Vance DESTROYED in Debate By Rival Donald Trump

Trump dropped abortion bombshell as Vance tried to rehab the GOP

Oct. 2: Trump says he’ll veto abortion ban … Vance won, not counting getting facts right … Walz succeeded in not screwing up … How Vance fucked Trump …

Listen to the audio version here.

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Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) shake hands in a moment you probably missed because CBS awkwardly stayed on moderator Margaret Brennan nodding wordlessly instead of taking the handshake shot until this final nanosecond that I grabbed. (Screengrab / CBS video.)

Just as the pundits were gearing up to proclaim Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) the winner (on style) of his debate with Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), a third participant suddenly inserted himself in the contest and walked away with it, demolishing Vance and setting his 2024 dreams on fire.

Vance was in the midst of selling America on a kinder, gentler forcing women to keep inside them unwanted things growing in their uteri, when former Pres. Donald Trump decided he could no longer keep inside him something that was growing in his brain: A thought.

Well into the night, at 9:53pm, late in the debate’s second trimester — when Vance’s hopes of winning were already developing limbs and the ability to see his political future — Trump posted on Truth Social.

Keep in mind, Vance has supported a federal abortion ban as recently as two years ago — before he entered politics. 

Then, in August of this year, with more than a year and a half of political experience, Vance said that he didn’t support a national ban on abortion, and that Trump would veto it. Trump then pushed back on that in his debate with Vice Pres. Kamala Harris.

“I didn’t discuss it with JD,” Trump said. “I don’t mind if he has a certain view but I don’t think he was speaking for me.”

Oops! Vance then backtracked, saying, “I think that I’ve learned my lesson on speaking for the president before he and I have actually talked about an issue.” (They hadn’t discussed abortion!)

Which meant that, last night, Vance’s attempts to dodge the issue left him tying a knot around his own neck with his umbilical cord to Trump. And that’s when Trump dropped his bombshell, robbing Vance of victory in the following post (bold italics added for emphasis in addition to Trump’s emphasis of putting everything in all-caps):

“EVERYONE KNOWS I WOULD NOT SUPPORT A FEDERAL ABORTION BAN, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, AND WOULD, IN FACT, VETO IT, BECAUSE IT IS UP TO THE STATES TO DECIDE BASED ON THE WILL OF THEIR VOTERS (THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE!).”

Of course, this mess is the illegitimate offspring of Trump doing exactly what he said he would do by appointing Christian conservatives to the Supreme Court, who joined with Bush-appointed Christian conservatives to kill abortion rights. Which was really unpopular.

And now it’s also got Vance and Trump selling out their conservative evangelical base — definitively, now — just a month before the election. Not merely on the policy position, but on the bio-theological implications.

Because Trump’s conservative evangelical base believes that abortion is murder from the very first moment a sweet, innocent smile appears on the face of the two-cell embryo. And a presidential candidate can’t believe that AND say baby murder should be a state’s rights issue.

“Okay,” you politically savvy, debate-watching Newsfuckers may be thinking, “but isn’t this just an elaborate way of avoiding saying that Vance won the debate?” Newsfucker, it is.

Vance Won the Debate (Now Please Enjoy the Many Reasons It Doesn’t Matter)

By most (corporatist) accounts, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) won his debate last night with Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN). The metrics for this win, however, were unrelated to what’s considered a key factor in judging real debates: Were the participants full of shit and, if so, how much of it?

Vance was full of shit on many a thing, indeed, as fact-checkers noted. And he couldn’t resist talking over women (CBS’s two moderators: Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan) in the process.

But in this woefully inadequate format, Vance was scarily effective at mainstreaming and normalizing and unscarifying his party’s radical agenda for transforming America.

It was a prime example of code-switching, what the GOP accuse Vice Pres. Kamala Harris of doing when she talks to different audiences. When she speaks one way to Wall Street donors and another way to audiences at historically Black colleges, it’s seen as inauthentic. But Vance speaks very differently to American debate audiences than he does to far-right, theocratic podcasters.

The difference was so stark it’s almost as if Vance is transitioning from his assigned birth-identity. For the googolth time, I should add.

In fact, before Trump blew up Vance’s shit, I was going to proclaim 2016 Vance the winner of this debate, clobbering post-2020 Vance.

There are other reasons not to sweat Vance’s “victory.” For one thing, Iran and Israel are having a war thanks to the de-escalation-by-escalation strategy.

Also, before, during, and after the debate, Drudge Report ignored it. The focus is so single-minded on Israel, Drudge isn’t even correcting the typos they missled, let alone mentioning the debate:

Another reason the debate doesn’t matter: It’s the vice-presidential debate. One does not “win” such a contest, one only loses it. Meaning, you can’t be so good that you help your candidate. You can only be so bad — like, Sarah-Palin-bad — that you hurt your candidate.

Walz’s one (1) goal last night was to not do that. Mission accomplished!

Another more reason Vance’s victory doesn’t matter is are am the media. The media bore easily. They’re excited when shiny new things happen. And they want to think of themselves as fair.

