Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson refuses to say Trump lost 2020 election

WASHINGTON: Republican US House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson sidestepped a question on Sunday on whether he accepted that Donald Trump lost to Democratic President Joe Biden in the 2020 election, giving a response similar to that from the former president’s running mate in the vice-presidential debate.

Trump, who lost to Biden in 2020 and falsely claimed the elections were unfair, is once again the Republican Party’s presidential candidate and faces Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the Nov 5 elections. Polls show a tight race.

“You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we are talking about the future,” Johnson said in a confrontational interview on ABC News on Sunday.

“We are not going to talk about what happened in 2020, we are going to talk about 2024,” Johnson said.

He added: “Joe Biden has been the president for almost four years. Everybody needs to get over this and move forward.”

When pressed further, he said: “This is a gotcha game that’s played, and I’m not playing it.”

In Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, Senator JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, also sidestepped the question.

Johnson also refused to condemn the former president’s suggestion that the Republican presidential candidate’s political opponents may be behind attempts to have him killed.