Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter, examining the apocalyptic politics and coverage of Campaign 2024.
"Look," JD Vance said, during the final round of questioning in Tuesday night's vice-presidential debate. "What President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020. And my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square."
The Republican vice-presidential nominee was lying about the facts, and doing it blatantly, but the spirit of his reply was earnest: There was nothing Vance wanted more than to be having a debate. His matchup with Tim Walz had played out, to that point, as the moment that Vance had been building toward for his entire life. The crabbed, awkward, snarling figure he'd presented in his prior two and a half months as Donald Trump's understudy had been replaced with someone confident, articulate, and self-assured. His hair gleamed in the studio lights.
Walz, meanwhile, was frazzled and amateurish, overstuffed with talking points, the coach unable to process whole swaths of his playbook once the game clock was running. He switched up "Iran" and "Israel," delivered whole lines out of order, and sounded at times like a sped-up version of Joe Biden's career-ending performance from June. It was a reminder that our entire system of presidential politics is built around rewarding people who are able to act "natural" or "authentic" while staring into a camera lens in a darkened, empty room—that candidates rise and fall based on how well they perform a profoundly abnormal behavior, projecting a synthetic human connection one-way through mass media, to convince invisible millions that they're a desirable person to have a beer with, or to entrust with the nuclear codes. It's a process that seems engineered to promote sociopaths, narcissists, and frauds.
And Walz's strategy only made that worse. Somehow, after weeks of firing up crowds by treating JD Vance as a couch-fucker and a weirdo, Walz apparently walked into the debate under orders to spare his opponent and exclusively attack Trump. "We got close to an agreement because all those things are happening," Walz said, when Vance promised that Trump would bring job growth in the energy sector. "I agree," Walz said, after Vance lamented the number of asylum seekers. "It should not take seven years for an asylum claim to be done." On Vance's claim that the United States needs a strong manufacturing sector: "I'm in agreement with him on this." On Vance's effort to pivot from the subject of banning abortion to the importance of easing the financial burden on families with children: "I agree with a lot of what Senator Vance said about what's happening. His running mate, though, does not. And that's the problem."
What all that polite agreeability felt like, through most of the night, was Joe Lieberman's catastrophic performance in 2000, when he spent his vice presidential debate burbling about his "great respect for Dick Cheney" and how honored he was to have been nominated in such a wonderful land of opportunity—while Cheney methodically sold the Republican agenda and, more importantly, sold himself as a levelheaded and serious figure, ballast for the lightweight at the top of the ticket. Whatever concerns the public might have had about electing the surly perpetual-adolescent son of a president no one had even liked in the first place, they could rest assured that there would be adults in the room.
And Vance was in the debate to sell the notion that in a new term, Trump would have someone at his side who could speak in complete sentences, or even paragraphs, and might at least pretend to have sympathy toward ordinary human suffering. It was phony and it was undercut a bit by Vance's habit of smirking and rolling his eyes on the split screen, but through most of the night it had a plasticky plausibility to it. The viewer had to already know about JD Vance to appreciate how shamelessly he was telling lies about everything, or how that same verbal acumen had previously been used for contempt and cruelty. There was no sign of the Vance who'd talked about "childless cat ladies" or about how, in cases of abortion after rape or incest, "the circumstances of that child's birth are somehow inconvenient."
It had to be the best possible job anyone could do as Donald Trump's running mate. Vance almost entirely deflected the most substantively outrageous things that he and Trump have said and proposed, and he clung with a college debater's annoying fluency to the message that things were better under Trump's first term than they are today—the factually absurd but apparently useful theme that Trump is depending on to keep his reelection viable in the polls and with the press. When one of the moderators noted that Vance himself had written in 2020 that "Trump thoroughly failed to deliver his economic populism," he brushed it off as his having "believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record" and blamed Congress for not helping Trump accomplish more.
