Vance Is Pence, Only Worse
He showed in the VP debate that he'll go much further than his predecessor in enabling Donald Trump's illegal and unconstitutional actions
JD Vance has been getting high marks for his performance in Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate—not just from friends but from foes too. He was coherent, cogent, and, above all, genial. But that’s not all. Vance was also Donald Trump’s personal launderer—presenting a man both temperamentally and morally unfit for the highest office in the land as a serious and thoughtful statesman.
Consider the following statements from the debate:
“Donald Trump not only respects but reveres all of those who served in our armed forces, and any suggestion otherwise is ridiculous.”
“Your concern that he doesn’t condemn neo-Nazis … President Trump has Jewish grandchildren. His daughter and son-in-law are Jewish. This is a president who respects and cherishes all of the American people.”
“President Trump, I will tell you, has boundless confidence in the American people.”
“President Trump has made a commitment to conservation and to the environment. Now, with regard to climate change, the climate is changing. But the issue is: What’s the cause and what do we do about it? President Trump has made it clear that we’re going to continue to listen to the science.”
“Under President Trump’s leadership ... we’ll do what we’ve done from day one which is improve the lives of African Americans. … [We] have fought for criminal justice ... and [for] opportunities for African Americans.”
“Trump and I have a plan to improve healthcare and to protect preexisting conditions for every American.”
“President Trump and I trust the American people to make choices in the best interest of their health.”
Actually, this wasn’t Vance in 2024. It was Mike Pence in 2020 during his debate with Kamala Harris.
Vance, after all, is hardly the first to sign up for the job of smoothing out Trump’s hard edges. A whole presidential cycle ago, Pence dutifully lied, misled, and debased himself on Trump’s behalf—and the result was a catastrophe for both himself and the country. He whitewashed Trump’s: derogatory comments about American soliders who get captured or killed in battle being “suckers” and “losers”; praise for “very fine people” participating in a neo-Nazi rally; and open contempt for climate change science. After Trump’s remarks about “pussy grabbing” came to light, Pence pleaded with his fellow Christians to forgive Trump for his sins and to still back him.
But even as Pence has learned his lesson and is now doing penance by warning the country against Trump, Vance has reversed course in the opposite direction and is depicting the man he once called “America’s Hitler” as a paragon of presidential virtue.
Here is a sampling of his spin on the debate floor:
When asked about Trump calling climate change a hoax, Vance parried that “if the Democrats ... really believe that climate change is serious” they’d allow “more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America.”
With regard to Trump’s attacks on Obamacare, he portrayed the former disgraced president as its savior. The program “was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along,” he declared, ignoring that the only reason Trump was unable to repeal it was that the late Sen. John McCain, a fellow Republican, literally rose from his deathbed to vote against the effort.
To clean up Trump’s bonkers statement that childcare is not going to be an “expensive problem to fix,” Vance offered an impressively systematic and coherent explanation for an utterly misguided plan that involves imposing draconian penalties on American companies with overseas manufacturing operations combined with massive tariffs on foreign goods and diverting the alleged revenue to state-funded childcare programs.
When it came to Trump’s dangerous and dehumanizing accusations that the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, was eating local pets, Vance, without missing a beat, moved the goalposts and soliloquized about the strain these hardworking immigrants were imposing on the community. Not just that, he took the opportunity to peddle an entirely faulty economics about the impact of immigration, especially on housing prices.
As I jokingly summarized Vance playing Trump’s sanitizer in a post on X at the time:
Until this point in the debate, however, the only difference between Pence 2020 and Vance 2024 was that Vance was a more subtle and convincing propagandist than Pence.
But then Vance went where Pence has refused to go and, in the process, exposed the limits of his strategy of sugarcoating Trump’s lies and demagoguery in a responsible, sophisticated register.
When the discussion turned to Trump’s Big Lie and the Jan. 6 attempted coup, Vance first just tried to wave away the whole question by noting that “Joe Biden became the president and Donald Trump left the White House”—as if the intervening violence that left a police officer dead, hundreds injured, scores of lawmakers cowering under their desks, and Vice President Pence being hunted by a MAGA mob hellbent on hanging him didn’t happen.
Worse, he wouldn’t commit to accepting this year’s election results even if, as moderator Norah O’Donnell noted, “every governor certifies the results.” Instead, he blathered about Kamala Harris engaging in “censorship at an industrial scale.” Even when Tim Walz asked him point blank: “Did [Donald Trump] lose the 2020 election?” Vance flatly refused to answer the question. “Tim, I'm focused on the future,” he lectured. The best he could muster was that if Walz somehow managed to become the next vice president, “he'll have my prayers, he'll have my best wishes, and he'll have my help whenever he wants it.”
This might be shocking but not surprising.
Trump initially selected Pence, as I have noted before, because as an infinitely vulgar, thrice-married, twice-divorced New York billionaire, he needed someone who could help sell him to social conservatives in general and religious heartlanders in particular. And Pence had just what Trump needed: credibility on issues like abortion and religious freedom—values that, again, Trump was incapable of convincingly embodying. Pence served as a sanity—and sanitizing—filter for Trump.
But this time around, Trump wanted not only a filter but also an accomplice. The extreme lengths to which Trump has amply demonstrated he’s willing to go both to gain and keep power has enhanced the difficulty of the VP’s job and requires commensurately more “skills” in the candidate to pull it off.
Fortunately for Trump but unfortunately for the country, Vance showed in the debate that he is totally up to the job. And should Trump get reelected, we may find out if there is any limit at all to just how far he’ll go to enable his boss.
© The UnPopulist, 2024
I think the major difference is that Pence finally recognized a "limit" to Trumps actions after essentially cheer leading for him for all four years. He was at least quite quiet with regard to anything that might have bothered him.
For Vance the illegality and unconstitutionality, like the cruelty, IS the point. He will act as a coconspirator and not just a cheer leader.
Bernie, with all due respect, under Biden-Harris we have gone from:
* No war to world war
* High rent and insane grocery prices
* Sudden, massive importation of illegal aliens jumping the line in front of qualified legal applicants
* FEMA ignoring a catastrophe because they illegally spent their money on illegal aliens
Did I miss anything?