Not be fair, but think of themselves as fair. Which is easier to do when you can point to ostensible “evidence”: Like proclaiming Vance the winner.

Boring easily also means it’s exciting and interesting to declare Vance the winner. Look at this shiny new thing!

But all three of these things happening now only makes it easier for the media to justify returning to the Harris-mentum theme right as we come up on Election Day. So, sweat not, sweaty Newsfuckers of 2024.

It’s the Newsfuckers of 2028 who need to worry about Vance. Because Vance fucked Trump, too.

Vance Fucked Trump, Too

The central theme of former Pres. Donald Trump’s campaign is that Democrats are the enemy of America. Communists, fascists, socialists, criminals, you name it. Or Trump will. They are the weird radicals, not him.

And on that theme, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) last night vance-stabbed Trump in not one but two ways.

With one mild-for-2024 instance of bullying the moderators, Vance 2028 did not model the bullying, maximalist language Trump brings to his debates and rallies. By contrast, Vance’s civility and demeanor effectively other-ized Trump.

Of the four people on the two tickets, only one is Trumpian. That makes Trump weirder in people’s eyes, depriving him of the validation a stylistically unhinged Vance would have given him.

And while de-normalizing Trump, Vance was simultaneously normalizing Democrats.

Time and again, Vance looked for opportunities to align himself with Walz. The driving engine of Trumpism is that sure-he’s-bad but at least he’s not a devil-worshiping, child-blood-drinking, dress-wearing America hater. And there was Vance 2028 upending all of it.

Vance 2028 and Walz shook hands before the debate. They chatted and introduced their wives to each other afterward. 

As Slate’s Jim Newell points out in a smart piece, Walz missed lots of opportunities because he wasn’t listening. He was funneling what had been loaded into him.

And it’s unconscionable that Walz didn’t have a quick mea culpa ready for his Tiananmen Square lie. Like, “I misspoke, I felt connected to the Chinese people and expressed that in a way that wasn’t true and I should’ve done better.”

That gives moderators nowhere to go and prevents the devastating followup when Walz didn’t address it At. All. in his first stab at it.

Ironically, Walz’s debate prep team included Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who’s lauded for his on-the-fly responses but definitely won’t take an L for last night because everyone lurvs Buttigieg.

But when Vance hailed the Trump economy, for instance, Walz might have pointed out that Trump gutted pandemic preparation and fumbled America’s response to it, leading to the death of a million people here (under both parties), the collapse of the economy, and the metastasization of anti-science attitudes that will surely fuck us during the attempt at a governmental public-health response to the next pandemic (which is now more likely thanks to climate change fucking up migratory patterns).

And how in the warming fucking world did Walz let this go by:

VANCE: “I strongly believe, and I've been a United States senator, that Congress is not just a high-class debating society. It's not just a forum for senators and congressmen to whine about problems. It's a forum to govern.”

As TFN — and maybe-the-fuck only TFN?!? — keeps pointing out, debating is literally all Vance did in Congress. He’s never sponsored or even co-sponsored a single bill that’s become a law! That’s right, not one U.S. law has a single comma from Vance’s brilliant, Yale Law School mind.

He’s never led a single Senate committee even. Or even led the minority party caucus in a single committee!

And no one raises this issue of Vance’s stunning inexperience because the unchallenged bias is always that Republicans are The Grownups and so of course we don’t need to worry about inexperience in the ticket that, combined, has less than six years experience in government.

Anyway, by the end last night, maybe more comfortable and able to respond more nimbly, Walz had what Newell calls his best moment: Calling out Vance for not being able to say Trump lost in 2020. “Tim, I’m focused on the future,” said Vance 2028.

Progressive Agendas Lost

We have one last, full presidential term left before 2030, the year after which efforts to mitigate climate change will be too late.

In that light, last night’s debate was depressing as fuck. The two candidates competed over which party pumps more carbon into the atmosphere.

At one point in my note-taking I jotted down this non-verbatim observation: “Walz bragging that we're producing more natural gas and oil than ever before. And, uh, we're fighting climate change.”

Democrats and the media have internalized a deeply strange approach to fighting climate change: The discussion is solely about the creation of sustainable, alternative energy. Any sane society poisoning itself would focus less on the production of other, safe things to eat and focus considerably more intensely on not making or eating the poison.

Any discussion of Hurricane Helene — the second deadliest storm of the last half-century¹ — ought in any sane society to address whether merely to padlock ExxonMobil or also prosecute its executives. 

We already have studies saying climate change intensified Helene. The amount of rain in parts of Georgia and the Carolinas was 50% greater than it would’ve been without climate change. The odds of those areas getting that rain were 20 times higher than they would’ve been if ExxonMobil had been shut down the day Al Gore became president.

Another casualty of both media and political bias was the anti-war movement. (Kids, there used to be an anti-war movement!)

Peter Beinart captured the blinkered, un-questioned media bias in a pretty perfect Tweet last night:

“this first question: would you support a preemptive strike on Iran rather than how would you stop this regional war pretty much encapsulates what is wrong with US media coverage of this conflict”

You can argue that the question is neutral. Pacifists, too, would surely like to know whether they support first strikes!

