J. D. Vance’s Thin Skin Makes Him Vulnerable

Kamala Harris used Donald Trump’s psychic weaknesses against him in their televised debate on September 10. Can Governor Tim Walz do the same to Senator J. D. Vance when they meet on Tuesday?

Watch what happens when Vance is asked an unexpected question by a friendly Fox News reporter: “What makes you smile?” Vance responds with ill temper and defensiveness: “I smile at a lot of things, including bogus questions from the media, man.” That insult is followed by an unpleasant laugh.

It has been said that the Trump-Vance ticket is the angriest in recent history. But Vance doesn’t rage and roar onstage the way Trump does. Instead, he seethes with petty peevishness. His disdain for women who deviate from his script for their life is barely disguised, or not disguised at all. It’s an unattractive look. Walz’s job is to provoke Vance into showing that ugly side to a huge national audience. How to do it?

Some of Vance’s recent missteps offer clues.

On September 15, Vance was interviewed by CNN’s Dana Bash. She pressed him on the falsity of his claims that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating household pets. That’s the interview where Vance let slip this revealing gaffe: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Vance immediately scrambled to correct his damaging admission: “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it. I didn’t create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris’s policies. Her policies did that. But yes, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story.”

Too late. The confession was on the record.

[David Frum: Nice little Jewish community you have there]

What caused Vance to make his mistake? The “creating a story” remark followed two rounds of Bash confronting Vance with statements from Ohio officials—including the mayor of Springfield and the county sheriff—that all contradicted Vance’s claims. In other words, she presented evidence that people whose opinion matters to him regard him as a liar.

Trump would shrug that material off. Trump lies without regret. He often seems entirely unaware of the line between reality and fantasy. But Vance is aware. It bothered him to be exposed as untruthful. It stressed him, and he stumbled.

Also compare Vance with the former Trump-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. In 2019, a congressional committee confronted Lewandowski with a contradiction between his claims in TV interviews and his sworn testimony to Robert Mueller’s special-counsel investigation. Lewandowski shrugged off this public proof of his deceit. “I have no obligation to be honest with the media,” he said. Lewandowsi does not care about his reputation, about status or standing. Vance does.

Lewandowski performs for an audience of one: Trump. He wanted to stay out of prison, so he did not lie under oath to Congress. Beyond that, nothing matters to him. But Vance wants to be seen as more than just another Trump henchman. His reinvention was meant to ingratiate himself with Trump and the MAGA movement. That shape-shifting is a pain point for him.

You can measure Vance’s pain by the pain he tries to inflict on others. Immediately upon Harris’s selection of Walz as her running mate, Vance attacked Walz over his military record. Walz had served in one rank, but retired at a lower rank because he had not completed all of the requirements to retain the rank permanently. Walz had on one occasion claimed that he had carried weapons “in war,” when he should have said “weapons of war.” Vance tried to amplify the discrepancy and the misstatement, but to little effect. When this line of attack fizzled, Vance switched to another: accusing Walz of deception because he had said that he and his wife had conceived a child by in vitro fertilization. In fact, they had used a different method of fertility treatment, intrauterine conception.

These attacks were surely not devised by Vance personally. They likely emerged from the GOP opposition-research shop. But a candidate for vice president does decide what he will or will not say. Vance could have rejected this material as trivial, offensive, and probably counterproductive. (Walz’s military record had been used against him during his first run for governor of Minnesota, in 2018, and had backfired then, too.)

The point of the anti-Walz material was to depict the governor as a phony. But why pick that angle? Walz is a super-liberal governor of a state that was wracked by civil unrest in the upheavals of 2020. Surely that offers a more promising approach? Yet Vance chose otherwise. Why?

Some observers have speculated that Republicans stopped attacking Walz for his record during the 2020 riots because there is audio of Trump praising Walz at the time. So what? The Trump ticket is not troubled by inconsistency. The Trump-Vance campaign promises to restore the state and local tax deductions that President Trump himself abolished in 2017. Republicans attack Democrats for the rise in crime that occurred under Trump and was reversed under President Joe Biden. They were against IVF before they were for it, and now they’re against it again. Trump Republicans feel that they owe no debt to reality. A little snippet of Trump audio would not stop Vance from attacking Walz for the riots if Vance thought it would give him an advantage.

If Vance opted instead for the “He’s a phony” attack, it’s because Vance himself believes that the “phony” charge is the most powerful one he can fling. And why does Vance think that? Because he himself is such an extreme phony.

