In Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, J.D. Vance faced a fundamental challenge: How to make a far-right agenda sound like middle-American common sense.
According to polls, America’s voters Biden-Harris is not enthusiastic about the administration’s record. And they ranked highest on issues like immigration and the economy more faith led the Republican ticket.
But voters are not particularly confident Donald Trump And JD Vance As people and they are also wary of the GOP’s penchant for trying Take away people’s health insurance and compel them to give birth.
Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz first drew national attention by spotlighting the strangeness of Trumpism in general and Vance’s version in particular, declaring, “These guys are just weird.“
Democrats have had little trouble proving that claim, as J.D. Vance has spent the past four years adapting his political commentary to the sensibilities of PhDs and proto-fascists: Vance declared Joe Biden Intentional flooding Red America with Fentanyl to “Kill a Bunch of MAGA Voters”; that rape victims should be forced to give birth to their abused children because “Two wrongs don’t make a right”; And that is run by the Democratic Party “The Childless Cat Lady.”
Combine this persona with the more politically toxic aspects of the Republican agenda — opposition to abortion rights, the Affordable Care Act, and tax increases on the wealthy — and you have a rich target for Democratic attack.
Vance’s goal Tuesday was to moderate the goals of the GOP ticket and make himself seem normal. I’m not a composite of every undecided voter in the United States, so I can’t tell you if he succeeded. But he clearly did not fail.
Of course, Vance showed (again) that he is able to retool his messaging to better fit the tastes of the audiences he is currently trying to please. Compared to versions of himself who opine on the moral failings of childless cat ladies and rape survivors, Vance came off as reasonable in his showdown with Walz — so much so that the Democratic vice-presidential candidate felt compelled to express his agreement with him. Republican opponent multiple times.
Vance achieved this through a combination of sophistry, intellectual dishonesty and outright lies. Specifically, Vance deploys three distinct strategies to make Trumpism more palatable to the unconverted.
1) Describing GOP ticket positions in terms that sound moderate — and are technically true — but are highly misleading.
Vance repeatedly downplayed the extremes of Trump’s agenda by saying things that weren’t strictly untrue but that gave a (beneficially) false impression of the ticket’s position.
He used this gambit most brazenly when defending Trump’s commitment to democracy. Confronting his running mate’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election — in part, by inciting an insurgent riot at the U.S. Capitol — Vance announced that Trump had asked protesters to protest “peacefully” on Jan. 6 and that he would “peacefully” take office on Jan. 20 as we speak. I have done it for 250 years in the country.
On January 6, 2021, Trump called on his supporters to march “peacefully and patriotically” on the Capitol. but Also said Theirs is to “fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore.” And while the former president eventually left office of his own volition, he tried first Election officials are forced in Multiple states To help him retain power by annulling the results.
Similarly, in defense of Trump’s proposal to impose a 10 percent tariff on all foreign imports, Vance suggested that the policy was bipartisan common sense, observing that Joe Biden himself “saved some of Trump’s tariffs that protected American manufacturing jobs.” But it was practically a non-sequitur: levying tariffs on a select number of goods deemed of strategic importance and imposing a 10 percent tariff. all Imports, including agricultural products that the United States cannot produce domestically—are a dramatically different proposition. Vance’s line is somewhat suggestive that it is not controversial for the government to nationalize all industry because both parties support the existence of public schools and veterans hospitals.
Finally, and most subtly, Vance muddies the waters on abortion by sympathizing with his opponent on the issue. The GOP vice presidential candidate said a close friend of hers told her she felt she needed to have an abortion because carrying the pregnancy to term would have kept her stuck in an abusive relationship. Vance said he took from that conversation that Republicans “need to restore the confidence of the American people on this issue where they clearly don’t trust us.” That’s one of the things that Donald Trump and I are trying to do.”
To an unsuspecting voter, it might sound like Vance was calling on the party to regain public trust by reconsidering its opposition to abortion rights when, in reality, Vance was simply saying that Republicans should make life easier for their women. Forcing births — such as through public spending on child care — is a policy Vance endorsed during the debate but has little support among other Republicans.
2) Lying
Vance used the more straightforward and time-tested technique of making things. During a recent interview Meet the pressVance said Donald Trump wanted to roll back some of the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions. Asked to answer for that unpopular stance, Vance suggested he was merely discussing regulatory changes that Trump had already implemented as president and that actually “saved Obamacare, which was working disastrously until Donald Trump came along.”
In fact, the Affordable Care Act was working just before Trump became president; In December 2016, the program saw a record number of people sign up for the program within a 24 hour period. And once in office, Trump did everything to undermine his power Administrative law when Attempts are being made to overturn it legally. In fact, the Affordable Care Act survived the Trump presidency only because three Republican senators broke with the president to oppose its repeal (Much to Trump’s chagrin)
3) Emphasizing that correlation is causation (when it is not).
Finally, Vance tried to steer the conversation away from policy proposals and toward the various good things that have happened during Trump’s presidency and the bad things that have happened while Biden and Harris are in power. Voters may have warmed to Trump’s economic proposals, such as cutting corporate taxes, but many remember his tenure nostalgically, as his first three years in office saw relatively low unemployment and low inflation.
Vance wanted to highlight the fact that “Donald Trump delivered for the American people: rising wages, rising take-home pay, an economy that worked for ordinary Americans.” And he rhetorically asked, “When was the last time an American president didn’t start a major conflict” on their watch, before replying, “Donald Trump has been president for four years.”
In reality, unemployment was already trending downward and wages rising before Trump took office. And they didn’t dramatically speed up his election time. Meanwhile, Trump gave this order Assassination of a top Iranian officialThis almost led to another conflict in the Middle East.
It is not clear why Kamala Harris is responsible for the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine but Donald Trump bears no responsibility for the Covid-19 pandemic. Neither of these events had direct agency, and Harris wasn’t even president when the former occurred.
Still, put it all together and you get Trumpism with a human face: a common-sense conservatism that wants to protect liberal democracy, restore voter confidence on abortion, care for the sick, and make America 2019 again.
It may or may not be a winning message, but it’s certainly funnier than “childless cat ladies are failing America.”
