Well, last night, Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance turned in a stellar debate performance.
Tim Walls fell flat on his face like the sitcom clown dad that he is.
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So, heading into last night's debate, the expectations for J.D. Vance, the vice presidential candidate for Donald Trump, were very, very high.
And he had to overcome that bar, and he did it with alacrity.
Just on a performance basis, J.D. Vance turned in one of the best Republican debate performances I've ever seen.
The only one of this century that even comes close to matching it was Mitt Romney's first debate performance against Barack Obama.
In terms of optics, in terms of what he was trying to do, in terms of his mission out there, he accomplished that.
So, what was J.D. Vance's mission?
His mission was to make it palatable for swing voters to look at the Trump-Vance ticket and not see chaos.
There's a reason that Kamala Harris and Tim Walls had immediately made J.D. Vance the centerpiece of their campaign for the White House when he was picked.
They tried to depict him as weird.
You remember this. Weird was the word of the day.
It was the buzzword that the Harris- Wall's campaign used immediately upon Trump selecting J.D. Vance for his vice presidential pick.
And it was always a strange word to use because JD of all four candidates is the most normal by far.
Married, has kids, went to a good school, made a good living, Senator from Ohio.
Like there's nothing really abnormal about JD Vance.
But the goal was to paint the entire overall ticket as weird and therefore out of bounds to vote for
because the basic idea for Democrats is to make it unpalatable to vote for the Republicans.
Not just you shouldn't, unpalatable, morally, aesthetically.
JD Vance had to go out there and he had to show that he was a normal human.
And not only did he show he was a normal human, J.D. Vance showed that he's a very high IQ human.
He wasn't just fighting Tim Walls last night on that debate stage.
He was also fighting the moderators, Nora O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan.
Margaret Brennan, in particular, was absolute trash last night.
Just awful. Every question directed at J.D. Vance came from the perspective of a person who wants Trump Vance to lose.
Clearly. And not just that.
As we will see, there were some false fact checks.
J.D. Vance, because he's a very smart person and because he knows his issues, was able to turn those fact checks around to harm the moderator and to harm Tim Walz.
Walz, for his part, had to basically portray Vance and Trump as nuts.
And he was really unable to do that.
Every time he tried to launch such an attack, Vance would disarm him.
Vance would disarm him not only because Vance has two standard IQ deviations on him, but also because J.D. Vance was actually quite kind last night.
In fact, watching that debate was somewhat dull, actually.
It started off, there were no rock-em-sock-em robots, no real kind of big haymaker moments, not the kind of stuff you're used to seeing from President Trump, where you never know what you're going to get.
It was kind of bad TV, to be honest with you.
And the reason it was bad TV is because J.D. Vance made it Absolutely solid.
It was just solid. You watched him, and you knew, you felt comfortable that he was going to give a good, solid answer on every question he was asked, and that every attack would be turned away with a nuanced point of view.
Again, J.D., I think, was 10 out of 10 last night.
Walls, for his part, had some big boo-boos.
Now, is that really going to hurt Tim Walls in any serious way?
Not really. Everybody already understands that the man's goofball.
However, did it mean that Walls was able to accomplish his purpose last night, which was to paint Trump and Vance as totally unpalatable?
He was unable to do that.
Vance was able to slip that punch, for sure.
Now again, back to the moderators.
The moderators did their best to try to make J.D. Vance the subject of the attacks, or Donald Trump the subject of the attacks.
J.D. Vance did something that I think is important for all Republicans to take note of.
Yes, he was facing an entrenched opposition.
Yes, he was facing an overwhelming barrage of questions from people who hate him and his opponent.
And you know what he did? He succeeded anyway.
And this is what we should expect of our Republican candidates.
Republicans in the base, I know that we've gotten used to the idea of victimhood because there are so many people out there who hate conservatives and who are willing to lie and because the media are constantly lying about the issues and they're constantly attacking whoever the Republican is.
My entire lifetime, Bush, McCain, Romney, Trump.
Because of that, we've gotten into kind of this mindset of the obstacles are insuperable.
We can never overcome them. What J.D. Vance showed is that when you have a smart person on the stage, you absolutely can overcome them.
And in fact, you can be victorious over them.
It actually helps you in some ways when people are that obviously anti-you because you can jujitsu their energy against them.
That's what J.D. Vance did last night.
So I want to get to the actual debate.
Now again, I'm just talking here about aesthetics, debate performance, what the candidates were trying to do.
I will say one area where I would have hoped that J.D. Vance did a little bit more was in painting Harris walls not just as not competent, but painting them as as radical as they are.
I think the impression you came away from this debate with was that J.D. Vance is really smart and really good at this, and that one day he might make a great president.
I think that's the overall aesthetic sense that you got from J.D. Vance.
What you didn't get was a feeling that it is totally unpalatable to vote for Harris-Walls, which I think was the other mission for J.D. So one mission was defensive, and that was prevent Democrats from painting Trump- Vance, as so out of the box, so chaotic, so crazy, you could never vote for them.
He was able to turn away that attack.
The thing he didn't do was paint Walls-Harris as so insanely radical that you should never vote for them.
In fact, there was a bizarre amount of agreement last night during the debate.
