a Trump property.

But between now November 5, Trump won’t be allowed to hit the links — due to security concerns, according to NBC News.

Trump has not played a round of golf since an assassination plot against him was foiled in Florida on September 15. NBC reports that Trump has had at least two conversations with top security officials in the administration who have conveyed their worries about their ability to protect him when he is on the golf course.

As NBC noted:

If Trump goes without golfing through Election Day, it will be the longest time he has gone without playing since the pandemic, which kept him off the links for over two months.

Golf is central to Trump’s identity. He owns more than a dozen courses in the U.S. and around the world. He has claimed for years that he has won many club championships at these courses — although that seems somewhat implausible.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly attacked how much then President Barack Obama played golf. But, while in office, Trump played far more than his predecessor.

In July 2020, amid criticism of his golf addiction, Trump tweeted:

Golf, oddly, was a major point of contention during the June 27 debate between Trump and Joe Biden. Trump, as he is wont to do, cited his many club championships and noted “to do that, you have to be quite smart and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way.” He added that Biden “can’t hit a ball 50 yards.”

To which Biden, who was once a pretty decent golfer, responded: “I got my handicap, when I was vice president, down to six.”

So, that happened.

3. Friday AMA

Every Friday I take a whole bunch of questions from subscribers to my YouTube channel. I snuck the livestream in this week right before I headed to the airport to fly back to DC from Utah. Fun behind-the-scenes tidbit: I balanced my computer on a trash can I found in the hotel room to get it up to the right height!

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

“With that, I’ll yield to the president. I mean the vice president.” — Joe Biden, referring to Kamala Harris, on Friday

ONE GOOD CHART

Where do Republican and Democratic campaigns eat? The Washington Post dove into campaign finance filings. Here’s what they found:

SONG OF THE DAY

I will admit I am too old to be into Charli xcx’s music. But I am definitely not too old to be into Bon Iver. Which brings me to this Charli xcx track featuring Bon Iver. It’s called “I think about it all the time.”

Thanks for reading! This nightly newsletter brings you ALL of what you need to know from the world of politics. Think of it as a daily cheat sheet! If you want to get it in your email inbox every night at 7:30 pm, become a subscriber today!