VP Debate Night: Vance Sanitized Trumpism, Walz Called Himself a Knucklehead

Leah Feiger: I think it adds to it. It’s this, it’s stolen valor. Even when you’re actually parsing through the specifics of it, is it that terrible?

Tim Marchman: I don’t think he came off great. I don’t think it’s …

Leah Feiger: Yeah, he came off not well in the fact that he called himself a knucklehead. That was tough to see. That was definitely a JD Vance smirking moment. I just couldn’t stop watching him that entire time.

Tim Marchman: Yeah, and it’s something you’d really … If the guy was gilding the lily a bit, everyone gilds the lily a bit, at least at this level of politics, and you really should have a comeback for that. I think there was a little bit of confusion. I was in the region during that period, I wasn’t in Hong Kong at the time of those specific protests. I wasn’t in Tiananmen Square when the man was standing down the tank, but I was there at that time. It was a time of great change, as we all remember, the Berlin Wall. There’s a way to do that. He seemed completely flat-footed, which was just bizarre.

Leah Feiger: Obviously, we should point out, and perhaps our lovely moderators could have as well, that Trump is a serial liar, and compared to his many, many, many whoppers over the years, I could have seen a funny turning point of Walz going, “This is nothing. Let’s talk about some greatest hits.” For a campaign that is so focused on the meme-able moment, on the pivot to social, on the pivot to TikTok, they did not manage to grab a lot out of this. Of course, we’re not even talking about Springfield. JD Vance was one of the big, big instigators of the whole Haitian immigrants, Haitian illegal immigrants are eating your friendly neighborhood pets. They’re eating your dogs and cats. When Springfield came up in the debate, this was such an opportunity for Walz to go in, and he did. He did mention that some of this rhetoric had led to schools having to have a lot of extra security, or having to have all these additional drills, but he didn’t go after Vance specifically. He barely went after Trump specifically.

Makena Kelly: This would’ve been a turn too for Walz to be like, “OK, let’s talk about lying and fibbing. You’re the person who literally went on the news last week or whatever week it was, saying that we can embellish these stories to really get everything across that’s happening to rural America right now because of immigration.” That would’ve been an awesome pivot point, and of course, it just didn’t happen.

Tim Marchman: He also had the opportunity to say that what Vance was saying was still just flatly false. Vance, as he did throughout the debate, basically took this rhetorical position, kind of distancing himself from Trump, or treating Trump as like a crazy uncle who, “Eh, we all know what he says, but let’s not worry about that. He says a lot of stuff.” He backed off the claims that Haitian illegal immigrants are kidnapping people’s pets and barbecuing them, but he presented it as his attempt to bring attention to the serious problem of immigrants flooding into Springfield and overwhelming the hospital systems, overwhelming the school systems, something of which there’s literally no evidence. People have looked at mortality rates, they’ve looked at 911 waiting times, all these different metrics. There’s no evidence that the migrants are overwhelming the hospital system. The school system, they need more ESL teachers, they need things like that. Those are legitimate issues to bring up. There’s a very easy way to bring up those issues without getting into blood libel. Walz missed the opportunity to go on offense with that when this whole issue came up, affirmatively defending these people and saying, “These are people who are here legally, who are in this town because the town has jobs, and they don’t have people to do them, period.” He was very forceful in making the point that Trump and Vance’s rhetoric has led to bomb threats and all sorts of horrible stuff, but it was, again, to me, an example of him just kind of ceding the premise a little bit. This is not a problem. Really, this is not a problem. He allowed it, I thought, to be presented as a huge existential problem for the country in a way that was just pretty ridiculous.