Walls would say something and Vance would say, well, I sort of agree with that.
And then Vance would say something and Walls would say, well, I sort of agree with that.
Now, I think conventional wisdom suggests that that was good for Vance because, you know, it made him appear kind, it made him appear conciliatory, and I think that's true.
But there's one sense in which it was not good for Trump Vance, and that sense is that if Tim Walz is able to say that he agrees with some of the things that J.D. Vance is saying, it makes their ticket overall appear much more moderate than they actually are.
And this is sort of a problem. And it speaks to a deeper Republican problem when it comes to policy.
They'll become evident over the course of the debate that we're about to go through.
One of the things that's so fascinating about the Trump phenomenon is that if you look just in terms of policy, it seems fairly typically Republican.
Trump term one was very similar, actually, in many ways, to George W. Bush policy.
You got a tax cut. Trump was harder on immigration than George W. Bush was.
That was probably the big distinction. You got some good federal judges.
Which ends with the overturning of Roe v.
Wade, obviously. And you got a very solid foreign policy.
A better foreign policy than George W. Bush's.
But basically what you got was hawkish foreign policy.
You got big spending.
And you got some good judiciary appointments.
Those are the things that you got from Donald Trump.
Fairly typical Republican policy.
In fact, almost indistinguishable on the domestic front from sort of the compassionate conservatism of the early 2000s from George W. Bush.
Last night, the sort of republicanism that was being pushed from J.D. Vance, if you knew nothing about his actual positions, if you knew nothing about what J.D. believes about abortion, he's pro-life.
If you knew nothing about any of these things, it would be almost impossible to tell that J.D. Vance was extremely pro-life on that stage.
It would be almost impossible to tell whether or not J.D. Vance, for example, wants to cut the scope of government or whether he wants to expand it.
In fact, if you watched the debate last night, you would think J.D. actually wants to radically increase the size and scope of government in our lives.
And despite all of the talk about the new isolationist wing of the Republican Party, J.D. Vance was as hawkish on foreign policy.
He was using Reagan's slogans like peace through strength, which was frankly music to my ears because I think that Reagan was correct on foreign policy.
And the best foreign policy is, in fact, peace through strength.
All of which is to say, for all the talk about the wild vacillations inside the Republican Party about policy, those vacillations are extremely overplayed.
The Republican Party, for as long as I've been alive, has been a low-tax, high-spending, harsh on foreign policy, like hawkish on foreign policy, and socially conservative party.
For as long as I've been alive.
And then, when the pedal hits the metal on social policy, they tend to moderate.
And that's kind of what it sounded like last night.
I'll get to more of that in a moment.
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Okay, so let's jump into the actual clips from the debate.
So the very first question was about the situation in the Middle East.
And again, part of the issue here for the Democrats is Walls was really bad.
He was really bad. His demeanor on camera is super strange.
It is, in fact, weird.
The word that Walls casts at others is, in fact, just projection.
He is a weirdo. And so, on camera, he looks very much like Don Rickles if Don Rickles had just sniffed some glue.
And so, every time they cut to him, he's kind of stumbling and bumbling over himself.
Looking slightly confused, the split screens were somewhat manic.
Him writing manically on a piece of paper or him looking bewilderedly around as though there's a bug flying around in the room.
There's a great split screen at one point where Walls was talking and J.D. Vance gave the full-on Jim Halpert to the camera, like from the office.
He kind of went... In any case, the first question was about the situation in the Middle East.
So for those who didn't see our live show yesterday, we did a live show in the afternoon, because Iran fired 181 ballistic missiles at Israel.
It didn't end up killing anybody except for one Gazan, Palestinian actually, who was in the West Bank, and a missile that had been shot down by Israel's David Sling system, the wreckage of that fell down in Taliban.
But, actually more Iranians were killed.
In the attack than Israelis, because five Iranians apparently died on the ground in Iran when one of the missiles they were shooting blew up.
In any case, it's an act of war.
It was 181 cruise missiles fired at Israel.
We'll get to all the details on that a little bit later.
And it's just another indicator of the kind of chaos that's been caused by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the Middle East.
Biden and Harris have created enormous chaos in the Middle East, as we will find out from J.D. Vance.
Their embrace of Iran, their attempt to distance themselves from the Saudis and from the Israelis has led to the most cataclysmic conflict in the Middle East in our lifetime.
Truly. In any case, Tim Walz tried to explain why, somehow, Kamala Harris ought to be given credit for what was going on in the Middle East, and it didn't go amazing.
Hamas terrorists, over 1,400 Israelis and took prisoners.
Israel's ability to be able to defend itself is absolutely fundamental.
Getting its hostages back, fundamental.
and ending the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
But the expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute fundamental necessity
for the United States to have the steady leadership there.
You saw it experienced today, where along with our Israeli partners and our coalition,
able to stop the incoming attack.
But what's fundamental here is that steady leadership is gonna matter.
It's clear, and the world saw it on that debate stage a few weeks ago, a nearly 80 year old Donald Trump
talking about crowd sizes is not what we need in this moment.
Okay, so you can see he's stumbling all over himself.
He mixes up Iran and Israel, I think, twice in the course of that one clip.