[Listen: The kleptocracy club]

Vance has changed his identity, beliefs, religion, personal history, even his name. He’s a Yale graduate and a venture capitalist who returned home to Ohio only to run for office, and had to be hauled over the finish line in this now-red state by a last-minute gift of $32 million in GOP campaign funds from his party’s Senate leader, Mitch McConnell. Vance is a servant of America’s richest men; his elevation to the presidential ticket produced promises of tens of millions of dollars in super-PAC contributions to the Trump campaign. He was a fierce Trump critic in The Atlantic during the 2016 election, and in private messages as late as February 2020. In the book that made him famous, Vance urged the white working class to stop blaming foreigners and shadowy elites for their troubles. He then ran for office on a message of blaming foreigners and shadowy elites.

Walz has previously responded to Vance’s slights against his military record by saying that all service should be respected equally. That’s high-minded, but it misses an opportunity to counterpunch. Vance accused Walz not only of dereliction of duty, but also of inauthenticity, of hypocrisy. Vance may well return to that theme in the debate. Walz can not only rebut the accusation, but make it recoil against the accuser. I am who I am. Like me, dislike me, here I am: an old-fashioned flag-and-country, union-label Democrat. Who are you? I mean, who are you today? Here’s one person you pretended to be in the past. Here’s another. Here’s a third. Which costume are you wearing to today’s dress-up party?

Vance will be ready with an answer. But if the thrust is aimed right, the parry will reveal Vance’s aggrieved personality. “Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion,” Vance wrote in Hillbilly Elegy. Few things trigger him as directly as challenges to whatever constructed image he is projecting for that moment’s advantage.

To see that in action, here’s exhibit A: the war over weird. Before becoming the VP nominee, Vance liked to insinuate that his political adversaries were “weird,” meaning racially or sexually deviant. As Walz entered national politics this summer, he seized on Vance’s favorite epithet and turned it against him, to imply that Vance’s own unhealthy preoccupations made him snoopy and controlling. “You know there’s something wrong with people when they talk about freedom,” he said, and they mean the “freedom to be in your bedroom, freedom to be in your exam room, freedom to tell your kids what they can read. That stuff is weird.” The counteraccusation caught on, showing up in Democratic ads.

And it got under Vance’s skin. Disparaging people as “weird” was something for him to do, not for others to do to him. In a CNN interview on August 10, Vance snapped. Asked about the “weird” label, he first dismissed it. Then he kept going: “I think it is a little bit of projection.” And then he said that after his speech at the Republican National Convention, he gave his wife a kiss, “because I love my wife and I think that’s what a normal person does.” Walz, by contrast, “gave his wife a nice, firm midwestern handshake.” To understand that jibe, you have to understand that it’s an article of faith for the far right that Walz’s advocacy for gay rights, dating back to the 1990s, proves that his marriage is a sham, and that his children are maybe not really his, because Walz is secretly gay, if not a clandestine sexual predator. Vance himself expressed a version of the slander about Walz as a sexual threat in an ABC interview on August 11, in which he charged that Walz “supported taking children away from their parents if the parents don’t consent to gender reassignment.”

In other words, by challenging Vance’s right to label others “weird,” Walz pushed Vance into repeating QAnon-style lunacy in back-to-back TV interviews. Vance and Walz were arguing not merely over which of them was weird, but over what is weird. Is it weird to be racially or sexually different? Or is it weird to want to surveil, police, and suppress differences? Vance has built his recent messaging on the first idea; Walz has throughout his career advocated the second idea. By goading Vance, Walz has driven Vance to make very public how deeply Vance’s policing would intrude into personal freedom.

[Ronald Brownstein: The undecided voters are not who you think they are]

Press Vance on that record, and his first instinct is denial. Interviewed in July by Megyn Kelly on her podcast, Vance sought to excuse his controversial earlier remark about “childless cat ladies”:  “Obviously it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats.” But lurking behind the denial is self-pity and aggression. In an NBC interview this month, Vance said, “I made a sarcastic comment years ago that I think that a lot of Democrats have willfully misinterpreted. I regret, certainly, that a lot of people took it the wrong way, and I certainly regret that the [Democratic National Committee] and Kamala Harris lied about it.” By then, however, other instances of Vance using the phrase had surfaced, and Vance’s excuse that the remark was a one-off joke was revealed as a lie of his own.

Vance is an intellectual, a man who enjoys the play of ideas. It’s been a long time since the Republicans put an intellectual on their national ticket—not since Richard Nixon, maybe. Vance is not averse to changing his ideas; he has changed almost all of them. But he is quite averse to apologizing for them.

Vance is both opportunistic and stubborn, an unstable combination. That’s one of many vulnerabilities that an adroit opponent can exploit. Walz has deftly used some of them already. He gets his chance to use more on national television Tuesday night.