At the vice presidential debate Tuesday night, Sen. JD Vance faced one fundamental challenge: How to make a radical right-wing agenda sound like middle-American common sense.
Judging by the polls, America’s voters are not enthusiastic about the Biden-Harris administration’s record. And on the issues they rank highest — such as immigration and the economy — they have more trust in the Republican ticket’s leadership.
But voters also do not particularly trust former President Donald Trump and JD Vance as people. And they’re also wary of the GOP’s penchant for trying to take away people’s health insurance and forcing them to give birth.
Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz first garnered national attention by spotlighting the oddity of Trumpism in general, and Vance’s version of it in particular, declaring, “These guys are just weird.”
Democrats had little trouble substantiating that claim, as Vance had spent much of the preceding four years tailoring his political commentary to the sensibilities of reactionary Catholic converts with PhDs and proto-fascists with Twitter addictions: Vance had declared President Joe Biden was deliberately flooding red America with fentanyl to “kill a bunch of MAGA voters”; that rape victims should be forced to birth their abusers’ children because “two wrongs don’t make a right”; and that the Democratic Party is run by “childless cat ladies.”
Pair this persona with the more politically toxic aspects of the Republican agenda — its opposition to abortion rights, the Affordable Care Act, and tax increases on the wealthy — and you get a rich target for Democratic attacks.
Vance’s aim Tuesday was therefore to make the GOP ticket’s aims sound moderate, and himself seem normal. I am not an amalgam of every undecided voter in the United States, so I cannot tell you whether he succeeded. But he did not obviously fail.
Certainly, Vance demonstrated (once again) that he is capable of recalibrating his messaging to better fit the tastes of whichever audience he’s currently trying to please. Compared to the version of himself who opined on the moral failings of childless cat ladies and rape survivors, Vance came across as reasonable in his showdown with Walz — so much so, that the Democratic vice-presidential candidate felt compelled to express his agreement with his Republican counterpart more than once.
Vance achieved this through a combination of sophistry, intellectual dishonesty, and outright lies. Specifically, he deployed three distinct tactics to make Trumpism more palatable to the unconverted.
1) Describing the GOP ticket’s positions in terms that sound moderate — and are technically true — but wildly misleading
Vance repeatedly downplayed the radicalism of Trump’s agenda by saying things that were not strictly untrue but which conveyed a (beneficially) false impression of the ticket’s positions.
He used this gambit most shamelessly when defending Trump’s commitment to democracy. Confronted with his running mate’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election — in part, by fomenting an insurrectionary riot at the US Capitol — Vance declared that Trump told the protesters on January 6 to protest “peacefully,” and that he “peacefully gave over power on January 20th as we have done for 250 years in this country.”
On January 6, 2021, Trump did call on his supporters to march “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol. But also told them to “fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” And while the former president did eventually leave office of his own volition, he first attempted to coerce election officials in multiple states to help him retain power by nullifying results.
Similarly, in defending Trump’s proposal to put a 10 percent tariff on all foreign imports, Vance suggested that the policy was bipartisan common sense, observing that Joe Biden himself had preserved some of “the Trump tariffs that protected American manufacturing jobs.” But this was virtually a non sequitur: Imposing tariffs on a select number of goods that one deems to be of strategic importance and imposing a 10 percent duty on all imports, including agricultural products that the United States cannot possibly produce domestically — are dramatically different propositions. Vance’s line is a bit like suggesting that it isn’t controversial for the government to nationalize all industries because both parties support the existence of public schools and veterans hospitals.
Finally, and most subtly, Vance muddied the waters on abortion by expressing empathy for his adversaries on the issue. The GOP vice presidential candidate said that a dear friend of his told him that she felt that she needed to have an abortion because carrying the pregnancy to term would have locked her into an abusive relationship. Vance said that he took from that conversation that Republicans needed to earn “the American people’s trust back on this issue where they frankly just don’t trust us. That’s one of the things Donald Trump and I are endeavoring to do.”
To an inattentive voter, this could make it sound as though Vance was calling for the party to regain the public’s trust by rethinking its opposition to abortion rights when, in actuality, Vance was merely saying that Republicans should make life easier for the women whom they force to give birth — such as through public spending on child care, a policy Vance endorsed during the debate but which has scant support among other Republicans.
Vance also utilized the more straightforward and time-tested technique of making stuff up. During a recent interview on Meet the Press, Vance said that Donald Trump intended to roll back some of the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with preexisting conditions. Asked to answer for that unpopular stance, Vance suggested that he was merely discussing regulatory changes that Trump had already implemented as president and which had actually “salvaged Obamacare which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along.”
In fact, the Affordable Care Act was doing just fine before the Trump presidency; in December 2016, the program saw a record number of people sign up for the program in a 24-hour period. And once in office, Trump did everything in his power to undermine the law administratively while trying to repeal it legislatively. In fact, the Affordable Care Act only survived Trump’s presidency because three Republican senators broke with the president to oppose its abolition (much to Trump’s chagrin).
3) Insisting that correlation is causation (except when it’s not)
Finally, Vance attempted to steer the conversation away from policy proposals and toward various good things that happened while Trump was president and bad things that happened with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in power. Voters may be lukewarm on Trump’s economic proposals, such as cutting corporate taxes, but many do remember his tenure nostalgically, due to the fact that his first three years in office saw relatively low unemployment and low inflation.
Vance sought to spotlight this fact by saying that “Donald Trump delivered for the American people: rising wages, rising take-home pay, an economy that worked for normal Americans.” And he asked rhetorically, “When was the last time an American president didn’t have a major conflict break out” on their watch, before answering, “The four years Donald Trump was president.”
In reality, unemployment was already trending lower and wages were trending higher for years before Trump took office, and they did not dramatically accelerate upon his election. Meanwhile, Trump ordered the assassination of a top Iranian official, thereby nearly triggering another Middle Eastern conflict.
It is unclear why Kamala Harris bears responsibility for, say, the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine but Donald Trump does not bear any responsibility for the Covid-19 pandemic. Neither had direct agency over either of those events, and Harris was not even president when the former occurred.
Nevertheless, put all this together and you get Trumpism with a human face: A common-sense conservatism that wants to protect liberal democracy, regain voters’ trust on abortion, care for the sick, and make America 2019 again.
This might or might not be a winning message, but it’s surely a more palatable one than “childless cat ladies are failing America.”