He looks really awkward. And then they cut to J.D. Vance, and J.D. is smooth, and he's polished, and he's professional, and he knows the issue and the substance.
He's totally right. As much as Governor Walz just accused Donald Trump of being an agent of chaos, Donald Trump actually delivered stability in the world, and he did it by establishing effective deterrence.
People were afraid of stepping out of line.
Iran, which launched this attack, has received over $100 billion in unfrozen assets thanks to the Kamala Harris administration.
What do they use that money for?
They use it to buy weapons that they're now launching against our allies, and God forbid, potentially, launching against the United States as well.
Donald Trump recognized that for people to fear the United States, you needed peace through strength.
They needed to recognize that if they got out of line, the United States' global leadership would put stability and peace back in the world.
Now, you asked about a preemptive strike, Margaret, and I want to answer the question.
Look, it is up to Israel what they think they need to do to keep their country safe.
That is a great answer.
And again, he's so smooth.
Right.
It's music to the ears for those of us who at one point used to watch debates and actually
see people speak in full sentences and without yelling and without bluster and without insults
and without sort of the weird jargon that Kamala Harris dumps on the debate stage.
This was just it was so soothing.
It was so calming.
It's like waking up in the morning and listening to Bach or something.
Really, really enjoyable, frankly.
And Vance continued along these lines.
At one point, Walls suggested, you know, it's a really dangerous world out there, and Iran is as close to a nuclear weapon as they've ever been.
It's because Trump pulled out of the nuclear weapons deal that we had with Iran, the so-called JCPOA, which is a terrible deal that Obama signed with Iran in order to normalize relations with Iran and open up their economy.
And J.D. Vance is like, wait, hold up.
You're saying that Iran is as close to a nuke as they've ever been.
Who's the president? Who's the vice president?
I missed it. You yourself just said Iran is as close to a nuclear weapon today as they have ever been.
And Governor Walz, you blame Donald Trump.
Who has been the vice president for the last three and a half years?
And the answer is your running mate, not mine.
Donald Trump consistently made the world more secure.
We talk about the sequence of events that led us to where we are right now, and you can't ignore October the 7th,
which I appreciate Governor Walz bringing up, but when did Iran and Hamas and their proxies attack Israel?
It was during the administration of Kamala Harris.
So, Governor Walz can criticize Donald Trump's tweets, but effective, smart diplomacy and peace through strength
is how you bring stability back to a very broken world.
When was the last time, I'm 40 years old, when was the last time that an American president didn't have a major
conflict breakout?
The only answer is during the four years that Donald Trump was president.
Okay, that is a great answer.
And again, he's so smooth. He's articulate, high IQ. We can do this, America.
Seriously, we can have candidates for like this.
It's totally fine.
We can. It'll be fine if we do.
It'll be better if we do, in many ways.
And he did a better job defending Donald Trump than Donald Trump has done this entire year on the campaign trail.
By a long shot.
Because Trump, again, that's not the way Trump expresses himself.
We all know this. Trump speaks in short sentences.
Trump has the big idea.
But this is sort of the point about how his administration works.
Trump, in administration one, he went out there and he would tweet something.
Everybody would be like, oh my god, I can't believe he tweeted that.
And then there would be people who were competent, like, say, J.D. Vance, actually implementing the thing that he wanted to do and putting all the flesh on the bones of the instincts that Trump had.
And that's why it's so wonderful to hear JD Vance do that.
Truly. Like, enjoyable.
I'll get to more of this in a moment.
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Okay, so the debate continues.
They move on to the issue of immigration.
So the first issue was the Middle East where Kamala Harris is a disaster area.
The second area is immigration where Kamala Harris is a disaster area.
And again, it's so wonderful to hear the case just laid out cogently, calmly by Senator Vance right here.
Before we talk about deportations, we have to stop the bleeding.
We have a historic immigration crisis because Kamala Harris started and said that she wanted to undo all of Donald Trump's border policies.
94 executive orders, suspending deportations, decriminalizing illegal aliens, massively increasing the asylum fraud that exists in our system.
That has opened the floodgates.
And what it's meant is that a lot of fentanyl is coming into our country.
I had a mother who struggled with opioid addiction and has gotten clean.
I don't want people who are struggling with addiction to be deprived of their second chance because Kamala Harris let in fentanyl into our communities at record levels.
So you've got to stop the bleeding.
The final point, Margaret, is you ask about family separation.
Right now, in this country, Margaret, we have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost.
Some of them have been trafficking.
Some of them hopefully are at homes with their families.
Some of them have been used as drug trafficking mules.
The real family separation policy in this country is unfortunately Kamala Harris's wide open southern border.
And I'd ask my fellow Americans to remember when she came into office, she said she was going to do this.
Real leadership would be saying, you know what?
I screwed up. I mean, he's so talented, honestly.
That's such a talented response.
When he weaves in there, subtly, the experiences of his mother, who had an addiction to alcohol and drugs, when he talks directly to the American people, when he swivels the question, the original question that he was asked, by the way, right there, was about Donald Trump's mass deportation policy, and Tim Walz had said something about him wanting to separate families.
