DC insider calls out JD Vance's 'slick sleight of hand' to avoid mockery from key audience

Bill Maher challenged Vice President JD Vance on President Donald Trump's false claims of election fraud, and a well-connected Washington, D.C., reporter flagged a sneaky maneuver the V.P. used to avoid heckling from the talk show's live audience.

The vice president agreed that candidates should not refuse to concede elections but claimed that technology companies had interfered in the 2020 election by censoring political narratives to favor Democratic candidates, but Jonathan Martin, Politico's politics bureau chief and senior political columnist, told MS NOW's "Morning Joe" that Vance had sidestepped Trump's actual claims.

"I want to go back to that clip you played at the start of this segment," Martin said. "I think it's really important for your viewers to see what Vance was doing, because it's a really slick slight of hand what Vance was doing. He has a studio audience, a studio audience there in Hollywood that skews liberal. He's got a host who definitely skews liberal in Bill Maher."

"Vance does not have the courage to sit there and echo Trump saying 2020 was stolen and Democrats literally stole the election because he knows that can't play with that audience and that he's going to be laughed at and mocked if he says it out loud," Martin added, "so he doesn't echo what Trump actually said, he just argues something else entirely."

Martin said the game Vance was playing on Maher's show is the same balance that all Republicans are forced to strike with Trump looming over the party.

"He won't carry Trump's water there because he'll be laughed at it before a studio audience," Martin said. "But he also won't alienate Trump or disagree with Trump, so he argues something else entirely from the question that was posed, which is talking about what social media companies did on speech in the lead up to '20. But that was never Trump's argument. Trump wasn't talking about that, Trump said, 'No, it was literally stolen from me, they literally stole the election from me.' But Vance won't litigate that, so instead he talked about something else and hopes that Trump won't notice, and this is a standard for the entire game for the last decade. What Vance was doing there is what the party does writ large, which is you just try to make this as least humiliating as possible – change the argument: 'Well, I'm talking about the broader case, the broader case, because if you litigate what Trump is actually saying..."

"It's embarrassing and obviously it doesn't stand up on the facts, either, and what Vance was doing there is that game they play every time – it's a high-brow Trumpism, it's an uptown version of Trumpism," Martin added. "He won't say they stole the election directly, I'll just say say something else that won't piss Trump off. He won't notice that I'm actually walking away from his craziness and I can just live for one more day. Boy, that is the order of the decade for the GOP."

- YouTube youtu.be