As Donald Trump consolidated power over the Republican Party in 2015 and 2016, his opponents, then still confident that he would not be president, mused at how much more dangerous a candidate who espoused Trump\u2019s politics but not his tactics might be. A candidate that dishonestly disparaged immigrants and attacked the foundations of American democracy \u2014 but also refrained from making wild, silly claims and tweeting out attacks at random critics?<\/p>\n
Even Trump supporters often (however sincerely) express their desire for such a candidate. I don\u2019t like some of the things he says, many will say of Trump, but I agree with his policies. An ideal candidate, then, would be one who could offer Trumpism without Trump.<\/p>\n
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome JD Vance to the stage.<\/p>\n
The senator from Ohio and Republican vice-presidential nominee presented himself as this upgraded iteration of Trump during Tuesday night\u2019s debate. All of Trump\u2019s policies were there, as were various falsehoods about what Trump had done or promised to do as president. But it was packaged as a Yale Law School graduate, someone who exuded the mannerisms and satisfaction of an experienced academic debater. Resolved: Donald Trump should be president and I should be vice president, and I\u2019m going to say what it takes to prevail in this engagement.<\/p>\n
At one point, Vance was asked about Trump\u2019s pledge to carry out a mass deportation of immigrants living in the United States.<\/p>\n
\u201cCould you be more specific about exactly how this will work?\u201d a moderator, CBS News\u2019s Margaret Brennan, asked. \u201cFor example, would you deport parents who have entered the U.S. illegally and separate them from any of their children who were born on U.S. soil?\u201d<\/p>\n
It is hard to know how Trump would have answered such a question, admittedly, since it could have gone in any direction imaginable. Policy questions and pointed queries from non-sycophantic interviewers are not his strength. By contrast, you could sense Vance\u2019s comfort in the environment and he dodged the question as if he were remaking \u201cThe Matrix.\u201d<\/p>\n
He pivoted to criticize the policies of the Biden administration (blamed on Vice President Kamala Harris, naturally) and peppered the answer with false claims about the problem. (There are not \u201c20 [or] 25 million\u201d undocumented immigrants in the country, nor did the government \u201close\u201d 320,000 children.) He assured the moderator that he would answer her question but instead simply pledged to prioritize the deportation of immigrants in the country who have criminal records.<\/p>\n
Brennan didn\u2019t let it slide, again pressing him on the specific question about stripping parents from their children. He deftly sidestepped the question again, attacking the administration.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to lose sight of the extent to which the question itself and the proposal it reflects is an extreme outlier in American political history. Vance\u2019s presentation of himself as a normal, sober politician \u2014 something that was very obviously one of his goals coming into the evening \u2014 was aided by Trump\u2019s having already injected these ideas into the national conversation. A sign of the extent to which a policy of mass deportation has simply become another policy plank was when CBS\u2019s on-screen graphic summarized the candidates\u2019 housing policy proposals and included \u201cmass deportation to ease demand\u201d among the items on a list topped with smiling photos of Trump and Vance. And there was Vance, smiling in the debate, assuring people that all of it would be fine, this deportation of millions of people, and it went down easier given the lack of sidebars about the dining habits of Hannibal Lecter.<\/p>\n
This was the pattern over and over. Vance was asked to explain things that he or his running mate had done or promised, and he parlayed the questions into the things he wanted to talk about instead. A question about health care evolved into a ridiculous claim that Trump had saved the Affordable Care Act as president, legislation that Trump tried repeatedly to dismantle. A question about abortion gave Vance a chance to offer empathy, telling a truncated story about a friend who\u2019d had an abortion \u2014 and then saying that the lesson was that Republicans have \u201cgot to do so much better of a job at earning the American peoples\u2019 trust back on this issue.\u201d<\/p>\n
He and his Democratic opponent, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, engaged in a characteristically Midwestern engagement with plenty of generosity and comity on display. For Vance, this was an existential need, given his public perception. It was also an effective mask for just how extreme the issues under consideration were: mass deportations, sweeping restrictions on abortion access, Vance\u2019s disparagements of his own constituents. The debate felt like a return to normal after nine years of Trump, which is the best thing that could happen to a Trump agenda that deviates so widely from normalcy.<\/p>\n
Where Vance fumbled the most obviously was when he was presented with a position he couldn\u2019t dodge. He is Trump\u2019s running mate in part because he\u2019s been willing to parrot and champion Trump\u2019s claims about the validity of the 2020 election and how it should have been addressed. He tried to pivot this against his opponents as well, suggesting that it was \u201creally rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy\u201d given that the former president \u201cpeacefully gave over power on January the 20th as we have done for 250 years in this country.\u201d As a parent of young kids, Vance should understand that finally doing what\u2019s required does not excuse the kicking, screaming temper tantrum.<\/p>\n
When Walz demanded that Vance admit that Trump had lost the 2020 election, Vance didn\u2019t have a good answer ready, if there was one to be had. He tried to pivot into a flimsy attack on Harris (centered on efforts to stamp out misinformation during the covid pandemic) without addressing Walz\u2019s point. And that, of course, was the answer, the answer that Walz and anyone else would have expected.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the problem with being Trump 2.0 in the moment: Vance is still tied to Trump\u2019s idiosyncrasies. There are other problems, too, to be sure, including that Vance lacks Trump\u2019s flair and ability to compel the Republican base. But nearly a decade into Trump\u2019s dominance of the GOP, we got a glimpse on Tuesday night of how Trumpism will evolve: more polish and more traditional political mannerisms doing a better job of masking the extremism and dishonesty that define Trump\u2019s politics.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
As Donald Trump consolidated power over the Republican Party in 2015 and 2016, his opponents, then still confident that he would not be president, mused at how much more dangerous a candidate who espoused Trump\u2019s politics but not his tactics might be. A candidate that dishonestly disparaged immigrants and attacked the foundations of American democracy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10490,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10489\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}