And to be fair, there was a lot that merited that expression. In particular, there was Walz’s utterly baffling remark that he became “friends with school shooters.” Which…what?
Look, we accept that Walz is, by his own admission in the same debate, a “knucklehead” who misspeaks (read: lies) all the time, but we have so many questions. Which school shooters is he “friends” with? How? If he didn’t mean school shooters, who was he talking about? Trump rally shooters, maybe? And not to belabor this point, but where the hell does he get off calling Vance weird when he’s friends with school shooters?
Moreover, Vance even went back and reframed answers which Trump had given in the previous debate that came in for mockery, but which Vance defended as sound thinking. In particular, when Vance was asked about Trump’s line that he had “concepts of a plan,” Vance pointed out, quite sensibly, that no one proposes a 900-page bill during a debate, and that it’s impossible to have more than concepts if one doesn’t know what legislators are going to negotiate for, or even who all the legislators will be. Nor are we the only ones to notice what a thoroughly effective job Vance did. Frank Luntz’s focus group, of which only five people had started out supporting Trump-Vance at the start, had swung to 12-2 in favor of Vance at the end.
In other words, if you want an idea of what this debate was like, then to borrow from Watchmen, Vance wasn’t locked in there with Walz; Walz was locked in there with Vance. The only thing missing was him asking Vance to tell him about the rabbits. Or at least, so it seemed for the first thirty minutes.
But then, something even more extraordinary happened. Walz started nodding. And shrugging, as if to say “fair enough,” in response to Vance’s answers. At one point, when Walz spoke about his child witnessing a school shooting, Vance turned to Walz and offered sincere condolences, for which Walz actually thanked him -- equally sincerely -- for offering. At certain points, it even seemed like Vance wasn’t so much debating Walz as winning him over like a skeptical voter. It was a master class in making a candidate look not only reasonable, but kind, empathetic, and well-informed on the issues.
Which brings us to the real takeaway from this debate, which is not that Tim Walz is an imbecile (though he is), but rather that J.D. Vance is Just. That. Good. He took a man whose job it was to make the case against him and made even that man look at him with fresh eyes. In other words, J.D. Vance did something rarer than arguing; he actually bothered to persuade. And in so doing, he showed the power of President Trump’s brand of politics; a brand of politics which can bring not only RFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard together with the likes of Roger Stone, but which can make even the nerdy hometown boy made good and the crusty “union guy” who coaches football finish out with warm words and conversation. On that stage, a new bipartisan, pro-working class consensus began to form before our very eyes, thanks to J.D. Vance’s power of persuasion, deployed on behalf of President Trump’s visionary political agenda.
Now, granted, the media is going to do its damnedest to scuttle that warm ending. Already, they’ve begun trying to bring up J.D. Vance’s “damning non-answer” on the 2020 election’s winner, even though the sorts of voters who care about whether President Trump will admit he lost are exactly the kind of #Resistance partisans who just want Trump humiliated. Not to mention, they ignore the fact that Vance’s “non-answer” amounted to a warning that large scale federal censorship is a far greater threat to democracy than mean tweets, which is a warning pitched squarely at the sort of people for whom threats to democracy are a voting issue.
Which brings us to the one downside: namely, the fact that this debate probably won’t be watched nearly as much as it should be. Vice presidential debates are, after all, not nearly as relevant to many voters as presidential ones, and a debate this amiable (particularly at the end) isn’t likely to draw the same attention as a slugfest. Our own senior editor, Jack Posobiec, doesn’t think this debate will move the needle, and we certainly don’t plan to disagree.
However, we would point one thing out: the sorts of people who choose to watch Vice Presidential debates are precisely the sorts of people who President Trump has been having trouble with. That is to say, suburban, college-educated, high information voters who deplore President Trump’s supposed lack of civility and earthy language, when compared with previous presidential candidates’ more conventionally high-minded approach. The sort of people, in other words, who might have preferred Nikki Haley in the Republican primary, or Michael Bloomberg in the 2020 primary.
Before tonight, those people would have seen no reason to vote for Donald Trump. Whereas now? J.D. Vance just gave them one. Already, Trump-Vance skeptics are changing their tune after seeing Vance’s performance. If those people, and the class they speak for, are this enthused, then a true unity ticket might have just been formed.
So here’s the bottom line: last night, J.D. Vance made the MAGA worldview – nationalism, populism, Trumpism, or whatever you call it – sound not just smart, or substantive, but rather, like something that could form the basis for a new bipartisan American consensus. He has likely eased the fears of people who aspire to enter the American elite class through similar paths to the one he trod. He’s dispelled the notions that he’s weird, off-putting, vengeful, and every other slur that the media has thrown at him. He even silenced the moderators’ one attempt at fact-checking. He did President Trump a world of good, and if this debate has the effect we think it will, then he's also done America a world of good. The future of MAGA was revealed tonight, and that future is bright, indeed.
