Tim Walz stumbled and struggled on the debate stage in New York last night, while J. D. Vance spoke smoothly and effectively.
I’ve known Vance for 15 years. In that time, I’ve witnessed many reinventions of the Vance story, heard many different retellings of who he is and what he believes. Last night, he debuted one more retelling. His performance of the role was well executed. The script was almost entirely fiction. Yet theater reviews aside, three issues of substance stayed with me.
The first is that Vance truly is no friend of Israel’s.
The evening opened with a question about yesterday’s Iranian missile barrage. This question presented Vance with a trap. On the one hand, Vance’s party wants to criticize the Biden-Harris administration as weak on defense, soft on Iran. On the other hand, Vance is himself intensely hostile to U.S. alliances. He has led the fight to deny aid to Ukraine. He keeps company with conspiracy theorists who promote anti-Semitism. Vance managed that contradiction in the debate mostly by evading the question about what the U.S. might do to support Israel. Israel’s actions, he said, were a matter for Israel to decide; beyond that, he had nothing to say.
But the trick in evading a question is that the evasion works only if it goes unnoticed. This evasion does not. If you care about Israel, what you heard was nothing where there needed to be something. He offered no solidarity with the Israeli families who had spent the evening in bomb shelters because of the most massive country-to-country ballistic-missile attack in the history of the world. No friendship, no sympathy, for the state of Israel. Above all, what Vance delivered—Israel will do what Israel will do—was a message of abandonment, not a message of support. If you wondered what kind of voice Vance would be in the Situation Room when Israel is under threat, now you know: not a friend.
The second enduring impression is that Vance has thoroughly analyzed the Republican problem on abortion and decided that the only option is to lie his way out.
When the Trump Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022, it opened the door to a new regime of state-level policing and punishment of American women. After this year’s election, Republicans may or may not have the votes in Congress to pass a national abortion ban. That’s not the most important question, however. The most important question is: Will a Republican administration use executive power to aid Republican states in their surveillance of American women? Vance’s own record on that is emphatic: Yes, he will, and, yes, he has.
Onstage, Vance disavowed his record. He professed support for generous investment in maternal health and child nutrition. But his record has not disappeared because he denied it. Vance’s actual preferred health policy is to restore to health insurers the right to treat people with preexisting conditions differently—to do less risk-sharing, not more, even if that leaves many Americans without affordable insurance. Women and children face more health risks than able-bodied men. Vance’s policies are the direct opposite of Vance’s slogans.
American women have had their privacy and autonomy ripped away from them—and Vance offered nothing to protect them. He was able to purr his way past his own cat-lady comments. But if American women were wondering, What happens to us under a Trump-Vance administration?, they have their answer: Your sex life and reproductive rights will be subject to government control in a way it has not been for half a century.
The third enduring impression is that Vance remains all in on Trump plots to overthrow the election. At the podium last night, Vance refused to accept the results of the 2020 election. That’s not just a lie about history. It’s a threat to the future.
Right now, Republicans in key states are working to bend the law to convert voting defeats into Electoral College victories. They hope to disenfranchise unwanted voters, to disqualify unwanted votes, to use a bag of old Jim Crow tricks and some new ones to defeat the people’s verdict in 2024. Vance’s answer about Trump’s violent coup after the last election expresses his willingness to support and assist his party’s stealthier subversion of the coming election.
You have been warned.