How he swivels that into a cogent and coherent answer is just wonderful.
It really is.
Now, again, for his part, Walls was basically falling apart on the stage.
And when it came to illegal immigration, he had to somehow try to make the case that Kamala Harris had been harsh with illegal immigration.
And then he had to also make the case that Kamala Harris was being compassionate with regard to illegal immigration.
And so he tried to bring up apparently the only line of the New Testament that Democrats ever cite, the line from Matthew about the least of these.
So here we go. I don't talk about my faith a lot, but Matthew 2540 talks about, to the least amongst us you do unto me.
I think that's true of most Americans.
They simply want order to it.
This bill does it.
It's funded. It's supported by the people who do it.
And it lets us keep our dignity about how we treat other people.
Notice these sort of mannerisms here.
So Vance is speaking, and he's speaking to the American people as you would in a conversation.
And Walls is pleading.
Everything he says is sort of a weird plea.
It's the thing that he does.
Well, in just one second, I want to get to what was probably the big takeaway from the debate, and this was the moment where the moderators really made their bias absolutely clear.
The moderators in this debate were absolutely awful, truly bad.
Margaret Brennan was by far the worst of the two.
It was Norah O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan.
Norah O'Donnell was not good. Margaret Brennan was a full-scale, four-alarm fire disaster area.
Just truly, truly bad.
And there was a moment where she got into a tête-à-tête with J.D. Vance.
And we'll get to that in a moment.
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Okay, so there are only a few kind of takeaway moments from the night.
And J.D. overall just performed great.
But it turns out that in the modern media age, the takeaways are the things you remember.
So from the first debate with Joe Biden, the only thing that you remember was Joe Biden staring into the maw of hell.
That's all you remember is just this.
That's all you remember from the whole debate.
Nothing else. Maybe Donald Trump suggesting that he...
I don't know what he's saying and he doesn't know what he's saying either.
From the debate with Trump and Kamala, the only thing that anyone remembers for that whole debate was they're eating the cats and they're eating the dogs.
Literally the only thing anyone remembers.
The question about the VP debate is what exactly is the thing that people are going to remember coming out?
There are probably two moments that have the possibility of being sort of the takeaway.
One of them was when J.D. Vance went up against Margaret Brennan.
So the... The moderators had said at the very top they were not going to do the thing that happened during the Kamala-Trump debate in which the moderators fact-checked Trump.
Like every single time he said something, they would jump in and do a fact-check.
It was absurd. They said they weren't going to do that.
Then they proceeded to do that with J.D. Vance.
The difference is that J.D. knows the facts.
So when they started to quote-unquote fact-check him, he was able to go right back at them and insist on fact-checking them back, at which point they cut his mic.
It looked really bad for CBS News.
Truly ugly for CBS News.
Here was that exchange. Thank you, Governor.
And just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status, temporary protected status.
Senator, we have so much to get to.
I think it's important. We're going to turn out of the economy.
Thank you. Margaret, the rules were that you guys weren't going to fact check.
And since you're fact checking me, I think it's important to say what's actually going on.
So there's an application called the CBP One App, where you can go on as an illegal 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 10 years.
Thank you, Senator. Deportation of illegal immigration, Margaret, by our own leadership.
Thank you, Senator, for describing the legal process.
We have so much to get to, Senator.
Okay, and you can hear Margaret Brennan jump in.
We have so much to get to.
Oh my gosh, so much to get to.
Let him finish his sentence. And then, when Vance was trying to finish his idea, and then Walls jumped in, then they cut the mic.
Just ridiculous. But, notice what a pro-JD Vance is there.
I mean, honestly, I'm gushing in my praise of him because he was that good last night.
That is how you handle it.
When a moderator falsely fact checks you, he says, listen, you set the rules.
I didn't set the rules. You're now violating the rules.
So that means that I get to respond to what you are doing right now and explain what exactly you're saying.
By the way, he's correct.
His actual fact check of her is correct.
Now what she's saying is technically true.
The Haitian migrants who are in Springfield, Ohio, are there on temporary protected status.
That doesn't mean that they're full on in the immigration system or that they're going to be granted full asylum or anything like that.
It means, as J.D. Van said, that they're basically just facilitated into the country.
When we talk about millions of illegal immigrants coming into the country, very often those illegal immigrants are coming to the border and they are being facilitated into the country by our own government under things like temporary protected status.
People claim asylum and then magically those people are deemed to have temporary protected status.
That's J.D. Vance's entire point.
So again, pro-performance.
And this demonstrates, once again, yes, the media are awful.
Yes, the legacy media are biased.
Yes, they lie. Yes, they fact-check only Republicans.
And half the time, those fact-checks are wrong.
However, that is not, in fact, an obstacle that Republicans cannot overcome.
And J.D. Vance just showed how to do it.
Okay, then they moved on to the economy.
And one of the things that, frankly, was a bit frustrating for me is as a free market person who believes that the government's intervention in the economy is generally a bad thing and that the growth of the American economy is reliant on entrepreneurialism and innovation and explosive dynamism, you know, because free market economics and because private property.
It was bewildering and annoying to me to hear both parties are now the parties of big government.
I'm not sure the word free market, those words were uttered on the stage last night.
