The most frustrating thing about the vice presidential debate wasn’t the outcome. JD Vance was exactly as good as I expected. He can be an excellent, persuasive communicator. Like many good lawyers, he’s a chameleon. Depending on the audience, he can breathe fire — the way he does on MAGA podcasts or at Trump rallies — or he can present as a calm, reasonable man, completely at home in a lunchtime think tank discussion.
No, the most frustrating part of the debate was how comprehensively deceptive it was. Voters who tuned into the debate without any knowledge of the candidates would think they were watching a contest between two civil, respectful people who agreed on many core values but merely disagreed on policy.
The Vance of the infamous “childless cat ladies” comment was gone. Nowhere did we see the version of Vance who told his supporters to “keep the cat memes flowing” when he and his running mate were fanning the flames of slander and bigotry against the Haitian immigrants of Springfield, Ohio. Absent for a moment was the bitter ideologue who once said, “I think our people hate the right people.”
If this was your first look at Vance, you might even be tempted to think, “How nice that Donald Trump would have such a thoughtful person by his side in the Oval Office.”
But this was not my first look at Vance, and I had a different thought: We’ve seen all this before.
The gentleman debater
In 2016 and 2020, Mike Pence was the gentleman debater. He was less polished and less effective than Vance, but he had a similar softening effect on the ticket. Pence acknowledged the humanity of his opponent. He debated policy rather than firing off personal insults. And especially in 2016, his earnest faith and apparent kindness might have reassured voters that Trump couldn’t be that bad, not if he had chosen Pence.
We know exactly how that turned out. Pence had no positive effect on Trump. None of Trump’s best advisers could change that man. The most they could do was throw their bodies in front of bad policy or outright criminality, at least until they resigned or were fired. Even Pence, the most loyal of the decent men around Trump, couldn’t shake him from his determination to try to steal an American election. So Pence, too, is gone — wandering in the political wilderness with the few remaining conservative dissidents.
In choosing Vance and discarding Pence, Trump traded actual decency for a man who can simulate decency, and that’s exactly what Vance did on Tuesday night.
But he couldn’t keep it together for the entire evening. At the very end, the mask slipped. When pressed to say whether Trump lost in 2020, Vance said, “Obviously, Donald Trump and I think that there were problems in 2020,” and he had the gall to say, “It’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on Jan. 20, as we have done for 250 years in this country.”
There was nothing peaceful about the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden. Even the relative calm of Inauguration Day (which Trump skipped) was guaranteed only by a troop deployment that made any substantial disruption impossible.
Trump first
With those words and in that moment, Vance told MAGA: Don’t be fooled by my civility; when real power is on the line, I’m with Trump. He’s said so before. Just last month, he told the All-In podcast that he “would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had.”
No one should underestimate the importance of that moment. Earlier in the debate, Vance explicitly backed away from his previous anti-abortion positions. If abortion is no longer sacred for Republicans, we know who is: Trump. Vance will compromise on abortion, but he won’t waver from the Big Lie.
I’m fully aware that vice presidential debates don’t have any impact on presidential races — even when races are extraordinarily close. How many people believe the debate between Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman swung the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore? Hanging chads mattered far more than anything Cheney or Lieberman said. Similarly, can anyone make a credible argument that Pence’s performance against Tim Kaine turned the tide in 2016?
The most crushing blow delivered in a vice presidential debate in my lifetime came in 1988 when Lloyd Bentsen let loose his famous “You’re no Jack Kennedy” rebuke to Dan Quayle — a month before the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket lost 40 states.
Even so, vice presidential debates can still be instructive. And on Tuesday night, voters learned exactly why MAGA loves Vance so much. He’s a talented communicator. He has a compelling life story. He can make the ideological and policy case for Republican populism better than any other politician in America. And he’s no Mike Pence: He would wreck the Republic for Donald Trump.
David French is a New York Times columnist.
