Conservative Ramesh Ponnuru is often sympathetic to Republicans' complaints about media bias, but not when it comes to basic questions about the winner of the 2020 presidential election.
Writing in the Washington Post, Ponnuru chides Republicans for decrying questions about the results of the 2020 election as a "gotcha" question given that the former president still insists that he won the election.
Ponnuru begins by calling out House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and saying that he "got tripped up this weekend by a question that should not have fazed a high-schooler with a moderate degree of civic awareness."
He then zeroes on on the reasons why Johnson and other Republicans cannot simply acknowledge that President Joe Biden won the election four years ago: Because Trump himself is making it an issue in this year's race.
"He recently claimed he won Michigan in 2020," Ponnuru argued. "He did not. A few weeks ago, he even said that only fraud had kept him from winning California."
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However, he believes that the fear of Trump's wrath is needlessly hurting Republican candidates and he urges them to simply tell the truth and then make their case for a change in the White House this year.
Of course, he continues, this is all but impossible given that Republicans decided to nominate Trump for the third consecutive election cycle.
"Modern parties usually abandon presidential candidates who lose," he adds. "Trump’s barrage of falsehoods about the election saved him from that fate and helped him cruise to the Republican nomination. The larger voting public, in 2022, seems to have held Republicans’ indulgence of 2020 mythology against them. In a recent poll, 63 percent of respondents thought Biden had won legitimately in 2020."
