Wednesday Reads: VP Debate and Trump Decompensation

Posted: October 2, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, just because | Tags: , , , , | 3 Comments

Good Morning!!

Last night’s VP debate wasn’t anything to write home about. (I admit that I didn’t watch every minute of it.) Tim Walz seemed nervous at first, but eventually got in some meaningful jabs. J.D. Vance was confident, glib and polished, but he had a some shameful moments that will probably be remembered far longer than his mostly smooth delivery of lies and obfuscation. The instant polls either called it a tie or gave Vance a slight edge.

Politico: The big VP debate takeaway: Neither candidate delivered the goods. 

Tim Walz and JD Vance spent much of Tuesday night defending their running mates’ records. They were less successful promoting their bosses’ plans for the future.

The two vice presidential candidates spent the 90-minute debate relitigating the last eight years just as much as they focused on their visions for the next four, sparring over the intricacies of Donald Trump’s first term, President Joe Biden’s policies — and their own political baggage, including Walz’s false claim he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests and Vance’s past harsh criticisms of Trump.

main-vpdebateroundtableThe result was a wide-ranging, policy-heavy back and forth that often pushed Walz and Vance to play defense for the presidential nominees, affording them little opportunity to make a fresh and forceful case to undecided voters just weeks before they head to the polls.

At the same time, they missed opportunities to use much-used attack lines against one another: Vance didn’t grill Walz on his military record while the Minnesota governor didn’t go after Vance over his “childless cat ladies” comment.

On immigration, Vance spent a large portion of his time defending Trump’s border policies, as Walz attacked the former president for only building less than 2 percent of the wall when he was in office. Vance used questions on the economy to argue that Trump delivered rising take-home pay and lower inflation, while slamming four years of Harris’ leadership on the economy. On health care, the men sparred over the Affordable Care Act and prescription drug costs under their running mates. And on foreign policy, they engaged in lengthy back and forth, both blaming each other’s parties for deteriorating global instability….

With no additional debates on the books, Tuesday night’s showdown may be the last significant national campaign event before November, increasing the weight of the vice presidential contenders’ closing arguments for their running mates. Polls show Harris and Trump in a neck-and-neck race, and Tuesday night was a chance for both men to pitch themselves and their party’s vision for the next four years.

Harris campaign co-chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said Walz “spoke passionately” about Harris’ “vision for a new way forward” and specifically highlighted Vance’s refusal to say Trump lost the 2020 election during what was perhaps the sharpest exchange of the night.

“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said, after Vance was pressed multiple times on the issue.

And that is likely to be the most memorable moment from the debate.  Will Saletan writes at The Bulwark: The One Question That Mattered in the VP Debate. 

IN TUESDAY NIGHT’S VICE-PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE, JD Vance and Tim Walz covered lots of issues: inflation, housing, guns, abortion, immigration, health care, and much more.

But there was only one question on which the vice presidency—the job for which these two men are competing—really matters. That question was whether they would certify the results of the next presidential election. And on that subject, Vance gave a non-answer that instantly disqualifies him: He refused to acknowledge that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

Certification of elections was a central factor in Vance’s audition to become Trump’s running mate. Other contenders for the job demonstrated, as Vance did, that they were sufficiently right-wing or loyal to MAGA. But, as Thomas Joscelyn has pointed out in The Bulwark, Vance stood out in one respect: He was the one who signaled most clearly that he was willing to push constitutional boundaries to do Trump’s bidding.

In February, Vance went on ABC’s This Week and made it clear that unlike Mike Pence, he would have collaborated in Trump’s scheme to block the certification of electoral votes on January 6, 2021.

Q: Would you have certified the election results had you been vice president?

Vance: If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors. And I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there.

Three months later, in an interview with Ross Douthat of the New York Times, Vance defended Trump’s scheme and explained how a vice president could have executed it. “You would try to marshal alternative slates of electors, like they did in the election of 1876,” said Vance. “The entire post-2020 thing would have gone a lot better if there had actually been an effort to provide alternative slates of electors and to force us to have that debate. I think it would’ve been a much better thing for the country.”

VP debateVance dismissed the argument that courts had already rejected Trump’s allegations of election fraud. “You can’t litigate these things judicially; you have to litigate them politically,” Vance told Douthat. “And we never had a real political debate about the 2020 election.”