I'm not sure that anybody made the case for a smaller government on the stage last night.
I think it is fair to say the era of small government in the United States is over.
And again, I understand why politically J.D. Vance is saying that.
I think J.D. Vance also has some ideological predilections toward big government involvement in many areas of the American economy, with which I disagree.
Now, that doesn't mean that he's not a very articulate defender of his position.
I just wish one of the parties liked the free market at this point.
That would be really nice. I would love it if the Republican Party was a party that said, actually, the biggest obstacle to growth in the United States is government spending.
Not that they're spending in the wrong place, that they shouldn't be spending it at all.
The biggest obstacle to growth in the United States is the regulations that hamper business.
The biggest obstacle to growth in the United States is the government picking winners and losers.
You want Americans to have a better way of life?
What you need is to unchain them from the shackles of government.
That's the thing I wish Republicans would say, but that's not the position that was taken on the stage last night.
So it turned into a bit of back and forth about who gets to spend how much and how much is the right amount to spend, but we all have to spend more.
The critique that J.D. Vance made of Tim Walls on this point was, you make all these big promises, but you haven't done any of them.
And that's a fine critique. It's very true.
Obviously, something I've said about Kamala Harris as well.
She has a plan.
Okay, fine. So why didn't you do it?
If your magical plans were going to heal the economy, why didn't you do it?
And that's J.D. Vance's point.
But it would have been really nice to hear a defense of free markets, Of innovation?
Of private property? On the stage last night.
And neither party seems to be willing to do that these days.
We'll get to more on that in a moment. First, it is, of course, election season.
It's time to choose who we think is the best candidate for a higher office.
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Okay, so, for example, when we talk about Big government.
And big government spending. Tim Wall says, we're going to propose to build 3 million new houses.
This is typical Dem speak.
Typical Dem speak is, got a problem?
We're going to confiscate money from the future, and we're just going to throw it at things.
Just throw money at things, man.
It's like soup out of Van Gogh painting.
Just take that money and just chuck it at things.
Firehose money. That's Tim Wall's basic proposal when it comes to bringing down the price of housing, which is weird because when you subsidize the buying of housing, but you don't remove the regulations on the building of housing, that creates increased demand with the same supply, which definitionally increases price.
There's three million new houses proposed under this plan with down payment assistance on the front end to get you in a house.
A house is much more than just an asset to be traded somewhere.
It's foundational to where you're at.
And then making sure that the things you buy every day, whether they be prescription drugs or other things, that there's fairness in that.
Look, the $35 insulin is a good thing, but it costs $5 to make insulin.
They were charging $800 before this law went into effect.
As far as the housing goes, I've seen it in Minnesota.
12% more houses in Minneapolis.
Prices went down on rent 4%.
It's working. And then making sure tax cuts go to the middle class.
Again, this is all typical Dem speak.
So Vance comes back.
And again, he does the pro thing if you're a big government guy.
Now, I could attack each one of those policies for being untrue.
When he says we're going to do tax cuts for the middle class, What he really means is we're going to subsidize certain people at the expense of other people.
And he says that Donald Trump's tax cuts affected largely the rich.
That is not true. In fact, they're one of the most regressive tax cuts in American history in the sense that they, progressive, in the sense that they actually affected people in the middle class more on average than people at the top in terms of percentage cuts, for example.
But the tack that Vance chose, again, is a smart debate tack and happens to be true, is, okay, sounds great.
Why didn't you do any of it? You're going to hear a lot from Tim Walsh this evening, and you just heard it in the answer.
A lot of what Kamala Harris proposes to do, and some of it, I'll be honest with you, it even sounds pretty good.
Here's what you won't hear, is that Kamala Harris has already done it.
Because she's been the vice president for three and a half years, she had the opportunity to enact all of these great policies, and what she's actually done instead is drive the cost of food higher by 25%.
Drive the cost of housing higher by about 60%.
Open the American southern border and make middle class life unaffordable for a large number of Americans.
If Kamala Harris has such great plans for how to address middle class problems, then she ought to do them now.
Not when asking for a promotion, but in the job the American people gave her three and a half years ago.
And the fact that she isn't tells you a lot about how much you can trust her actual plans.
Okay, so again, I agree that everything that he says there is true.
Also, it'd be great to hear on principle why Kamala Harris's economic plans are wrong.
That'd be great. Like, first principles explanation.
That's why, again, I think J.D. Vance did some really heavy lifting on behalf of the Trump campaign.
I think he really helped himself in terms of his future possible presidential aspirations.
One of my questions, when we get to the abortion issue, we'll see more of this, is whether he laid any sort of ideological groundwork for the traditional conservative position.
I think that the answer there is less than I wish in some ways.
But again, a lot of good hits for Vance.
So, for example, clip 13. At a certain point, Walls sort of started spewing nonsense about what a wonderful job Kamala Harris had done, and JD drops the hammer on him.
If you notice, what Governor Walz just did is he said, first of all, Donald Trump has to listen to the experts.
And then when he acknowledged that the experts screwed up, he said, well, Donald Trump didn't do nearly as good of a job as the statistics show that he did.
No, that's a gross generalization.
