On one hand, last night’s vice presidential debate between Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) was almost nostalgic, a callback to an era before former President Donald Trump took the political stage, in which the major party nominees did not obviously despise one another. They repeatedly conceded points to one another and seemed to take great pains to be courteous. On a surface level it was the least unbearable presidential or vice presidential debate since Barack Obama and John McCain squared off in 2008. But it was also unnerving, because that relative tranquility was produced largely by Vance calmly and unremorsefully lying.
But there’s no denying that the vibe was different from anything we’ve seen in years. Vance, Walz and their wives standing around chit-chatting for a few minutes after the debate concluded was jarring. There’s a better chance of the Chicago White Sox winning the World Series next year than there is of Kamala Harris, Doug Emhoff, Donald Trump, and Melania hanging out after a debate making small talk. The grinding contempt between the two parties has become such a taken-for-granted feature of the Trump era that simple displays of somewhat forced human decency felt shocking.
As for who won, Vance probably got the better of a frequently nervous Walz. Walz’s occasional hesitations often led him to swing and miss on opportunities to pin Vance to things he has said or done. While he hit his stride in the debate’s second half, he seemed taken off guard by Vance’s gentlemanly act, probably unsure how the red-meat-tossing MAGA populist of the campaign trail and this relentlessly agreeable “Christ have mercy” fellow standing in front of him could possibly be the same person. Still, Walz’s folksy nervousness might have played as more relatable than Vance’s icy precision, as evidenced by this Politico snap poll that showed independents preferred the Minnesota governor’s performance.
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Vance was unquestionably smooth, but he lied the way that I imagine a young Trump would have before his brain turned mushy (likely because of age and right-wing disinformation)—constantly, shamelessly and with zero compunction about any of it. He didn’t waste any time, unfurling a complete hallucination about how the Biden-Harris administration handed Iran $100 billion in unfrozen assets in his very first answer. I wouldn’t even know where to start: the U.S. never held anything remotely approaching this figure in frozen Iranian assets, most of it is still frozen anyway, and if he was talking about sanctions relief as part of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama-Biden administration (that Harris had nothing to do with), most of that never happened either because Trump blew the deal apart.
It went on and on from there. After years of calling openly for a federal abortion ban, Vance claimed that “I have never supported a national ban.” Perhaps most galling was Vance’s claim that Trump “salvaged Obamacare” by working “in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.”
Imagine for a moment that a veterinarian decides to give the pink juice to euthanize your perfectly healthy dog but gets the formula wrong. Your beloved pet survives anyway, and the vet says to you, “Actually I salvaged your dog.” That’s the level of indifference to the truth that Vance displayed all night. The ACA is still the law of the land only because the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) used the most memorable thumbs down in congressional history to torch the GOP’s “skinny repeal” scheme that Trump had every intention of signing into law.
Vance’s performance, however much it was grounded in a chameleonic departure from the hard-right character he’s been playing for years, was really a glimpse at what Trumpism might look like after Trump. As Democrats rediscovered when Harris replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, it is just as easy to have an articulate, affable party leader who is in the prime of their life as it is to entrust your fortunes to elderly people in unmistakable cognitive decline. Having a nominee who can do the simple stuff—have a normal conversation with a political adversary, consistently speak in complete sentences and successfully drive home a series of simple messages—is much more important than either party’s primary voters seem to have understood over the past decade.
And Republicans were surely thinking to themselves, as they watched this slick, Yale Law-educated operator smooth talk his way through the evening, that achieving their political goals does not necessarily require yoking themselves to an emotionally incontinent 78-year-old grifter who is incapable of staying on any message for more than 90 seconds and whose repellant divisiveness has capped his and his movement’s appeal well below 50 percent of the country. Vance even seems to have internalized the lesson that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) could not—that the culture war antics that fire up Elon Musk reply guys and quack podcasters are deeply unloved by the American people and have to be kept under careful wraps.
Whenever this nightmare election is over and Trump no longer dominates our politics, Democrats need to be ready for this new, more publicly palatable and self-aware version of MAGA, because it is an entirely different, and potentially much more politically dangerous, beast.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
