After weeks of mealy-mouthed avoidance, vice presidential candidate JD Vance finally last week directly answered the question of whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 election: no. His exact languages was a question: “So, did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use, OK?” He said a good deal more to hedge and expand on that answer, but none of that matters as much as the sentiment, with which Vance definitively entered the ranks of the election denialists.

This is of course the home stretch of a hotly contested election, and practically all politicians inflate, obfuscate and, yes, even lie outright when it comes to advancing their campaigns and political positions. But this is not a political position.

As much as the Trump camp has tried to throw this all into doubt, whether he did or did not win the 2020 presidential election is not a matter of opinion or debate. He did not, and he tried mightily to reverse the results not because there was any fraud committed, but because he wanted to nix the expressed will of the U.S. electorate and overthrow this country’s tradition of democratic governance.

There is no mystery here, no alternative view of what happened or who was responsible. Insofar as there has been a long-running federal criminal cases into Trump’s attempts at election theft, these are to establish whether and how the former president can be held responsible and face consequences for his conduct, not to prove whether it happened.

It happened; we all saw it, we watched Trump stoke up the Jan. 6 crowd, we heard the recording of him pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to report false results, we know his advisors tried to organize alternate slates of electors. Trump himself has on occasion admitted that he lost.

Vance, a U.S. senator, knows all of this. Once upon a time, he too could see and call out Trump’s falsehoods. Then he came to believe that the best path forward for his political aims was tethering himself to the former president. So there is no confusion at play here; Vance knows full well that he is lying, and he is willing to do it to please his boss. In a sensical political environment, there should be no coming back from this.

These are not the sort of lies that you can chalk up to overzealousness or the old adage of campaigning in poetry and governing in prose. It is not overstating the impact of a desired tax cut or fudging the numbers on immigrant arrivals. This lie takes direct aim at the heart of our system, and the lie in and of itself is dangerous, chipping away at the basic trust in a system that undergirds all else.

We now have huge chunks of the electorate who believe our elections are illegitimate because shadowy cabals are ballot-stuffing or noncitizens are voting in great numbers or any of a number of other conspiracies that have been exhaustively disproven. Every time a figure like Vance gets up in front of a crowd or a TV camera and repeats the lie, a little more damage is done, damage that will be very, very difficult to undo. So we hope it’s worth it, JD.

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