Picture this: It’s the biggest moment of your professional life — performed before an audience of millions — and you have to defend your boss.
He is colossally needy and notoriously thin skinned. He stoked a violent mob against your predecessor. Oh, and he’s providing a live play-by-play critique of your performance on his own personal social-media network. Your job? Soften his edges, while stroking his ego.
This is the awkward task America watched JD Vance try to pull off Tuesday night.
At a vice-presidential debate against his Democratic rival, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Mr. Vance attempted the high-wire act of defending Donald Trump better than Donald Trump. The performance amounted to an effort to reinvent one of the most polarizing figures in American political history, without openly rebuking any of his words, deeds or positions that have divided the nation.
It was, to put it mildly, a difficult exercise.
In Mr. Vance’s telling, a former president known for vicious attacks on his opponents and trafficking in conspiracy theories became a beacon of “common-sense wisdom” and bipartisan governance.
Mr. Trump’s support for strict state abortion bans became part of an attempt to make the Republican Party “pro-family in the fullest sense of the word.” Even though Mr. Trump tried — and failed — to repeal the Affordable Care Act dozens of times during his administration, Mr. Vance told the nation that his boss “salvaged Obamacare” by working across the aisle.
And as for Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election and his role in the violent and deadly siege on the Capitol on Jan. 6? Well, said Mr. Vance, Mr. Trump “peacefully gave over power” on Inauguration Day two weeks later.
“Something that these guys do is they make a lot of claims about if Donald Trump becomes president all of these terrible consequences are going to ensue,” Mr. Vance said. “He did his job, which is govern in a bipartisan way.”
For his part, Mr. Walz approached Mr. Vance with civility and his trademark folksy style. He defended the record of the Biden administration. And, again and again, Mr. Walz tried to turn the conversation back to Mr. Trump, reminding voters of the chaos and instability of the Trump era.
“We’ll sometimes hear revisionist history,” he warned in the opening moments of the debate, during an exchange about the escalating conflict in the Middle East.
Mr. Walz had the more predictable task, following a path of attacks on Mr. Trump’s leadership, style and policies that has been well trod by his party for almost a decade.
Mr. Vance faced the more politically treacherous mission of remaking Mr. Trump for an audience beyond the MAGA faithful who pack his rallies. He showed a deftness that Mr. Trump lacked at his own debate last month against Vice President Kamala Harris, when the former president couldn’t resist the pull of conservative falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
For a man known for his own share of polarizing remarks, Mr. Vance struck a stark contrast with the dark, almost apocalyptic vision Mr. Trump has offered voters on the campaign trail. He wasn’t a happy warrior — the way Democrats love to cast Mr. Walz — but he was certainly a collegial one. The shift in tone was apparent from the earliest moments: Unlike Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance eagerly approached his opponent to shake his hand.
Of course, as is typical in vice-presidential debates, Tuesday night was not about the two candidates onstage but those at the top of the ticket. For Mr. Vance, who was picked for his fealty to Mr. Trump’s political brand, that stage was also a place to plant seeds for a broader political future, whether or not Mr. Trump wins the White House next month.
To do that, Mr. Vance had to repackage his own image as a conservative warrior beloved by right-wing podcast bros but broadly unpopular among voters in polling. He shied away from the fiercest attacks on Mr. Walz, declining to jump on an admission from the Minnesota governor that he “misspoke” when he made claims of being in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre in the spring of 1989.
At times, Mr. Vance even appeared to extend a branch of bipartisanship, saying he agreed with Mr. Walz on elements of immigration, mental health, housing and other issues. He expressed concern when Mr. Walz said that his 17-year-old son, Gus, witnessed a shooting at a community center.
“I’m sorry about that and I just want to say, Christ have mercy. It is awful,” he said.
Mr. Vance benefited from moderators who agreed at the start to not spend time correcting false claims uttered on the stage, which allowed him to continue largely unfettered by facts or past positions.
At one point, Mr. Vance falsely claimed he never backed a national abortion restriction, saying he supported “a minimum national standard” — a phrase used by anti-abortion proponents to describe a 15-week federal ban. His comment went unchecked.
A mild rebuke over the legal status of Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, prompted a quick protest from Mr. Vance.
“The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check,” he told the moderators, before trying to detail the legal intricacies of the immigration process.
Some of Mr. Vance’s previous efforts to speak for the former president failed disastrously. After Mr. Vance said Mr. Trump would veto a national abortion bill, he was rebuked by the former president from his own debate stage last month. (During Tuesday’s debate, Mr. Trump pivoted yet again, posting on his social media network that he would, in fact, veto such a ban.)
But Mr. Vance did not repeat the mistake of speaking directly for the former president.
He made little effort to directly rebut some of Mr. Trump’s remarks, ignoring a question about whether he agreed with the former president’s description of climate change as a “hoax.” Mr. Vance refused to say whether a second Trump administration would separate parents from their children as part of a plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
And he asked a question some of Mr. Trump’s campaign aides would like the former president to press daily: If Ms. Harris wants to lower housing prices and other costs, why hasn’t she done that yet?
“Who has been the vice president for the last three and a half years? And the answer is your running mate, not mine,” he said to Mr. Walz.
The question was meant to remind voters of her ties to the administration in power in the White House and undercut her efforts to cast her campaign as the change many Americans are seeking.
But for all his careful positioning, there was one crucial issue on which Mr. Vance broke with Mr. Trump.
“We are going to shake hands after this debate and after this election,” Mr. Vance said, making a promise about how he would handle the outcome of the contest. “I hope that we’ll win, and I think we’re going to win, but if Tim Walz is 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.”
His boss may have a word with him about that.
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