WASHINGTON — Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) spent Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate downplaying former President Donald Trump’s most extreme plans for a second term, on issues including abortion, immigration and health care.
But one of Vance’s most egregious attempts at rewriting reality came when Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, asked him directly if Trump lost the 2020 election, which he very much did.
“[Trump] is still saying he didn’t lose the 2020 election,” Walz said, turning to the Ohio Republican. “Did he lose the 2020 election?”
“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance replied. “Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?”
“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said.
Vance, who once called Trump “America’s Hitler,” also defended his running mate as having overseen a peaceful transfer of presidential power to Joe Biden — despite fueling a violent attack at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, that resulted in more than 140 police officers injured (and several dead by suicide) and nearly got Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, killed.
“He peacefully gave over power on Jan. 20,” Vance said.
The debate, the first and only meeting of the vice presidential candidates — and most likely the final presidential debate of this year’s election cycle — was fairly uneventful, however. There were no fireworks or petty squabbles like during debates featuring Trump. Vance and Walz stuck to defending and deferring to the candidates at the top of their tickets. They even said some nice things to each other, including when Vance was sympathetic to Walz sharing that his son had witnessed a shooting at a community center.
But when it came to policy questions, Vance — who entered the night as one of the least popular vice presidential picks in recent American history and delivered a performance conservatives hope will improve his image — spent most of his time papering over Trump’s drastic policy plans.
When immigration came up, he repeatedly refused to answer questions about Trump’s plans to use the U.S. military to carry out mass deportations, as well as whether that would involve separating parents from children who were born in the United States.
“We have a historic immigration crisis,” Vance replied before pivoting to talk about fentanyl.
Asked once more, minutes later, whether he and Trump would separate parents from their children even if their kids are American citizens, Vance again dodged.
“My point is that we already have massive child separations thanks to Kamala Harris’ open border,” he said, glossing over his running mate’s plan to set up camps along the border to deport millions of people at a record pace. (Vance’s claim that Harris caused child separations also does not hold up to scrutiny.)
Later, the Ohio Republican disputed that he’d ever supported a national ban on abortion. He did though — at 15 weeks — and once said anyone who opposed such a ban would be making the U.S. “the most barbaric pro-abortion regime anywhere in the entire world.”
Asked why he changed his position on supporting such a ban, Vance scoffed.
“First of all, I never supported a national ban,” he declared. But then he conceded that he did, except he just called it by another name: “I did, when I was running for Senate in 2022, talk about setting some minimum national standard.”
In one of his weirder deflections, Vance dodged a basic question about whether he believes climate change is a hoax — something Trump has claimed — and called it “weird science.”
And when health care came up, the Republican senator unleashed some serious gaslighting by claiming that Trump “salvaged” the Affordable Care Act when, in reality, he relentlessly tried to kill it. As president, Trump spent years trying to dismantle the historic health insurance law put in place by former President Barack Obama in 2010. Republicans in Congress voted dozens of times, at Trump’s direction, to try to repeal the law but failed every time.
On Tuesday, Vance somehow twisted that reality into Trump being the law’s savior through some regulations he put in place as president.
“I think you can make a really good argument that it salvaged Obamacare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along,” he said.
“When Obamacare was crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden and health care costs, Donald Trump could have destroyed the program,” Vance continued. “Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.”
Walz, meanwhile, wasn’t an especially strong check on some of his opponent’s claims.
Neither Walz nor the moderators made Vance answer directly for spreading unconfirmed reports of Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio, which has experienced a surge of legal immigration since the pandemic. The lies that Vance, Trump and other Republicans spread about immigrants there resulted in schools and municipal buildings being closed or evacuated due to bomb threats.
“I believe Sen. Vance wants to solve this, but by standing with Donald Trump and not working together to find a solution, it becomes a talking point,” said Walz, who did at one point call out Vance for appearing to acknowledge in a CNN interview he spread stories that weren’t confirmed to advance a specific narrative about immigration.
The Minnesota governor, who has taken far fewer questions from the media than Vance throughout the campaign, struggled to project confidence at the beginning of the debate and often looked sad or surprised while Vance delivered his answers.
He also clumsily addressed a misleading claim that he was in Hong Kong for the pro-democracy protests of 1989. Walz said he was chaperoning U.S. sports teams in Hong Kong the summer of that year, but the dates may not have lined up exactly with the weeks of the demonstrations.
“All I said on this was, I got there that summer and misspoke on this,” Walz said, noting that he hasn’t been perfect in his response to the claim.
“I’m a knucklehead at times,” he added.