When Douthat suggested that pursuing Trump’s scheme “would have pushed America into a crisis,” Vance refused to concede that the scheme was illegal. Trump “was using the constitutional procedures,” Vance argued. “He was trying to take a constitutional process to its natural conclusion.”

In short, Vance made it clear that he believed 1) Congress could second-guess and override election results submitted by states; 2) politicians, not judges, should decide these matters; and 3) any scheme could be rendered presumptively constitutional by inventing a new interpretation of the Constitution. As a Yale Law grad, he surely knows better.

Read the rest at The Bulwark.

At The Washington Post, Dana Millbank describes another moment that will likely be remembered: At debate, Vance whines: You weren’t supposed to fact-check me! 

Half an hour into Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, JD Vance lodged a whiny protest.

“Margaret,” he said to moderator Margaret Brennan of CBS News, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check!”

It was a lie on top of another lie, supplemented by a pair of other lies, in support of an even bigger lie.

There was no “rule” against fact-checking. And Vance had just told a whopper. He had alleged that, in Springfield, Ohio, “you’ve got schools that are overwhelmed, you’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants.”

There is no “open border,” Kamala Harris isn’t the president, and the thousands of Haitian migrants to which Vance was referring have legal status, which Brennan had accurately pointed out. But Vance claimed that “what’s actually going on” was that the Haitian migrants are there as part of “the facilitation of illegal immigration” — and he kept going until the moderators shut off the candidates’ microphones.

From the sidelines, Donald Trump cheered on his running mate. “Margaret Brennan just lied again about the ILLEGAL MIGRANTS let into our Country by Lyin’ Kamala Harris, and then she cut off JD’s mic to stop him from correcting her!” he posted on Truth Social.

The up-is-down moment was all the worse because it was in response to Vance’s original libels about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield: that they were bringing crime, disease and, yes, eating the cats and dogs of the town’s residents. Vance declined to walk back that calumny during the debate, instead saying: “The people that I’m most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’s open border.”

It feels entirely appropriate that CBS chose to hold the vice-presidential debate in a studio once home to “Captain Kangaroo.”

At NBC News, Jonathan Allen writes about an outrageous lie by Vance: Vance claims Trump ‘salvaged’ Obamacare. Trump tried, and failed, to kill it.

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance claimed Tuesday night — in contradiction of history — that his running mate, former President Donald Trump, “salvaged Obamacare,” the health insurance program that Trump tried to kill.

During the vice presidential debate on CBS against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vance, a senator from Ohio, echoed Trump’s own recent revisionism. But the assertion also served to remind voters that Democrats ultimately won the yearslong political fight over expanding access to health insurance: The Republican ticket no longer wants to repeal the 2010 law.

Election 2024 Debate

Trump “actually implemented some of these regulations when he was president of the United States,” Vance said Tuesday night. “And I think you can make a really good argument that it salvaged Obamacare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along. I think this is an important point about President Trump.

“When Obamacare was crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden and health care costs, Donald Trump could have destroyed the program,” Vance added. “Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.”

But when Trump was president, repeal was a centerpiece of his agenda. In a dramatic Senate vote in 2017, Democrats and a handful of Republicans rejected his plan to repeal Obamacare. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., cast the deciding vote by turning his thumb down with a theatrical flourish. A critic of Obamacare, McCain nonetheless concluded that the “skinny repeal” measure would leave people worse off than if Obamacare remained in place.

Walz noted that episode Tuesday night.

Trump “would have repealed [Obamacare] had it not been for the courage of John McCain,” Walz said.

At The Daily Beast, AJ McDougall describes a notable interaction between the two men: Tim Walz Reveals During Debate That Son Gus Witnessed a Shooting. 

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate that his son Gus was among the many Americans who have witnessed a shooting, causing an otherwise contentious sparring session to be briefly waylaid by a moment of human compassion.

“I’ve got a 17-year-old,” Walz said, as part of answer to a question about the issue of gun violence, “and he witnessed a shooting at a community center playing volleyball.”

“That’s awful,” JD Vance muttered, visibly surprised.

When it was the Ohio senator’s turn to respond, Vance turned to Walz.

“Tim, first of all, I didn’t know that your 17-year-old witnessed a shooting, and I’m sorry about that and I hope he’s doing OK,” he said.

Then he proclaimed: “Christ have mercy. It is awful.”

“I appreciate you saying that,” Walz thanked him.

Walz has previously referred to the anecdote along the campaign trail while discussing the need for gun control.

