During an interview on Sunday, Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson refused to say whether he believed President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election against former President Donald Trump.
In an appearance on ABC News’s “This Week” program, host George Stephanopoulos posed the question to Johnson, noting that Trump’s vice presidential nominee, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) avoided answering the question when it was posed to him during his debate with Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minnesota), the Democratic Party’s vice presidential candidate.
Johnson griped about the question on the program, claiming that the issue was unimportant and that the media were using it as a “gotcha” against Trump-aligned Republicans. “You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we are talking about the future,” Johnson said.
“So like Vance, you can’t say unequivocally that Biden won the election and Trump lost?” Stephanopoulos pressed on.
Johnson responded by saying that Biden is in the White House as president, but avoided indicating whether he believed Biden had legitimately won the race.
“We are not going to talk about what happened in 2020, we are going to talk about 2024,” Johnson reiterated.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Can you say unequivocally that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Trump lost?
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 6, 2024
MIKE JOHNSON: See, this is the game that is always played by mainstream media with mainstream Republicans. It's a gotcha game.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So like Vance, you can't say… pic.twitter.com/0vFnZHi4a3
Despite Republican attempts to circumvent the issue, Trump’s maneuvers to overthrow the 2020 election remain relevant, as Trump appears to be laying the groundwork to sow doubt over the outcome of this year’s race if he loses to Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.
In the lead up to the 2020 election, Trump wrongly suggested that mail-in votes and early voting were rife with fraud (even though he himself has utilized early voting several times). On election night that year, when batches of absentee ballots were finally counted, Biden took the lead in many states, prompting Trump to falsely claim that fraud had been committed.
In this year’s race, Trump is employing a similar strategy to create doubts if he loses in November— this time by fear mongering about voter fraud by undocumented immigrants. Trump is wrongly claiming, for example, that Harris and her campaign are “trying to get [immigrants] to vote.”
Notably, every state in the country has mechanisms in place to prevent votes from being counted if they are not from U.S. citizens, and steep penalties for those who try to engage in election fraud.
Trump and his supporters “are pre-deploying a big lie to justify their future efforts to disrupt or overturn elections,” Wendy Weiser, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice, told HuffPost about the issue.
Notably, Johnson played a part in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Johnson, then a little-known congressional representative, drafted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, co-signed by dozens of his colleagues, urging justices to allow a case to proceed that would have blocked Biden’s win weeks after the election had taken place. That case ultimately failed, as the Court refused to hear it at all.
Angry, shocked, overwhelmed? Take action: Support independent media.
We’ve borne witness to a chaotic first few months in Trump’s presidency.
Over the last months, each executive order has delivered shock and bewilderment — a core part of a strategy to make the right-wing turn feel inevitable and overwhelming. But, as organizer Sandra Avalos implored us to remember in Truthout last November, “Together, we are more powerful than Trump.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is pushing through executive orders, but — as we’ve reported at Truthout — many are in legal limbo and face court challenges from unions and civil rights groups. Efforts to quash anti-racist teaching and DEI programs are stalled by education faculty, staff, and students refusing to comply. And communities across the country are coming together to raise the alarm on ICE raids, inform neighbors of their civil rights, and protect each other in moving shows of solidarity.
It will be a long fight ahead. And as nonprofit movement media, Truthout plans to be there documenting and uplifting resistance.
As we undertake this life-sustaining work, we appeal for your support. We have 24 hours left in our fundraiser: Please, if you find value in what we do, join our community of sustainers by making a monthly or one-time gift.