There was a strange feeling as the vice-presidential debate got under way in the CBS News studios on Tuesday night that only intensified as 90 minutes of detailed policy discussion unfolded: was the United States in danger of regaining its sanity?
After weeks and months of being assailed by Donald Trump’s dystopian evocation of a country on the verge of self-destruction, amplified by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s dire warnings of democracy in peril, here was something very different. The two vice-presidential nominees were embracing that most endangered of American political species: agreement.
“Tim, I actually think I agree with you,” said JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, addressing his opposite number Tim Walz during the discussion on immigration.
“Much of what the senator said right there, I’m in agreement with him,” said Walz, the Minnesota governor and Democratic nominee, as they turned to trade policy.
It wasn’t true, of course. The two men were no closer to agreement than their bosses, who in their own presidential debate last month showed themselves to be worlds apart.
But on Tuesday it was as if the CBS News studio in midtown Manhattan had been transported back to a prelapsarian – or at least, pre-Maga – times. To an era when politicians could be civil, and to get on you didn’t have to castigate your opponent as an enemy of the people.
For Vance the metamorphosis was especially striking. He is, after all, running mate to the architect of “American carnage”.
For his own part, the senator from Ohio has spread malicious untruths about legal-resident Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating people’s cats and dogs. Not to mention that he’s the “childless cat-ladies” guy.
An unrecognisable Vance emerged on the New York stage. This one listened respectfully to his debating partner, spoke in whole and largely measured sentences, and went so far as to admit his own fallibility – three qualities that the former president rarely emulates.
Vance had reason to present himself differently from Trump, perhaps. At 40, to Trump’s 78, he has the future to think about – his own future.
But his affable demeanor was also artifice. When it came to the content of what he said, the Republican vice-presidential nominee was as economical with the truth as his overseer.
He lied with abandon, in fact. He just did it with a silken tongue.
He talked about the vice-president presiding over an “open border” with Mexico when numbers of border-crossers are actually at a four-year low. He claimed he had not supported a national abortion ban – oh yes he did, repeatedly during his 2022 senatorial race.
On the Middle East crisis, he accused the “Kamala Harris administration” of handing Iran $100bn in the form of unfrozen assets – not true. It was $55bn, and it was negotiated under Barack Obama.
Perhaps most egregiously, he said Trump had “salvaged” the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Obama’s wildly popular healthcare insurance scheme commonly known as Obamacare. “Salvaged” was an interesting choice of word to apply to Trump, who tried 60 times to destroy the ACA without offering any alternative.
Yet it would have taken an attentive viewer to see behind Vance’s smooth comportment to the lies he was purveying. The former tech investor and bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy looked comfortable on stage and in his own skin, presenting himself as the reasonable Trump, a Maga lion in sheep’s clothing.
Walz by contrast had moments in which he came across as tense and uneasy, the pre-debate nerves that had been reported by CNN appearing to have been genuine. While Vance beamed his piercingly-blue eyes direct to camera, the Minnesota governor frequently looked down at his notes.
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The folksy, aw-shucks “Coach Walz” who has taken the US by storm since he was plucked out of Minnesota obscurity to be Harris’s running mate was largely absent.
He stumbled on occasion, garbling his words to refer to having become “friends” with school shooters rather than their victims’ families. And he mishandled a question about why he had wrongly claimed to have visited China during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, woodenly trying to dodge the issue by calling himself a “knucklehead”.
But when push came to shove, Walz came through. On the subjects that matter most to Harris in her bid to become the first female president, and the first woman of color in the Oval Office, he hit Vance hard – civilly, but hard.
On abortion he followed his running mate’s lead and spoke movingly about the personal impact of Trump’s effective evisceration of Roe v Wade. He invoked the story of Amber Thurman, who died as she traveled in search of reproductive care from Georgia to North Carolina.
That even extracted one of the most surprising “I agree” remarks of the evening from the staunchly anti-abortion Vance: “Governor, I agree with you, Amber Thurman should still be alive … and I certainly wish that she was.”
There was only one point in the evening when the kid gloves came off, and the cod display of gentility was discarded by both parties. It came when Vance had the audacity to claim – silkenly, naturally – that Harris’s attempts to “censor” misinformation in public discourse posed a far greater threat to democracy than Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election on January 6.
“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance deflected when Walz asked him directly whether Trump had lost that contest. “That is a damning non-answer,” the Democrat shot back, his face pained.
In the last analysis, both men were only there playing the role of side-kick. They may have raised hopes that civility could make a comeback to US politics, but let Trump have the last word.
“Walz was a Low IQ Disaster – Very much like Kamala,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social site shortly after the debate had ended. And just like that, it was business as usual.