Some members of the media insist upon constantly relitigating the post-2020 election disputes while trying to force prominent Republicans to publicly denounce former President Donald Trump and his claims of a rigged election and ballot fraud that cost him an electoral victory.

Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), Trump's vice presidential nominee, just made it clear that he won't play the media's forced confessional game as he repeatedly refused to answer a deliberately loaded question from a reporter, according to Newsmax.

Vance's response, in which he flipped the script and attempted to compel the reporter to confess that leftist censorship cost Trump votes he otherwise might have won, was reminiscent of House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-LA) recent refusal to play the same "game" on a Sunday morning news show.

Vance refuses to answer loaded question about Trump losing 2020 election

Sen. Vance recently sat down for a podcast interview with The New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro, who on five occasions asked the senator to provide a yes-or-no response to some variation of the question: "Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?"

Vance, who had similarly avoided answering a question like that during the vice presidential debate, initially told the reporter that he was "focused on the future" and said, "There’s an obsession here with focusing on 2020. I’m much more worried about what happened after 2020, which is a wide-open border, groceries that are unaffordable."

Asked again if former President Trump lost in 2020, Vance instead pointed to the media's coordinated censorship of the New York Post's accurate and bombshell reporting about Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop, and noted that independent studies have suggested that the censorship of that damaging story about the Biden family may have cost Trump millions of votes he otherwise might have received.

The reporter asked the same question a third time, but the senator fired back, "Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes?" When Garcia-Navarro pressed a fourth time, Vance stated, "I’ve answered your question with another question. You answer my question and I’ll answer yours."

Following a fifth iteration of the same question, now with the addition that there was "no proof, legal or otherwise" to support Trump's claims of fraud, Vance said dismissively, "I’m not worried about this slogan that people throw, 'Well, every court case went this way.' I’m talking about something very discrete -- a problem of censorship in this country that I do think affected things in 2020."

Johnson refuses to play media's "gotcha game" about 2020 election

A similar occurrence happened a few days earlier when Speaker Johnson appeared on ABC News' "This Week" with host George Stephanopolous, who first attempted repeatedly but unsuccessfully to get Johnson to denounce former President Trump's claims about Democratic rhetoric inciting the assassination attempts against him.

When Johnson refused to take that bait -- and actually seemed to back Trump's claim by highlighting the dangers of the left's exceedingly anti-Trump rhetoric -- Stephanopolous shifted gears and asked the speaker if he could "say unequivocally that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Donald Trump lost?"

"See, this is the game that is always played by mainstream media with leading Republicans. It’s -- it's a gotcha game," Johnson said. "You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we're talking about the future. We're not going to talk about what happened in 2020. We're going to talk about 2024 and how we're going to solve the problems for the American people."

"I think this thing -- this game that's played all the time, I’m not going to engage in it. We're -- we're not talking about that," he added. "Joe Biden has been the president for almost four years. Everybody needs to get over this and move forward. That's what we need to talk about, what happens on November 5 and the days after that."

Johnson wants to focus on current and future issues

Stephanopolous wasn't mollified, however, and asked again, which prompted Johnson to say, "George, I’m the speaker of the House. I work with the president of the United States all the time. Joe Biden has been the president for four years. There's not a question about this, okay? It's already been done and decided, and this is a gotcha game that's played and I’m not playing it. I want to talk about the future. Let's talk about policies."

The host continued to press the matter, albeit to no avail, as the speaker continued to state emphatically that he was "not going to play the game" and instead wanted to talk about current and future issues -- though he did acknowledge that "election security is a major concern of the American people" and, as such, Trump and anybody else had a right to raise the issue of alleged cheating and fraud and talk about ways to address and prevent such problems.