“Too many of us have been there,” he said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, two weeks ago. “My own son was in a location where someone was shot in the head.”

This is an interesting sidelight from Mary Ann Akers at The Daily Beast: Republicans Will Secretly Cheer Walz during Debate: Friend. 

Tim Walz‘s former roommate and fellow lawmaker claims there’s a secret cabal of Republicans that supports Kamala Harris but whose members are too chicken to cross Donald Trump.

Former Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA) who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2006 alongside Walz told the Daily Beast Tuesday that not only will he be rooting for his ex-roomie to defeat JD Vance in Tuesday night’s debate, but former colleagues on the other side of the aisle will be, too.

“There’s a silent majority out there that wants to send a message to Donald Trump that he was fired once for a reason,” Murphy told the Daily Beast Tuesday.

Patrick Murphy, PA

Former Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA)

The only problem with these GOP members is that they fear Trump, who—in spite of everything—still has an iron grip on the GOP congressional establishment.

Former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona is the latest GOP ex-member of Congress to endorse Harris, joining the likes of former Republican Reps. Jim Greenwood, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Cheney’s father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, has also endorsed Harris.

Walz’s friend Murphy, who served on House Armed Services when Walz served on the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said he regularly texts with Republicans who say they support Harris and don’t want another four years of Trump in the White House.

“But they’re afraid,” he said, adding that Trump’s most recent personal attacks on Harris may be the final blow for Republicans who are privately fed up with the former president and 2024 GOP nominee. Murphy declined to name names.

“More Republicans will definitely be coming out to endorse Harris,” he predicted. “After lying about cats and dogs being eaten, Obama not being born in America, he’s now turning on her with false claims about a mental disability,” said Murphy, a combat veteran who served as a paratrooper with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq.

Moira Donegan at The Guardian on Vance:  JD Vance’s debate lines were so polished you could forget they made no sense. 

Maybe he thought the pink tie could help. JD Vance, the Ohio senator and Donald Trump’s running mate, clearly set out to make himself seem less creepy at Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, and a major target of this project was aimed at convincing women voters to like him. Vance, after all, has what pollsters call “high unfavorables”, which is a polite way of saying that people hate his guts.

Much of this stems from Vance’s extreme and inflexible views on abortion, his hostility to childless women, and his creepy statements about families and childrearing. He had to convince women that he’s not out to hurt them or monitor their menstrual cycles; he had to try and seem kindly, empathetic, gentle. The resulting 90 minutes felt like watching a remarkably lifelike robot try to imitate normal human emotion. He smiled. He cooed. He spoke of an anonymous woman he knew whom he said was watching, and told her: “Love ya”. And occasionally, when he was fact-checked or received pushback on his falsehoods or distortions, the eyes of his stiff, fixed face flashed with an incandescent rage.

A generous characterization of Vance’s performance might be to call it “slick”. Vance delivered practiced answers to questions on healthcare, abortion rights and childcare that were dense with lies and euphemism. Asked about his call for a national abortion ban, Vance insisted that what he wanted was a national “standard” – a standard, that is, to ban it at 15 weeks.

He spoke in what was probably supposed to be empathetic terms about a woman he had grown up with who had told him that she felt she had had to have the abortion she got when they were younger, because it allowed her to leave her abusive relationship – without clarifying that the laws that Vance supports would have compelled that woman he purports to care about to carry her abuser’s child to term, and likely become trapped with him.

He claimed that Americans didn’t “trust” Republicans on the abortion issue, but did not mention that they don’t trust Republicans because those are the ones taking their rights away.

When asked about childcare, Vance spoke in eerily imprecise terms about encouraging people to choose their preferred “family model”, without specifying exactly which “model” he had in mind. He spoke of the “multiple people who could be providing family care options” but did not specify if these “people” had anything in common with each other. In media appearances throughout his career, Vance has been more explicit: he means that women will perform childcare for free – dropping out of paid work in the public sphere to do so, if necessary.

Vance was confident and smiling as he delivered these lines; he had the greasy self-assurance of someone who is used to lying to people he thinks are stupider than him. He sounded every bit like the Yale Law lawyer that he is. Even when he was not degrading women’s dignity or condescending to the two female moderators, his answers were often delivered with a polish that seemed intended to conceal the fact that they made no sense.

