The Atlantic put up an article by Helen Lewis the day after the debate that posed the question:
“Did Donald Trump Notice J. D. Vance’s Strangest Answer?”
The subtitle was
“The senator from Ohio conspicuously refused to repeat his running mate’s biggest lie.”
When I read those two sentences, I thought, “Did someone hear what I heard that night?”
The answer to that question is “Almost,” because the “bombshell” I mention in my title above didn’t even get a nod in that essay. Ms Lewis, however, does do an excellent job of covering Vance’s hedging his language around his ticket-mate’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and she does a great job of linking that obfuscation to the likelihood that Vance is actually using Trump as a stepping stone, rather than a running mate. Here’s how she sums it up in her second paragraph:
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.
(emphasis mine)
The bolded sentence is exactly what I got from Vance’s performance that night, but the actual key statement in the debate wasn’t actually that “surprising moment” — a moment which the Harris campaign nonetheless deftly nailed in an ad they posted a mere 10 hours after that moment occurred, and which indeed should be savored:
Now that ad, like the Lewis column in the Atlantic, was a great piece of work, produced with speed and panache akin to how Stephen Colbert’s crew cranks out their biting, hilarious, Trump-eviscerating pieces. It’s a killer spot…but the conclusion they arrive at at the end of it doesn’t come to the “Vance-is-contradicting-Trump’s Big Lie” conclusion that Lewis’ Atlantic piece more accurately does, instead closing with the statement that Vance “is gonna honor Trump.” That’s a damning prospect, to be sure (especially for those who abhor Trump), but the big tell, the bombshell of that debate that no one caught, not even Ms Lewis who nailed it otherwise (nor Walz, unfortunately, for that matter), came from a moment in the debate when Vance actually admitted, outright, that Trump lost the 2020 election!
You didn’t see it? I did.
Here’s a link to the debate, and the moment begins at 31:56. It’s an exchange where Vance, in response to Walz rightly pinning much of the deficit on the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy, is blaming Harris for everything under the fiscal sun. Here’s the quote:
“If Kamala Harris has such great plans for how to address middle class tax problems, then she ought to do them now, not when asking for a promotion, but in the job the American people gave her three and a half years ago.”
There it is in bold font folks: JD Vance admitting, outright, that the 2020 election was won, outright, by Biden and Harris, or more to the point: IT. WAS. NOT. STOLEN. That should have been the headline for the night, But it blew right past everybody, even Helen Lewis who wrote an otherwise brilliant analysis of how Vance isn’t just failing to support Trump’s Big Lie, but also likely has his own designs for the Oval Office that cast the Orange Buffoon as just a rung on the ladder he’s hoping to climb to get there.
Maybe it was because it was such a “normal” comment (which it would have been in any other Presidential race), in what everyone considers was a “normal” debate, but it should have been the gist of a hundred headlines like this:
“VANCE DIRECTLY CONTRADICTS TRUMP’S BIG LIE”
and with a lede like this:
“Donald Trump must be wondering how he was tricked into picking JD Vance for his running mate...”
So feel free to mull that one over in the comments, folks. It’s a bit to chew on!
