Republicans Need A Forceful Answer To Dems’ 2020 Questions

Democrats continue to play games with the Senate confirmation hearings. And while the Trump nominees remain unscathed by the “gotcha” questioning, someone needs to forcefully, substantially — and in a sound-bite — answer their query about whether Donald Trump “lost” the 2020 election.

Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, sidled near the sweet spot when Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., asked her if she was “prepared to say today under oath without reservation that Donald Trump lost the presidential contest to Joe Biden in 2020.”

“Ranking Member Durbin, President Biden is the president of the United States. He was duly sworn in, and he is the president of the United States,” the attorney general nominee replied.

Durbin persisted, though, asking whether she had “any doubts that Joe Biden had the majority of votes, electoral votes necessary to be elected president in 2020.”

Bondi reiterated that she “accept[s], of course, that Joe Biden is president of the United States, what I can tell you is what I saw firsthand when I went to Pennsylvania as an advocate for the campaign. I was an advocate for the campaign, and I was on the ground in Pennsylvania and I saw many things there, but do I accept the results? Of course I do. Do I agree with what happened, and I saw so much. You know, no one from either side of the aisle should want there to be any issues with election integrity in our country. We should all want our elections to be free and fair and the rules and the laws to be followed.”

“I think that question deserved a yes or no, and I think the length of your answer is an indication that you weren’t prepared to answer yes,” Durbin retorted.

Sen. Dick Blumenthal, D-Conn., would later revisit the 2020 election, intoning that he was “really troubled” and “deeply disturbed” by Bondi’s response to Durbin: “You have to be able to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. You dodged that question when you were asked directly by Senator Durbin.”

Bondi forcefully condemned the senator’s comments: “You said ‘I have to sit up here and say these things.’ No, I don’t. I sit up here and speak the truth. I’m not going to sit up here and say anything that I need to say to get confirmed by this body. I don’t have to say anything. I will answer the questions to the best of my ability and honestly.”

While Bondi’s pushback was beautiful to see, it’s past time for Republicans to provide a pithy answer to counter the Democrat’s deceptive question.

As I explained last year when the legacy media hounded then-Sen. J.D. Vance to say Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, there is a fundamental flaw in the question: “The query includes an undefined term — ‘lost’ — which holds a different meaning to Trump supporters and to the anti-Trump inquisitors.”

“If ‘lost’ merely meant Biden is the president of the United States, then that’s an easy answer: Yes, of course, Trump lost, as Biden was inaugurated,” and he is currently nearing the end of his four disastrous years in the Oval Office. But that’s not what those demanding an acknowledgement that Trump lost mean by “lost,” and yesterday’s hearings confirmed that reality, for Bondi repeatedly and expressly attested that, yes, Joe Biden is the president of the United States.

What Durbin, Blumenthal, and pretty much everyone else demanding a “yes” or “no” answer to whether Trump lost the 2020 election seek is a concession that Trump’s election challenges were frivolous, unfounded, or wrong. Democrats inject such concessions into their meaning of “lost.”

That’s why Bondi answered Durbin’s question as she did, by stating both that she accepted that Biden is president of the United States and that she saw firsthand issues in Pennsylvania’s election.

In other words, it depends on what you mean by “lost.”

Republicans need to make this point more explicit, first to stop the silly game of “gotcha,” but second to remind Americans what Democrats and the media did to “win” in 2020. Here, the other meanings of “lost” come into play.

“If asked whether Trump ‘lost’ the 2020 election, meaning that if all legal votes were counted and all illegal counts discarded — and the counting was done legally pursuant to controlling election law —” the answer should be a resounding, “I don’t know.” 

As I wrote last year: “No one can possibly know the answer to that question because in 2020 there were too many election laws violated or ignored, and too many illegal votes counted. But the lawsuits challenging the election outcomes were tossed as moot once the votes were certified, so there was never a determination on the validity of the tallies, leaving uncertain the accuracy of the election results.”

That’s why election integrity matters because no serious country should leave its citizens shrugging over the accuracy of the vote count.

But “lost” can have a third connotation too, with it posing the question of whether Trump “lost” a free and fair election to Joe Biden. And with this meaning given to the word “lost,” I’d venture to say that an overwhelming majority of Americans would agree the 2020 election wasn’t “free and fair,” but was rigged against Trump.

Republicans need to make that point, and the confirmation hearings provide a perfect opportunity. So, here’s a simple, soundbite for the next Trump nominee cornered with the query, “Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”

“It depends on what you mean by ‘lose.’ Joe Biden is the president of the United States. But Biden did not win a free and fair election, and the country has suffered the devastating consequences for the last four years as a result of the Biden presidency.”

And the 2020 election was not free and fair: Not when the FBI pre-bunked the Hunter Biden laptop story, causing social media companies to censor the evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s pay-to-play scandal; not when the Biden campaign’s senior advisor, Antony Blinken, “set in motion” the release of a public statement signed by 51 former intelligence agents that falsely framed Hunter’s laptop as Russian disinformation; not when there were “systemic violations of election law” which “disparately favor[ed] one candidate,” and “allow[ed] for tens of thousands of illegal votes to be counted;” and not when illegal drop box were placed in Democrat-heavy precincts and Zuckbucks were used to get out the Democrat vote.

Of course, the Democrat inquisitors will likely try to reframe the nominee’s response as one asserting claims of widespread fraud, which is precisely what the J6 Committee did in its show trial, all while ignoring the substantial evidence of systemic violations of election law. But “that there was no widespread fraud in November 2020 doesn’t mean that the election was not rigged to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.”

With the legacy media’s stranglehold on the news broken, Americans now know many of these facts. So, if Democrats insist on relitigating the 2020 election, Republicans shouldn’t fear forcefully and clearly countering with the truth and then moving on — because the rest of the country has long ago.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion, National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.