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Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan torched CNN’s Dana Bash during a tense segment on whether President-elect Donald Trump would enact retribution on his opponents.
During an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Jordan got into a heated exchange with Bash over Trump’s campaign rhetoric promising to be his supporters’ “retribution.”
“People talk about retribution; the retribution has been from the other side,” Jordan said. “I’ve been trying to stop retribution for the last… 10 years.”
Bash started to interject, stating that she would address it but that she was referring to Trump’s promises to implement “retribution.” She questioned whether he would be in favor of Trump prosecuting alleged opponents through the Justice Department.
“He didn’t do it in his first term,” Jordan responded, after which he was interrupted and pressed as to whether he would support retribution in Trump’s second term. Jordan countered by presenting alleged examples of the targeting of political opposition by the Biden administration.
“I don’t think any of that’s going to happen, because we’re the party who’s against political prosecution,” he said when pressed as to whether Trump’s “retribution” would happen. “We’re the party who’s against going after your opponents using lawfare.”
Jordan and Bash then disagreed on whether Trump’s staff was in favor of free speech. When Bash asked Jordan which illegal immigrants would be deported, an equally heated discussion on immigration occurred.
President Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama, former Representative Liz Cheney, former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senator-elect Adam Schiff (D-CA), Vice President Kamala Harris, and others were all accused of being the targets of Trump’s “retribution,” which he made several times during his campaign.
Much of this, according to Trump and his allies, is payback for his prosecution, which they claim was motivated by politics.
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Bash and Jordan also got into a heated back and forth when discussing election integrity and how Vice President Kamala Harris got millions fewer votes than Joe Biden did in the 2020 election.
“It seems to me that Republicans claim voting fraud and election integrity when you lose and not when you win,” Bash said.
“No. I mean, again, as I said before, this election I think was the greatest political comeback we have ever seen. He did something that even Teddy Roosevelt couldn’t do, for goodness’ sake. And the country — “ Jordan began before she cut him off.
“But you think it was a free and fair election?” Bash asked.
“No, no, this election — you just interviewed the Latino, I think, restaurant owner or a restaurant worker, and he said he was tired of all the woke stuff. This election was really simple. You had back-to-back administrations. We got something we very seldom get in American history, in American politics, back-to-back administrations now running for the top job, and people could do a direct comparison. And they said, ‘We like what we had under President Trump versus — we liked the safe streets versus the record crime. We liked the $2 gas versus the $4 gas. We liked the security border versus the open border,'” Jordan said.
“That’s totally fair. But last time around, it wasn’t so much about the policy differences or the personality differences. There were false claims about election fraud when Donald Trump lost. This time, Donald Trump won, and you think the election was free and fair. You see there’s a little bit of a…?” Bash asked.
“No, I think the Democrats got to ask, ‘Why did we go from getting 81 million to getting 70 million?’ What happened to those 10 million people? Maybe they needed — maybe it’s not smart to run an election where you have no vision, no record to run on, where you’re just going to call the other side names and you’re going to use lawfare,” Jordan said.
“Do you believe that the 2024 election was free and fair?” Bash asked, to which Jordan responded: “I do. I do.”
“And why was it different from 2020, when he lost? Is that the only difference?” Bash snidely said.
“No, there were concerns about 2020 with all the mail-in voting that happened. What, Pennsylvania had, like, two-point-something million mail-in ballots come in without any signature verification, which was required under Pennsylvania statute. So there were all kinds of concerns with how the 2020 election was carried out,” Jordan added.
Jordan concluded: “But the biggest question Democrats need to be asking, what happened to the 10 million voters that Joe Biden got that didn’t come out for Kamala Harris? A bunch of them — President Trump’s numbers were right up where they were in 2020, but the Democrats were much lower. I think it’s because they had no vision, no record to run on, and they just wanted to call everyone names. Turns out, when you tell people, oh, you’re a fascist, racist, deplorable, garbage, they don’t like that. And then when you use lawfare to go after their candidate, they don’t like that either. That’s why they came out — so, on top of the economy, on top of the price of gas, on top of the inflation, that’s why they voted for President Trump.”
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