So what Tim Walz is doing, and I honestly, Tim, I think you got a tough job here.
Because you've got to play whack-a-mole.
You've got to pretend that Donald Trump didn't deliver rising take-home pay, which of course he did.
You've got to pretend that Donald Trump didn't deliver lower inflation, which of course he did.
And then you've simultaneously got to defend Kamala Harris's atrocious economic record, which has made gas, groceries, and housing unaffordable for American citizens.
I was raised by a woman who would sometimes go into medical debt So that she could put food on the table in our household.
I know what it's like to not be able to afford the things that you need to afford.
We can do so much better.
To all of you watching, we can get back to an America that's affordable again.
Walls, I know what he's doing on that split screen right there.
Walls looks like, kind of weirdly like a ferret who has popped his head up out of the ground.
He's just kind of swiveling his head around wildly.
It was not a good night for Tim Walz.
Even Democrats were acknowledging last night it was not a good night for Tim Walz.
The worst moment of the night for Tim Walz was when he was asked about the fact that he had suggested that he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre.
This went about as poorly for Tim Walz as possible for things to go in a presidential debate.
My commitment has been from the beginning to make sure that I'm there for the people, to make sure that I get this right.
I will say more than anything.
Many times I will talk a lot.
I will get caught up in the rhetoric.
But being there, the impact it made, the difference it made in my life, I learned a lot about China.
I hear the critiques of this.
I would make the case that Donald Trump should have come on one of those trips with us.
I guarantee you he wouldn't be...
Praising Xi Jinping about COVID. And I guarantee you he wouldn't start a trade war that he ends up losing.
So this is about trying to understand the world.
It's about trying to do the best you can for your community.
And then it's putting yourself out there and letting your folks understand what it is.
My commitment, whether it be through teaching, which I was good at, or whether it was being a good soldier or was being a good member of Congress, those are the things that I think are the values that people care about.
Governor, just to follow up on that, the question was, can you explain the discrepancy?
All I said on this was, is I got there that summer and misspoke on this.
So I will just, that's what I've said.
So I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests went in.
Um, um, oh boy.
At that point, you might have to stop talking.
I love when people feel the necessity to talk.
At this point, by the way, during the debate, he did call himself a knucklehead, which was a move.
You don't see it very often.
It's a bold move, Godden. We'll see how it works out for him in just one second.
I'll get to the issue of abortion.
Where I understand what J.D. Vance was doing.
I think it was smooth. I also have some problems with it.
First, as you know, I've got a busy schedule.
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So for the first hour of the debate, J.D. Vance just dominated Tim Walz thoroughly, just in terms of performance, in terms of issues.
And then the debate turned to a couple of issues that were less easy for Republicans.
So the issue of abortion.
When it comes to abortion, the fact is the American people are somewhere in the middle.
They're not totally pro-life.
They're certainly not totally pro-choice.
They tend to be somewhere in the middle. And there are a bunch of tacks that Republicans can take with regard to this issue.
When it comes to Trump-Vance, the tack that they've taken is, we're not doing federal legislation on this issue.
We're not looking at that.
That's not something we're interested in.
The Supreme Court itself has suggested that federal legislation is inapposite, that this probably should be delegated down to the states, and there really isn't much the federal government can do.
J.D. Vance was trying to soften his appeal to women, clearly.
He was trying to say to them, listen, I feel you, I empathize with you, I get it.
The problem is that the argument that he made last night was really not an argument so much as an emotional appeal.
And while I admire the skill with which it was done, I do not appreciate the political and value line that undergirds it.
Which basically suggests that the big problem is that we just haven't convinced enough people in the United States that a woman should choose life rather than choosing abortion.
That may be true. That is also not the issue as to legislation.
I agree. Everybody needs to do a better job of trying to convince women thinking about abortion not to have an abortion.
This is why, for example, one of our advertisers is pre-born.
Their literal job is to go to pregnant moms and show them ultrasounds to try to convince them on a one-to-one level not to have an abortion.
However, when you are talking about the pro-life position, the pro-life position is not merely that this is a matter of choice and that we should try to convince individual women not to have abortions.
That last part, of course, is true.
The real question is whether life deserves protection.
Now what J.D. Vance could say, while still threading the needle, is, listen, I am pro-life.
I believe that every life deserves legal protection.
With that said, we have a federalist system in this country.
The Supreme Court has made clear the federal government does not have a place in the regulation of abortion overall.
And what that means is that on a state-by-state level, the people are going to speak.
I may vote one way, I might be overruled.
That's how our system works.
So when it comes to the issue of abortion, Democrats have tried to play this as the be-all, end-all at the federal level.
And it's a strange thing to do, and it's disingenuous and dishonest.
And he could then swivel it on his opponent, and he could say, listen...
The claim is that I, as a pro-lifer, am extreme in some way because I want every life protected.
My question to my opponent, Tim Walls, is would you veto a bill protecting life at eight months in the womb?
Would you veto it? Right?
It's a simple question. And Tim Walls is not going to have an answer for that.
The answer, of course, is he would veto it.
In any case, here was JD's attempt to answer the abortion question.
I want to talk about this issue because I know a lot of Americans care about it and I know a lot of Americans don't agree with everything that I've ever said on this topic.
