Did Donald Trump Notice J. D. Vance’s Strangest Answer?

Here’s what you could have had: That’s what I kept thinking throughout the vice-presidential debate. The head-to-head between Tim Walz and J. D. Vance was a vision of what American politics could be without the distorting gravitational field generated by Donald Trump—a political interlude beamed to you from Planet Normal.

How soon will that day come? The most surprising moment of the debate arrived right at the end, when it became clear that the outwardly subservient Vance is already plotting his post-Trump future. Don’t tell the mad old king, but his most loyal baron is looking at the crown and wondering how well it would fit his head.

More on that later, but first let’s enjoy the climate on Planet Normal. Onstage in New York were two people with regular attention spans and an above-average ability to remember names and details. Vance, the Republican, offered slick, coherent, and blessedly short answers to the CBS moderators’ questions. (The Bulwark compared him to a “smoother, 2016-vintage Marco Rubio.”) Tim Walz, the Democrat, started nervously, quickly discovering that being folksy in an empty room is hard—although he certainly didn’t go down in Dan Quayle–style flames. The debate was cordial—too cordial for many Democrats, who wondered why Walz was not delivering the smackdowns they longed to see.

Both candidates committed political sins well within the expected range: Vance freely ignored the first question on Iran, and instead recapped his appealing backstory for any viewers unfamiliar with Hillbilly Elegy. Walz dodged and weaved around a question about his inflated biography, before eventually conceding that he “misspoke” when he claimed to have been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. The two men also managed to have several substantive exchanges on policy, arguing over what we can learn from Finland’s approach to gun crime, and to what extent mental-health issues interact with mass shootings. All of that was a reminder of what American political debates used to be like in the distant past of, oh, the early 2010s.

The pundits have largely called this debate for Vance, who successfully downplayed his unpopular positions on abortion and health care, and took several opportunities to push his key ideological theme of protectionism. America needs to become more self-sufficient, and not just in heavy industry, he said, because “the pharmaceuticals that we put in the bodies of our children are manufactured by nations that hate us.” That line sounded less paranoid than it once might have, after former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson revealed last week that, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, he had flirted with sending a commando team to recover vaccines held by the European Union.

The audience polls were closer, however. Walz recovered from his shaky start to deliver several punchy lines. On gun violence, he talked about his own teenage son witnessing a shooting, drawing an empathetic response from Vance; he also recounted meeting with the parents of the pupils killed at Sandy Hook—realizing that he had a picture of his own child on the office wall, when the people in front of him had lost their own children. Asked to explain why he changed his mind and now supported a ban on assault weapons, Walz said simply: “I sat in that office with those Sandy Hook parents.”

All very civil, sane, normal. Very demure. Every so often, though, an alternate reality began to bleed into the CBS studio. Or rather—our reality began to bleed in. The one where Donald Trump is the Republican candidate. The clearest signal was Vance’s frequent tic of referring to his running mate: Donald Trump’s energy policy, Donald Trump’s border policy, Donald Trump’s wisdom and courage. By contrast, Walz mentioned Kamala Harris more rarely.

You and I both know why Vance name-dropped with the zest of an out-of-work actor. Trump is one of those people who picks up a political memoir and flicks to the index to see how often he is mentioned. Over the past eight years, the entire Republican Party has reshaped itself around his giant ego, and it is filled with many men much smarter than Trump—men like J. D. Vance, in fact—who believe they can manipulate him through flattery. The former president won’t have been paying attention to the finer details of Finnish policy, but he will have been instead listening for his name. Throughout the debate, the Trump campaign’s rapid-response team blasted out “fact-checks,” but the candidate’s Truth Social feed rambled through his usual obsessions: the CBS anchors’ low ratings; paeans to his own greatness and sagacity—“America was GREAT when I was President,” “I SAVED our Country from the China Virus,” “EVERYONE KNOWS I WOULD NOT SUPPORT A FEDERAL ABORTION BAN”—and praise for “a great defense of me” by Vance.

The big mystery of this moment in American politics is that Trump’s flaws—his self-obsession, his lack of self-control, his casual lies—are so obvious. And yet all attempts to replace him with a lab-grown alternative, with those flaws removed, have failed. (Had Vance run in the Republican primary, I suspect he would have done about as well as Ron DeSantis.) The Republican base loves the chaos and the drama and the darkness that Trump offers, and resists all attempts to replace those qualities with boring competence.