Underneath that, with even more tenacity, Vance stuck to his campaign's other persistent message: that the reason things got worse after Trump left the White House, the root cause of every American ailment, was that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden let immigrants into the country. Migrants crossing the border, Vance declared, are the reason "a lot of fentanyl is coming into the country." They "undercut the wages of American workers." The middle-class cost of living, the state of schools, limited access to health care: all the fault of immigrants. The housing shortage? "Twenty-five million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country."
Vance claimed he could provide a study to the moderators after the debate to prove that last point, notwithstanding that 25 million migrants is more than double the country's estimated undocumented population. A totalizing explanation of the world needn't trifle with facts; in his most sweeping turn back to the all-consuming struggle border, Vance veered away from the problem of children getting massacred with assault rifles—for which his only solution is making schools into even more fortified bunkers than they are—to complain that, "Thanks to Kamala Harris's open border, we've seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartel." In the real world, the violence of the cartels is inflamed by guns pouring the other way, as American gunmakers and retailers profiteer off Mexican suffering by selling more weaponry than the domestic market can absorb.
But reality only slowed Vance down once through all that, when he paused to complain to the moderators, "The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact check," because they'd had the temerity to note that the Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, who Vance had been calling "illegal immigrants," are in the country legally. The truth is negotiable if you have a story to tell.
And then, abruptly, it wasn't. Not long after Vance's friend Ross Douthat—whose own career depends on making sure the readers of the New York Times never glimpse the things he actually believes—posted an item preemptively declaring him the winner of the night, Vance tried to put across one last alternative version of reality. Vance had already declared, CBS's Norah O'Donnell said, that if he had been vice president in 2021, he would not have certified Joe Biden's victory over Donald Trump. "Would you again seek to challenge this year's election results, even if every governor certifies the results?" O'Donnell asked.
Vance tried feinting away from the question—"Well, Norah, first of all, I think that we're focused on the future"—and then hunkered down into his message about how the 2020 election was a matter for "debate":
And that's all that Donald Trump has said. Remember, he said that on January 6, the protesters ought to protest peacefully. And on January 20, what happened? Joe Biden became the President. Donald Trump left the White House.
That was all that happened in January 2021: Donald Trump gave a peaceful speech, and then Joe Biden became president. Vance then started fuming about how the real threat to democracy was Kamala Harris trying to get misinformation moderated on Facebook. "And that, to me, is a much bigger threat to democracy than what Donald Trump said when he said that protesters should peacefully protest on January 6," Vance said.
After all that effort to seem normal and reasonable, Vance had found himself caught—on the most obvious of questions—between the two most extreme influences on his worldview: his absolute political subservience to Trump, and his intellectual suffocation in the far-right online bubble of his tech-lord benefactors. Vance's job depends on never telling the truth about Donald Trump; his model of the world requires him to believe that the general public shares his outrage about the supposed suppression of conservative voices on social media. And so he thought he saw a chance to change the subject.
Even the jumbled-up Tim Walz could see what to do with that. "He lost this election, and he said he didn't," Walz said. "One hundred and forty police officers were beaten at the Capitol that day, some with the American flag. Several later died." How, Walz said, could someone "deny what happened on January 6, the first time in American history that a President or anyone tried to overturn a fair election and the peaceful transfer of power"?
Vance still seemed to think he could find a winning position: "Yeah, well, look, Tim, first of all, it's really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January 20, as we have done for 250 years in this country." Donald Trump gave up power on Jan. 20—after the blood and shit and broken glass had been scrubbed and swept out of the Capitol, after the military and Congressional leadership had cut him out of the chain of command, after every other option had been exhausted—peacefully.
"Did he lose the 2020 election?" Walz asked.
Vance, fully glitching, repeated his losing maneuver: "Tim, I'm focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?"
"That is a damning non-answer," Walz said.
All Vance could do was keep skidding straight into the hive-mind of the terminally online, pleading to get back to the kind of argument he wanted to have:
Kamala Harris wants to use the power of government and big tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this present political moment. I would like Democrats and Republicans to both reject censorship. Let's persuade one another. Let's argue about ideas, and then let's come together afterwards.
"He lost the election," Walz said. "This is not a debate."