And, you know, I grew up in a working class family in a neighborhood where I knew a lot of young women who had unplanned pregnancies and decided to terminate those pregnancies because they feel like they didn't have any other options.
And, you know, one of them is actually very dear to me.
And I know she's watching tonight, and I love you.
And she told me something a couple years ago that she felt like if she hadn't had that abortion, that it would have destroyed her life because she was in an abusive relationship.
And I think that what I take from that, as a Republican who proudly wants to protect innocent life in this country, who proudly wants to protect the vulnerable, is that my party, we've got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people's trust back on this issue where they frankly just don't trust us.
Okay, so, if you took that clip out of context, you could make the argument that J.D. Vance is pro-choice.
I know he isn't, obviously, and people who watch politics know that he isn't, but if you took that clip out of context, where you think that story is going is, my friend said that she needed to have an abortion because it would have ruined her life to have the baby, and what I said to her is that every life has meaning, And that, I'm sorry she felt that way, but every life deserves a chance, right?
You think that's where the story's going as a pro-lifer, and that's not where the story goes.
And the problem is that when Republicans refuse to make the argument or engage in the argument, that does create space to pretend that Democrats are somehow moderate on the issue.
Now, to his credit, Vance did call out Walls with regard to the law in the state of Minnesota.
The law in the state of Minnesota, Walls actually vetoed a bill that would have protected the health rights of children who were born during botched abortions.
And apparently up to eight kids in the state of Minnesota have basically been born during botched abortions and then were effectively denied health care and their rights because of Tim Walz's bill.
Vance brought that up and Walz kind of fibbed about it.
These are women's decisions to make about their health care decisions and the physicians who know best when they need to do this.
Trying to distort the way a law is written to try and make a point, that's not it at all.
But what was I wrong about, Governor? Please tell me, what was I wrong about?
That is not the way the law is written.
Look, I've given this advice on a lot of things, that getting involved, that's been misread and it was fact-checked at the last debate.
But the point on this is there's a continuation of these guys to try and tell women or to get involved.
I use this line on this, just mind your own business.
I asked a specific question, Governor.
You gave me a slogan as a response.
It's not the case. And again, Vance is correct on this.
Very calm, very collected.
Good point for Vance. I would love to hear the principled argument on why Walls actually says this.
He kept granting Walls the benefit of the doubt.
I believe that you don't want babies to die in abortion.
I believe that you don't want...
I understand.
He's trying to be kind. He's trying to be effective on the stage.
I get all of that. Also, Tim Walls is radically pro-abortion.
I mean, that's just the reality of the situation.
Okay. Meanwhile, again, one of my big sort of critiques overall of the moment in which we stand is that there is no one left who talks about small government.
Like, at all. So, one of the questions was about the childcare crisis.
Crisis. Okay. I tend to reserve the term crisis for things like, I don't know, war.
Perhaps a hurricane. I don't tend to think that the lack of affordable childcare amounts to a crisis.
It amounts to a problem, obviously.
I think that there are people who need childcare who can't afford it, and that's a problem.
It's usually handled and should be handled by family, by locality, at best, by state authorities.
This idea that it's up to the federal government to intervene with billions of dollars because there needs to be some place for two-year-olds to go while mom is working.
Again, I don't see why that is a federal issue or where the federal government is empowered by the Constitution of the United States to get involved in that issue.
But the Republican Party of the sort of Trump movement, and again, this actually precedes Donald Trump.
I don't want to blame Trump for that.
George W. Bush was doing this stuff with compassionate conservatism in the year 2000.
So this has been around for a long time.
There has not been a small government party in the United States for pretty much my entire lifetime.
Ronald Reagan left office in 1989.
So here was J.D. Vance talking about the necessity for federal involvement in child care, which, again, not into it.
A number of my Republican colleagues and some Democrats, too, have worked on this issue.
And I think there is a bipartisan solution here because a lot of us care about this issue.
I mean, look, I speak from this very personally because I'm married to a beautiful woman who is an incredible mother to our three beautiful kids, but is also a very, very brilliant corporate litigator.
And I'm so proud of her.
But being a working mom, even for somebody with all of the advantages of my wife, is extremely It's extraordinarily difficult.
And it's not just difficult from a policy perspective.
She actually had access to paid family leave because she worked for a bigger company.
But the cultural pressure on young families and especially young women I think makes it really hard for people to choose the family model they want.
A lot of young women would like to go back to work immediately.
Some would like to spend a little time home with the kids.
Some would like to spend longer at home with the kids.
We should have a family care model that makes choice possible.
Okay, I mean, all of that may be true on a social level, but at no point in this debate did anybody just say, hey, free markets.
Both of them agreed on tariffs.
Both of them agreed on major government involvement in manufacturing subsidies.
Both of them agreed on gigantic government involvement in everything from healthcare to childcare.
A party that actually represents, you know, like a small federal government, because by the way, you want a corrupt federal government, make it big.
You want an effective federal government, make it small.
But that argument seems to have passed by the wayside.
Now, the one area in which Tim Walz probably scored a few points, I think it's probably a dead issue by now, but Democrats are going to keep trying to mine this particular well.
