Never mind the public declarations, however repeated. In the eyes of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump has no intentions of acting as a dictator.
“The idea that Trump is going to be radically different than what he was four years ago is just preposterous,” Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday’s State of the Union when asked if he was concerned about Trump abusing presidential power. “He was an effective, successful president.”
Vance seemed to ignore Trump’s interview with Sean Hannity last week, where he said he would only be a dictator on “day one” of a potential second term. He doubled down on the position on Saturday during a speaking slot at a New York Young Republicans Gala.
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“[Peter] Baker today in The New York Times said that I want to be a dictator,” Trump said. “I didn’t say that. I said I want to be a dictator for one day.”
But Vance’s fantasy version of Trump mirrored the view he held of the Republican Party. Throughout the interview, Vance maintained that Republicans were not trying to limit access to contraceptives, and advanced the notion that the media was colluding with Twitter and the government in 2020.
After the senator expressed how Republicans should not advocate for a blanket abortion ban, Tapper pressed the senator on whether he believed women should have easier access to birth control, thereby preventing abortions. Vance demurred, saying he didn’t know of any Republican—“at least not a Republican with a brand”—trying to limit access to it.
“I mean, I could provide a list for you, if you wanted,” Tapper quipped.
“Well, OK. Not anybody I talk to, Jake,” Vance shot back, explaining that the cost of having a child in the U.S. is too high.
“Not enough American families that want to have children are able to do it,” he said. “That's how you destroy a nation.”
Tapper later raised former White House official Kash Patel’s comments on Steve Bannon’s podcast, where Patel promised that a future Trump term would “go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media,” and “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
Vance then used the opportunity to highlight the infamous New York Post report on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was suppressed online over fears it was the product of Russian disinformation.
“I agree that we need to look seriously at how there was collusion between members of the press and big technology companies and members of national security state,” Vance said, ignoring Tapper’s insistence that any suppression of the story was limited to “a day or two on Twitter.”
“It is not journalism to take your security clearance, lie to the American people, and then persuade the big technology companies to censor anti-Joe Biden stories. That’s not journalism. That is cooperation between the government and journalism.”
Vance did not mention, or acknowledge after Tapper did, how the president who oversaw the government during the time was Donald Trump.
