Sen. JD Vance of Ohio appeared on two Sunday news programs where he defended former President Donald Trump’s false claims about federal hurricane aid and a Colorado city that he claimed had been “conquered” by gangs and spoke about abortion.
On both “Fox News Sunday” and ABC’s “This Week,” Vance faced questions over whether the Republican presidential ticket had been overstating problems as a way to attack Vice President Kamala Harris and her fellow Democrats — and whether he was deliberately blurring unpopular positions from the Republican ticket as part of a marketing pitch to voters.
On “This Week,” Vance defended Trump’s insistence on repeating the debunked claim that Aurora, Colorado, had been “invaded and conquered” by Venezuelan gangs after the mayor and local officials had said it was not true.
Martha Raddatz, the program’s host, asked Vance whether he supported claims “that the Republican mayor says were grossly exaggerated and have hurt the city’s identity and sense of safety.”
“Well, Martha, you just said the mayor said they were exaggerated — that means there’s got to be some element of truth here,” Vance said.
Raddatz interrupted, telling Vance the incidents had been limited to a “handful” of apartment complexes where police had responded.
Vance accused the news media of “nitpicking everything that Donald Trump said” instead of focusing on illegal immigration and crime.
Raddatz had started her interview by asking Vance about Trump’s false claims that the Biden administration had deliberately not provided federal aid to predominantly Republican areas after recent storms. “There is no truth to that,” Raddatz said.
Vance suggested that Trump’s attack was a way to acknowledge that “Americans are feeling left behind by their government.”
On “Fox News Sunday,” Shannon Bream, the host, asked Vance whether he still supported banning abortion after 15 or 20 weeks, as he has said in the past.
“First of all, I think it’s reasonable, at a certain level, to say late-term abortions are barbaric if they are done for elective reasons,” Vance said. “Of course you have to have the exceptions, but late-term abortions for elective reasons is something no civilized country allows.”
“Are we just playing with semantics here?” Bream asked, questioning how banning abortion after 15 or 20 weeks differed from a national ban. Vance said his abortion position was not a matter of semantics and pointed to Trump’s support for letting states decide the issue. He noted that Trump had said that he would not sign a national ban.
Vance also continued to evade questions about whether he believed Trump’s false claims of winning the 2020 election.
“I’ve said repeatedly I think the 2020 election had problems,” Vance said on ABC. “You want to say rigged? You want to say he won? Use whatever vocabulary term you want.
“I want to focus on the fact that we had big technology firms censoring our fellow citizens in a way that violated our fundamental rights,” he said. “The fact that you’re so obsessed with what word I use to describe this phenomenon, rather than the phenomenon itself, suggests something very broken in the American media.”
Vance has faced scrutiny over his position on the 2020 election since the vice presidential debate, when he did not acknowledge that Trump had lost.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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