They're going to keep trying to frack this particular well, to use a metaphor that they themselves would never use.
We'll get to the January 6th of it in just one second.
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Now, the one issue where I think that Tim Walls may have scored some points, particularly late in the debate, was on the issue of January 6th.
Now, again, this issue is basically a debt issue.
I don't think that many Americans are sitting around thinking about 2020 and January 6th or any of it.
They're thinking about inflation. They're thinking about war in the Middle East.
They're thinking about the economy. They're thinking about a port strike.
They're thinking about hurricanes. They're thinking about the things that are happening, you know, in the calendar year 2024.
They're not thinking about the stuff that happened in the calendar year 2021.
However, One of the problems that J.D. Vance has to shoulder when it comes to debate situations like this is because the person who is his running mate has said over and over and over that he did not lose in 2020.
J.D., who I think knows that Donald Trump lost in 2020, is forced to not just say the obvious thing The obvious thing is, yes, Donald Trump legally lost.
By the laws of the United States, he lost, which is why he left office.
I can have questions about it.
Those questions became irrelevant the minute that Donald Trump lost the election.
The state votes were certified by Congress in a legal process, and then he left.
But because Donald Trump doesn't want to hear that from J.D. fans, J.D. is forced into the bizarre position of having to misdirect.
Now, again, I think some of the points he's making here are great.
He says, you keep talking about threats to democracy.
The threats to democracy that Democrats are constantly pursuing, particularly with regard to censorship, are really, really dangerous.
Here's a clip at 21. What President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020, and my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square, and that's all I've said, and that's all that Donald Trump has said.
I believe that we actually do have a threat to democracy in this country, but unfortunately it's not the threat to democracy that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to talk about.
It is the threat of censorship.
It's Americans casting aside lifelong friendships because of disagreements over politics.
It's big technology companies silencing their fellow citizens.
And it's Kamala Harris saying that rather than debate and persuade her fellow Americans, she'd like to censor people who engage in misinformation.
I think that is a much bigger threat to democracy than anything that we've seen in this country in the last four years, in the last 40 years.
Okay, so, again, I agree with an enormous amount of what he's saying.
However, he leaves the door open to the January 6th counterattack, and here's Walls going on the attack here.
Did he lose the 2020 election?
Tim, I'm focused on the future.
Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?
That is a damning non-answer.
It's a damning non-answer for you to not talk about censorship.
I'm Obviously, Donald Trump and I think that there were problems in 2020.
We've talked about it.
I'm happy to talk about it further.
But you guys attack us for not believing in democracy.
The most sacred right under the United States democracy is the First Amendment.
When Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that's why Mike Pence isn't on this stage.
What I'm concerned about is, where is the firewall with Donald Trump Where is the firewall if he knows he could do anything, including taking an election, and his vice president's not going to stand to it?
So, again, does this have any impact on the election?
Not really, but it does demonstrate the baggage that President Trump has brought along with him because of the activities of 2020.
So, overall, what exactly does this debate mean?
What it means is J.D. Vance uber-competent.
It smooths off many of the rough edges, and it's going to totally change perceptions about J.D. Because if you look at the polling numbers when J.D. was first picked, very negative for J.D. Vance.
He was doing these sort of Rah-rah, very online kind of stuff.
This is the best of JD Vance.
This always was the best of JD Vance.
This JD Vance looks a lot like the JD Vance of Hillbilly Elegy fame.
It looks a lot less like the JD Vance of some of the online activities that he's sort of been pursuing.
JD is an extraordinarily talented politician.
He's really young. He's going to be on the scene for a while.
That's very good for JD. Good for the Trump campaign in the sense that a good debate is good for the Trump campaign.
Is it going to shift a lot of votes?
I doubt that it's going to shift a lot of votes.
It just reopens, again, an opportunity for Donald Trump to shift his messaging.
What Donald Trump should take away from this is that J.D. Vance, everyone today is raving about J.D. Vance.
Why? Because J.D. made a calm, collected, cogent case that Harris and Walls should not be the president and Donald Trump should be.
That means less bombastic.
It means less shouty.
It means less... Sort of evocative and exaggerating.
It means just say in plain language, she's been terrible.
I ran a good administration and I will do it again.
It's really that simple.
It really is. And if Donald Trump says that from here to the election, without some of the bombastic stuff, without some of the sort of more exaggerated, you don't have to say that Georgia, that Brian Kemp never talked with Joe Biden.
You can just say, Joe Biden is in absentia on this job.
He takes phone calls and then goes back to the sleep on the beach.
He can totally say the stuff that he wants to say.
This has always been the story with Donald Trump.
If Donald Trump turned that spinal tap volume from 11 down to like 7, he never would have lost the presidency in 2020.
And he has the opportunity to win the presidency right now if he does that again.
Alrighty, guys, coming up, we're going to jump into the Vaunted Ben Shapiro Show mailbag because I have a couple of days off after this.
I want to answer some of your questions.
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I would really appreciate it if you left.
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They don't say I'm racist.
Joining us now is Matt, certified DEI expert.
Here's my certification. What you're doing is you're stretching out of your whiteness.
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The word inherent is challenging there.
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