JD Vance says Trump didn't lose in 2020—and that even if he did, it was all Twitter's fault

It's quite late here in the City of Angels (Madison, Wisconsin), and I'm feeling pretty good about how much HQC (high-quality content) I've sent your direction this week, and pretty bad about how much sleep I haven't gotten. So at Julia's suggestion, I'm going to beg your collective indulgence and simply share a few links today.

Good to Know

Vice President Kamala Harris did an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, comporting herself splendidly. The video above is pretty funny: After Harris noted that Donald Trump has repeatedly referred to "an enemy within" America and raised the prospect of using the military against Americans who oppose his policies, her interviewer, Bret Baier, played a clip from earlier in the day, when Trump was asked about those comments and denied making them. (And of course, obviously Donald Trump would never blatantly lie.) Anyway, Harris wasn't having it, telling Baier: "He has repeated it many times, and you and I both know that." And as MSNBC's Chris Hayes points out, he also repeated it immediately before the part of the interview Baier showed.

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance finally came out and said he doesn't believe Trump lost the 2020 election. Obviously, he knows full well that Trump lost, and also knows that Trump would be furious if he said so. Vance tried to pass the whole thing off as not a big deal, and ultimately blamed the 2020 outcome on…the tech industry, for censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story. Real quick, to refresh your memory: Right at this time four years ago, the conservative-leaning New York Post reported that it had obtained emails and videos from a laptop once owned by Joe Biden's younger son, Hunter. These files purportedly proved that Hunter—an attorney with a long history of liking to party—had been engaged in some kind of corruption involving the Ukrainian gas company he once worked for, and also that the corruption could actually be traced back to Joe. The problem was, the whole thing sounded super fishy: Hunter had supposedly abandoned the laptop at a repair shop a year and a half earlier, and the shop owner had been so concerned by what he found on it that he'd copied the hard drive and given that copy to Trump crony Rudy Giuliani in late 2019. At which point Giuliani…set it aside for 10 months, never mentioning it until the election was nigh upon us.

On account of the whole thing sounding like bullshit, and not wanting to spread misinformation, Facebook and Twitter temporarily blocked their users from linking to the NY Post story. And conservatives have been outraged about it ever since. Trump supporter Elon Musk, who took over Twitter in 2022, called blocking the link "a violation of the Constitution's First Amendment." (As opposed to one of the other First Amendments out there, genius?) He and Trump and others have claimed the federal government pressured tech companies to block the link, and as evidence, they've got messages from the Biden campaign asking Twitter to do so. The only flaw in that logic is that Joe Biden wasn't in charge of the federal government in October 2020, when all this went down. He was just a guy running for president.

Long story short: According to JD Vance, Trump lost in 2020 because for about a day, you couldn't post the link to the Hunter Biden laptop story on Twitter or Facebook. Two things about that: One, nobody ever found any evidence of Hunter or Joe Biden's purported crimes in the laptop files. And two, a few weeks ago, when a reporter posted a link on Twitter to a Trump campaign dossier that had been obtained in a hack…Elon Musk had the link blocked and suspended the reporter's account. (It was reinstated the other day.) Yes, he did the exact thing he was so upset about in 2020.

Speaking of Elon Musk and the website he ruined and keeps on ruining: Twitter is changing its block function so that people you've blocked will now be able to see your tweets. They still won't be able to reply or retweet or like your tweets, and they were always able to see your tweets anyway, simply by making a new account; but at least making and logging into that new account was a minor hassle, and removing that extra step feels unnecessary and creepy, especially in light of how many women use the block function to prevent harassment and stalking. (If you're in the market for a Twitter replacement, let me recommend Bluesky. It's more or less the same as Twitter, but if you have any questions, send them my way.)

And here's another video, from last week, in which PBS NewsHour talks to four lifelong Republicans in Arizona who aren't voting for Trump:

Many folks on the left have been upset with Harris for doing so much campaigning with conservatives like Liz Cheney and actively tacking toward more centrist stances to win disaffected Republicans' votes. But it seems to be working, and it's way more important that she win than that she pass a leftist purity test. (The leftists freaking love the purity tests.) And you know, if the votes she wins come from Republicans like these four—well, they could be awful people in their private lives, I don't know them, but they seem nice enough here.

The Fun Part

Based on how I found myself next to Julia on the couch earlier this year, watching almost two full seasons of Bridgerton, I think there might be something to this.

Having a Normal One comes out Monday through Friday. Subscribe today for just $3/month or $33/year. Posts are available for free after one day at normalnewsletter.net.

Hit me up at joshwimmer@gmail.com with questions, suggestions, thoughts and feelings, tips, and politely worded corrections and criticism. If you think someone would be interested in this newsletter, forward it to them.

Somebody asked me the other day if they could print it out and send it in the regular mail, in an envelope, to a person who doesn't use email. I don't really want you to, though. What if that person ends up liking it? What then? Then are they gonna start using email, just to read my newsletter? Seems unlikely. Maybe they reach out to me, ask if I could put out a print edition as well. I know, I know, I should just say I can't, but I'm a people pleaser. Suddenly I'm doing the email and I'm printing it out AND I'm printing it out again for their friend who wants it faxed. So it's potentially quite a stressful scenario. I think just stick to the email, but thank you for asking. (Okay, you got me—nobody actually asked. But I wanted to get out ahead of it before anyone did.)