Asked about the housing crisis, for instance, he said that mass deportations – a horrific ethnic-cleansing operation proposed by the Trump campaign that would ruin communities, families and lives – would lower prices by decreasing demand. It was a kind of repeat of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, but this time it wasn’t satire. He also suggested that the government could build housing on federal lands – but neglected to mention that most of those lands are in the vast, rural, empty Mountain West, in regions with lots of tumbleweeds and absolutely no jobs.

Read more at The Guardian.

If the VP debate was somewhat unmemorable, Trump’s behavior yesterday decidedly was not. Some highlights:

William Vaillancourt at The Daily Beast: Donald Trump Takes Aim at Jimmy Carter on His Milestone 100th Birthday. 

Not only was Donald Trump the sole living president—current or former—to not deliver a video message for Jimmy Carter in honor of the 39th president’s milestone 100th birthday on Tuesday, but he made no mention of the historic occasion despite talking about Carter’s presidency in an attempt to criticize Joe Biden.

hq720On Tuesday, the Carter Center shared excerpts of messages of support from Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden that were shown at Carter’s birthday concert last month at Atlanta’s Fox Theater. The concert, a benefit that has raised $1.2 million thus far for the Carter Center’s mission to “wage peace, fight disease, and build hope,” airs Tuesday on Georgia Public Broadcasting….

Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden also posted about Carter on their official social media accounts. As of publication, Trump hadn’t even done that.

Instead, while campaigning in Waunakee, Wisconsin, Trump used Biden’s administration as a way to mention Carter—and not in a positive way.

“Jimmy Carter is the happiest man because Jimmy Carter is considered a brilliant president in comparison,” Trump said, after having called Biden “the worst.”

Carter, who left office in 1981, has had the longest post-presidency of any former commander-in-chief and is the only former president to have turned 100. He entered hospice care in February 2023….

Seen Tuesday surrounded by family and friends in his backyard while being saluted with a military flyover, Carter has downplayed his birthday. What’s more important to him, he has made clear through his family, is being able to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump once again insulted U.S. troops. Matthew Chapman at Raw Story: ‘They had a headache’: Trump dismisses brain injuries of U.S. soldiers from Iran strike. 

Former President Donald Trump dismissed the injuries of U.S. soldiers who were caught in a 2020 missile attack by Iran on an American military installation, while he fielded questions from reporters at his latest campaign event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Earlier in the day, the former president reacted to the news of strikes on Israel by Iran, by claiming that nothing of the sort could have happened if he were still in office.

Notably, Iran did the same thing during his presidency to American troops in retaliation for a U.S. operation that assassinated Iranian general Qasem Suleimani.

When confronted with this fact by a reporter, Trump downplayed the idea that U.S. troop casualties in the incident were a big deal.

“Do you believe that you should have been tougher on Iran after they had launched ballistic missiles in 2020 on U.S. forces in Iraq, leaving more than 100 soldiers injured?” asked a reporter.

“So first of all, injured. What does injured mean?” said Trump. “You mean because they had a headache. Because the bombs never hit the fort. So, just so you understand, there was nobody ever tougher on Iraq. They had no money with me, they would have made any deal with me. I would have had a deal made within — literally, I would have had a deal made within one week after the election.”

The troops who were wounded in the missile strike suffered considerably more than a headache, officials have said.

According to a Pentagon report at the time, 109 troops were injured, many of whom suffered traumatic brain injuries. Despite the report, Trump has insisted, “We suffered no casualties.”

Sabrina Rodriguez and Isaac Arnsdorf at The Washington Post: Trump mixes up words, swerves among subjects in off-topic speech. 

MILWAUKEE — Republican nominee Donald Trump spoke for 33 minutes before his first mention of the ostensible focus of his remarks.

Signs reading “SCHOOL CHOICE,” “EDUCATION FREEDOM NOW” and “LET PARENTS DECIDE” decorated a small auditorium, and a panel of speakers preceding the former president focused on using public funds to let families choose between public and private, especially religious, schools. Trump read from a binder containing a prepared speech on the subject, and he switched abruptly between the text and a jumble of other topics.

“We can be nice and we can be politically incorrect, but the only thing they’re going to do there is cheat on elections, and we just can’t let this happen,” he said at one point. Without warning, he continued: “The city of Milwaukee is the home of first and oldest choice program.”

He spoke of “a million Rambos.” “Turnarounds” and “gotaways” and “dead-head spending.” He mixed up Iran with North Korea and strained to pronounce United Arab Emirates. He marveled at Hurricane Helene coming so late in the storm season, which typically runs through November. He falsely claimed government agencies can’t name the U.S. population, and he compared the conflict between Israel and Iran to “two kids fighting in the schoolyard.”