All the way through, the times Vance really seemed in trouble were when he had to defend Trump’s behavior, and his own switch from critic to sycophant. He gave an outrageous—but superficially convincing—explanation for how he went from thinking Trump was “America’s Hitler” to its last and only hope. “I was wrong, first of all, because I believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record,” he said. In the same way, the only real flash of the dislikable “childless cat ladies” version of Vance—familiar to me from edgy podcasts and cozy Fox News interviews—came when he had to defend Trump’s lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. When the moderators noted that the Haitians in question were in America legally, Vance replied: “The rules were that you weren’t going to fact-check.” Not exactly the response of a man confident that he is telling the truth.

Right at the end, Vance was asked whether he would challenge the election results in ways that violated the law and the Constitution. “I think that we’re focused on the future,” he said, before jazz-hands-ing into standard Republican talking points about the threat of Big Tech censorship. (The two flagship cases of this in right-wing lore involve Hunter Biden’s laptop and COVID discussions on Facebook and Spotify.) Harris, Vance said, would “like to censor people who engage in misinformation. I think that is a much bigger threat to democracy than anything that we’ve seen in this country in the last four years, in the last 40 years.”

At this, Walz found a new gear. The Folksy Midwestern Dad was now not angry, but disappointed in his wayward son, who had returned long after curfew, smelling suspiciously of weed. Vance, Walz’s demeanor implied, had let himself down. “I’ve enjoyed tonight’s debate, and I think there was a lot of commonality here,” he began, before mounting a devastating attack of Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021. “He lost this election, and he said he didn’t. One hundred and forty police officers were beaten at the Capitol that day, some with the American flag. Several later died.” As Walz moved into a riff about being a football coach, telling his team that playing fair was more important than winning at any cost, Vance reflexively began to nod slightly.  

In his response, Vance tried his best—pointing out that Hillary Clinton had raised the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 election. But Walz shot back: “January 6 was not Facebook ads.” (We might also note that, whatever her misgivings about the election, Clinton attended Trump’s inauguration, explicitly acknowledging the peaceful transfer of power to an opponent. By contrast, Trump did not stay in Washington, D.C., to watch Joe Biden get sworn in as president, but instead flew off to Florida in a huff.)

Walz then asked Vance flat out whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Again, the Republican could only offer a cop-out—“Tim, I’m focused on the future”—and a pivot back to Big Tech censorship, which allowed Walz to go in for the kill. “This is not a debate,” he said. “It’s not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump’s world, because, look, when Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage.”

The extraordinary part of Vance’s waffle here isn’t that he refused to tell the truth—to say the 2020 election was valid. The really remarkable thing is that the Republican vice-presidential nominee can’t bring himself to agree with his boss and say that the 2020 election was stolen. In the past four years, the Trump campaign has filed multiple lawsuits to challenge the results; the candidate himself encouraged the crowd on January 6 to protest them—culminating in threats of violence to Congress and then–Vice President Pence—and his stump speeches regularly feature riffs about the issue. This year, he has suggested that he will lose only if the Democrats “cheat like hell.”

Vance did not echo this language, nor did he repeat his previous suggestion that he would not have done what Pence did in January 2021, which was to certify the results. On the most fundamental issue of this year’s contest—whether America is still a functioning democracy with free and fair elections—the Republican ticket is not entirely in sync.

Now, I’m beyond being surprised that Vance wouldn’t tell the truth. But I am intrigued that, when given the biggest platform of his career to date, he couldn’t bring himself to lie, either. After so many humiliating concessions, this is the point when Vance decided, to adapt the famous phrase of the poet E. E. Cummings, “There is some shit I will not eat.” He switched so deftly to his talking points about misinformation that much of the instant punditry missed his sleight of hand.

Why not agree with his boss about what happened in 2020? The inevitable conclusion must be that J. D. Vance—smart, ambitious, and only 40 years old—is already contemplating the post-Trump future. Once the former president is out of the picture, what will be the point of harping on his personal bitterness about being rejected by the American people? The voters of 2028 or 2032 will undoubtedly care more about gas prices and housing costs than an old man’s grievance. You might as well keep doing Trump’s crazy material about sharks and Hannibal Lecter.

By any measure, Vance did quite well last night. But I wonder if Trump noticed that, amid all the name-drops and the flattery, his running mate is “focused on the future”—a future that doesn’t include him.