The first thing I thought of while watching Senator JD Vance of Ohio refuse to say whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election in a recent interview with this newspaper was “The Manchurian Candidatemango win,” John Frankenheimer’s 1962 psychological thriller.

The linchpin of “The Manchurian Candidate,” of course, is the scene in which we learn that the sterling and charismatic Raymond Shaw, a war hero, was actually captured and brainwashed during his time during the Korean War. He was programmed as a sleeper agent to kill on command, and his handlers also brainwashed his fellow captured soldiers so that the truth of his identity would be kept under wraps. When asked about Shaw, those soldiers repeat the same robotic statement, that Shaw is “the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

My colleague Lulu Garcia-Navarro gave Vance five opportunities to answer a single simple question: Did Trump lose the 2020 election? And each time, Vance gave the same rote response. “Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes?” he asked.

Each refusal to answer was more chilling than the last. It was as if Vance had just been repeating a set of programmed answers, unable to deviate from his commands. Of course, Vance isn’t the victim in a Hollywood thriller. He is a willing participant in an effort to degrade and destroy the truth in order to win power.

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There is no question that Vance knows that Trump lost the presidency in a free and fair election. His decision to say otherwise is a show of loyalty to his patron. And I would suggest that it is also a statement of intent — that Vance and Trump don’t really believe that they ought to abide by the will of the voters. If they win in November, no matter by how narrow a margin, they’ll say it was a mandate. If they lose, they’ll say it was fraud.

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