| “Once it became clear that Trump had remade the GOP in his own image, Vance was shrewd enough to realize that he now had to ingratiate himself with the man he once compared to Hitler,” Jeet Heer wrote earlier this week.
JD Vance played the perfect sycophant during Tuesday’s debate. He glossed over the former president’s climate denial and his ugly exaggerations about late-term abortion and completely avoided Trump’s refusal to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election. “Vance provides Walz with a cornucopia of examples of extremism, hypocrisy, and just plain old weirdness,” Joan Walsh wrote in the lead up to the debate. The question for her was, how would Tim Walz handle that fodder?
John Nichols thinks he handled it well, especially considering that he had to play double duty. While Vance spun lies such as “Donald Trump actually delivered stability in the world” during his term, Walz had to both debunk that “revisionist history” and make his case for Kamala Harris’s vision for the future. Walz would have had less of a burden if the CBS moderators hadn’t capitulated to the GOP and instead insisted on their responsibility as journalists to fact-check lies. “Why didn’t the moderators immediately challenge Vance and focus the debate on realistic assessments of the issues?” Nichols asks. “That would not have been a radical intervention,” he writes; it would have been “a service to the voters.”
Nonetheless, Walz “proved up to the task” of calling out Vance’s lies, Nichols writes. Walz picked up speed in the second half of the debate with sharp responses to Vance on abortion, housing, and democracy. Overall, Nichols argues that Walz proved that even the governor’s reputation as “Minnesota nice” has its limits.
Similarly, our DC bureau chief, Chris Lehmann, argues that the lack of fact-checking allowed Vance, an alum of Yale Law, to do in his slick lawyerly way what Trump and his allies have been doing throughout the media: “flood the zone with shit.” But Walz improved as the debate went on, and Vance’s lies, Lehmann writes, fell apart at the end. When Walz directly asked Vance whether he thought Trump lost the 2020 election, Vance robotically intoned, “I’m speaking about the future.” The dodge created an opening, and Walz shot back, “That’s a damning nonanswer.”
With that line, the Kamala Harris campaign has its sound bite that can stand in for the Trump-Vance ticket’s repeated refusal to acknowledge the results of the 2020 election. Jeet Heer writes that Harris is right to focus on this exchange. Vance’s response is “an error that illuminates—in an easy-to-understand way—everything wrong with a candidate.”
Walz’s performance wasn’t spectacular, but Heer argues that he “lit a slow fuse that will explode in the coming days and damage Trump’s presidential bid.”
–Alana Pockros
Engagement Editor, The Nation |