But the phrasing and the cultural context telegraph clearly that attacking Iran is the default approach. Especially when you bake in, as the question did, the decades-old boogeyman of Iranian nukes. If only we had some precedent for the dangers of WMD fear-mongering.

It was good that Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) didn’t take the bait and endorse the tactical suggestions of CBS News. But the rest of the answer was pro forma pro-Israel no matter what, mixed in with exalting military expertise (granted, in the laudable cause of citing their opposition to former Pres. Donald Trump…but when do we get a debate in which a candidate trots out the opinions of leading pacificists?)

One thing that did gladden my lefty heart, that I was rooting for beforehand in the live chat (which you can check out here), concerned immigration.

Yes, the media yet again baked in bias to the question, citing a majority that support mass deportation, free of the context of what that would mean, let alone the (im)moral dimensions.

And yes, both parties are ex/im-plicitly demonizing immigrants by pretending that the crisis on the border is the number of people getting in rather than the number being kept out.

But what I was rooting for was for Democrats to champion immigrants, folks with the temerity and fortitude to undertake an incredibly challenging journey. I mean, have you or your friends ever complained about moving? That but plus a desert and a river.

Forget that immigrants have a lower crime rate than that of our violent society. Or that they are an economic boon to the country. All that aside, America more than any country on Earth is supposed to love immigrants.

Walz may not have sung the praises of immigrants, but in questions teeing him up to tee off on immigrants, Walz at least didn’t take that part of the bait. “[W]hen it becomes a talking point like this, we dehumanize and villainize other human beings,” he said, and referred to “this issue of continuing to bring this up, of not dealing with it, of blaming migrants for everything.”

More of that, please.

The Media Medium Is the Messy Message

There’s a strong argument to be made that right-wing biases were baked in to much of the questioning, as I’ve discussed above. At one point, Gov. Tim Walz (D-OH) was challenged, understandably, for lying about being in China during the Tiananmen Square protests.

Hilariously, the parallel question to Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) — his how-do-you-explain-this gotcha question — was that he once criticized former Pres. Donald Trump! Explain your past reasonableness, good sir, if you can!

Obvi, the right will claim that fact-checking Vance on multiple issues — including his lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH — reflects media bias, but there’s a far more dangerous bias inherent in the form.

Time and again the moderators told us there was a lot to get to. But rushing massive topics ensures that nothing gets got to.

One thing folks should understand is that the media can ask questions of the campaigns any time they want. Debates are by no means the only opportunity to ferret out policy positions or clear up ambiguities.

So there’s no imperative to cover the entire sweep of human existence in a single debate. Far more revealing would be extended deep dives not just on single issues, but on specific aspects of single issues.

When the moderators tried to cut off Vance, for instance, he was saying something really important. And it didn’t get addressed despite how important it was because the clock was more important.

That’s a dangerous and unexamined bias with real-world impacts.

Because what Vance was arguing was what I surfaced in my own reporting a couple of weeks ago: He was refusing to recognize the legitimacy of legal immigration under the authority of a Democratic administration.

Here’s the key exchange with moderator Margaret Brennan:

VANCE: …there's an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal [sic] migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand. That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for ten years.

BRENNAN: Thank you, Senator.

VANCE: That is the facilitation of illegal immigration, Margaret, by our own leadership. And Kamala Harris opened up that pathway.

BRENNAN: Thank you, Senator, for describing the legal process. We have so much to get to.

What could possibly be more important than the vice-presidential candidate rejecting the legitimacy of a Democratic administration’s legal processes, dismissing them as “facilitation of illegal immigration” and the wave of a presumably magic wand? (Get it? She’s a witch!)

So, Now What?

As pretty much everyone predicted, this won’t matter much. People don’t vote on the undercard, and neither candidate did enough damage to the top of their ticket to change the race’s dynamics.

The fight goes on. And, no, today’s TFN didn’t address the day’s new developments in the Middle East or the Helene devastation. But climate change and Middle East hostilities will be here tomorrow. And so will we!

TCB

LIVE-CHAT Thanks so much to all you Newsfuckers who turned up and participated and lurked and all of that. Out of curiosity, I checked a couple other live chats of much bigger accounts and our debate-fucking was more robust in terms of turnout and how many comments we had along the way. So…thank you, it was a blast!

(And my apologies again to everyone who was on board for my first time doing live video on Substack. The option is only available for what Substacks calls bestsellers — of which we’re one! — and only on one’s phone. But when I opened the app on my phone, the live video option wasn’t there. And Substack couldn’t help me. Rest assured, Newsfuckers, there will come a reckoning! (And we’ll try again soon!)

JOURNALISMING You can find my original reporting at Jonathan Larsen’s Substack, and you can support TFN’s original snarking with a donation or a paid subscription.

You can also support TFN by restacking your favorite bits of newsfucking and sharing them on social media, tagging me on Threads, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, Spoutible, or Twitter.

Go get ‘em, kids!

1. Without the death toll getting a boost from an incompetent president’s federal “response.”