Election 2024 Trump

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event at Discovery World, Friday, Oct. 1, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Trump, 78, often speaks in a digressive, extemporaneous style that thrills his fans at large-scale rallies. But Tuesday’s event, in front of almost entirely reporters, was especially scattered and hard to follow. Polls show voters’ concerns about Trump’s age and fitness have increased since President Joe Biden, 81, withdrew and was replaced as the Democratic nominee by Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump spoke slowly and appeared tired. It was his second stop of the day, and he has picked up the pace of campaigning in recent weeks….

Trump was more energetic during a speech to supporters in Waunakee, Wis., earlier Tuesday. He went on an extended riff about the 1987 film “Full Metal Jacket” and made up a false claim that Harris raised taxes as the San Francisco district attorney, which is not a power of that office.

Trump avoided direct questions about how he would address the escalating violence between Iran and Israel, by repeatedly insisting it never would have happened if he were president. He claimed he could settle that war, as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with a single phone call apiece, but he declined to specify how.

“I don’t want to say what I’d use because I don’t want to give up negotiating abilities,” he said. He even boasted that with a second term he could have struck a peace deal between Iran and Israel.

There’s more Trump nonsense at the link. The guy is really coming apart.

Finally, from Aaron Rupar and Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: Trump’s decompensation was the big debate day story. They write that highlights of the debate

…pale in comparison to Donald Trump’s most troubling showing yet on the campaign trail. Across two campaign events in Wisconsin on Tuesday, the former and would-be president reiterated a truth that is much more important than who won the debate: namely, that he’s morally and intellectually unfit for office.

Both Trump events were packed with outrageous defamations and lies. His targets included troops wounded abroad while he was president, which would be unthinkable in anything resembling a normal era of politics.

Vicious as Trump’s attacks were, they also managed to be muddled in ways suggesting he isn’t up to the task of being president until he’s 82 years old. Vance’s slick lying and election denialism is even more ominous given the possibility that he may end up as the country’s leader in a second, nightmarish, Trump term….

Trump’s public addresses are disjointed and disconnected from reality at the best of times. Yesterday, however, was a particularly wide-ranging journey through conspiracy theories, hatred, and nonsense.

His first speech of the day in the the Madison suburb of Waunakee featured racially coded attacks on Brittney Griner, a Black American basketball player who was held hostage in Russia. Trump also lied about opposing the Iraq War and said all sorts of strange stuff, such as accusing Democrats of supporting “water-free bathrooms.”

The lowlight, however, came when Trump flat out defamed Kamala Harris for murder, saying of a murder victim, “She murdered him. In my opinion Kamala murdered him. Just like she had a gun in her hand.” (So much for Trump toning down the rhetoric and offering a message of unity — watch the clip below.)

Even lower depths were explored during Trump’s appearance later in the day in Milwaukee. Taking questions from the press, he told a reporter who asked him if he trusts the election process this time around that “I’ll let you know in 33 days” — the implication being that he would accept the results only if he wins. Riffing about immigration, he wandered off into a bizarre, woozy, blatantly racist rant about people in the Congo, a country that he boasted he did not know anything about. (“They come from the Congo in the Africa. Many people from the Congo. I don’t know what that is, but they come out of jails in the Congo.”) [….]

Then, in a moment that would’ve driven news cycles for days had Biden done it, Trump confused the dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, with the president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, and claimed his buddy Kim “is trying to kill me.”

Then came the episode when Trump mocked injured troops.

That debacle came when a reporter asked Trump if he should’ve been tougher in retaliation against Iran after they launched a 2020 missile attack on a US base in Iraq, which injured more than 100 US soldiers. The Iranian launch was in retaliation for a US drone strike which killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. More than 100 US soldiers suffered traumatic brain injuries.

Trump at the time lied about the incident, insisting that no soldiers were harmed and that he’d “heard that they had headaches.” The episode was mostly forgotten over the ensuing four years, but Trump reminded everyone about it during his news conference, peevishly responding to the reporter: “So first of all — injured. What does injured mean? Injured means — you mean because they had a headache? Because the bombs never hit the fort.”

After Trump finished downplaying serious, life-changing injuries suffered by the troops, he then attacked the reporter for not being “truthful” while mixing up Iraq and Iran.

Read on at Public Notice for more horrifying Trump quotes along with videos.