Partway through his latest “Meet the Press” appearance, Gov. Doug Burgum tried to impress one viewer in particular with a bizarre claim. “Donald Trump, at the end of his term on January 20th, left the White House,” the North Dakota Republican claimed. “We had a smooth transition.”

We did not have a smooth transition.

Soon after, in the same interview, NBC News’ Kristen Welker noted that the former president spent much of last week’s debate brazenly lying. “As someone who is on Donald Trump’s short list to be his vice presidential nominee, do you think he should stop saying things that are not true?” the host asked.

“[E]verything that he said on Thursday night, he’s been saying before,” the governor replied. “So this is not news.”

It’s a defense rooted in the idea that deliberately deceiving the public is acceptable, just so long as the politician peddling the lies repeats the same false claims more than once.

But perhaps most importantly, Welker asked Burgum whether he’ll accept the results of the 2024 presidential election. The guest said he would — just so long as Burgum considers the race to be “free and fair.”

As regular readers know, those eager to become Trump’s running mate have come to an unfortunate conclusion: They almost certainly won’t make the Republican ticket if they say categorically that they’ll accept the 2024 election results. After all, the former president is refusing to commit to honoring the results — the same posture he adopted four years ago — so the GOP’s prospective vice presidents are sticking to the same script.

Months ago, House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik helped get the ball rolling, refusing to say whether she’d vote to certify the results of the 2024 election. More recently, Sen. Tim Scott appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where host Kristen Welker repeatedly pressed the South Carolinian to simply say, “yes or no,” whether he was prepared to accept the results of the upcoming presidential election. Scott refused.

In May, Sen. J.D. Vance told CNN that he “plans“ to accept the election results, but only if they meet the Ohio Republican’s undefined standards, and soon after, Sen. Marco Rubio dodged the question entirely.

Burgum appears to have joined an unfortunate club, no doubt aware of the fact that his national ambitions would come to an immediate halt if he failed to toe the line.

As we’ve discussed, in the not-too-distant past, prominent American politicians were not asked whether they were prepared to accept their own country’s election results. The line of inquiry seemed wholly unnecessary: Our political system was stable and healthy enough to make the answer to such a question obvious.

But as the radicalization of Republican politics intensifies, leading officials from the party aren’t just confronting the question, they’re also struggling to answer it. Indeed, at least so far, among the top contenders for the GOP’s 2024 ticket, none has simply replied, “Yes, win or lose, I’ll accept the results.”

As for the “free and fair” phrasing, this continues to look like a rather clumsy shell game.

1. Republicans hope to accept 2024 results, so long as the elections are “free and fair.”

2. Republicans will decide for themselves whether the elections were “free and fair,” based on amorphous and undefined standards they will not share.

3. If Democrats win, the results will necessarily trigger questions about the “free and fair” nature of the elections — because Republicans say so — at which point the GOP’s plan to accept the results will be thrown out the window.

Burgum likely knows all of this. He stuck to the partisan script anyway.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com