Opinion 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.
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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.”
For three decades beginning in the mid-1950s, the Captain, along with Mr. Green Jeans, Mr. Bunny Rabbit, Mr. Moose and other friends, regaled children with fantastic stories, a Magic Drawing Board, and cartoons featuring the likes of Tom Terrific, a shape-shifting boy who lived in a tree house and could transform himself into anything he wanted by using the funnel-shaped hat that sat on his head.
But Captain Kangaroo never conjured a figure quite so outlandish as JD Vance.
This shape-shifting boy has gone from being a never-Trump author who in 2016 compared the “reprehensible” Trump to Adolf Hitler, to a venture capitalist who in 2020 said Trump “thoroughly failed to deliver,” to the junior senator from Ohio who, as Trump’s running mate in 2024, worships the ground the former president walks on.
Vance has used his own Magic Drawing Board to create a whimsical portrait of reality in this election season. He has embraced the fiction that Trump won the 2020 election. He has falsely claimed that Democrats were responsible for two assassination attempts against Trump. He has seconded Trump’s routine lies about crime, jobs, tariffs and the border. He has slandered his vice-presidential opponent, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, accusing him of “stolen valor” after Walz’s 24 years of honorable military service. And he has led the vile demonization of the Haitians in Springfield.
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he admitted last month on CNN.
And that’s just what he did during the debate. Walz wasn’t a particularly skilled debater; he tripped over words and at one point said, “I’ve become friends with school shooters” when he was referring to the families of school-shooting victims. But even if Walz had been quicker on his feet, there wouldn’t have been a way to keep up with the fictions Vance submitted.
The senator said Harris “became the appointed border czar.” She received no such appointment.
He said “over $100 billion” of Iranian assets were unfrozen “thanks to the Kamala Harris administration.” Not so.
On abortion, he said he “never supported a national ban.” When running for the Senate two years ago, he said he “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”
On health care, he served up the howler of the night when he said that Trump “saved” the “collapsing” Affordable Care Act. Instead of destroying Obamacare, Vance said, “Donald Trump worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans have access to affordable care.”
In reality, of course, Trump tried his best to kill Obamacare. (John McCain famously thwarted the effort in the Senate.)
Vance capped the night by saying that Trump “peacefully” surrendered power four years ago. When Walz asked him point-blank whether Trump had lost that election, Vance would not answer.
Throughout the debate, Vance pretended that Harris was the president, referring to “Kamala Harris’s open border" and “Kamala Harris’s atrocious economic record.” He claimed that “Kamala Harris let in fentanyl” and “enabled the Mexican drug cartels to operate freely in this country.”
And on Truth Social, Trump added still zanier claims. “Tim Walz wants to abolish ICE. ... I SAVED our Country from the China Virus. ... CBS is LYING AGAIN about the 2020 Election." And best of all: “JD Vance just CRUSHED Tampon Tim with the FACTS.”
Fact check: Half true. JD Vance just crushed the facts."
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