7 Layups Tim Walz Missed in the Debate
Hurricanes, inflation, cat ladies, and what Trump really did on January 6th.
IN TUESDAY’S FACEOFF between the vice presidential candidates, Tim Walz scored important points on some issues—but he repeatedly missed what should have been easy opportunities to persuade people on issues and points that he had to know would come up. Here are some of the things that viewers of the debate deserved to hear:
1. Donald Trump lied about the Biden administration’s Hurricane Helene response.
Walz correctly emphasized bipartisanship among governors on responses to disasters, but he missed a big opportunity to contrast this bipartisanship to Trump’s polarizing toxicity and dishonesty. For the past two days, Trump has been shamelessly lying about Joe Biden and his administration supposedly intentionally denying aid to Republican-dominated affected areas. Trump has falsely claimed that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp had been unable to reach President Biden. Trump has falsely accused Vice President Kamala Harris of staging a fake photo of herself talking to federal disaster officials. He has been, in effect, rebutted by Republican governors: not only Gov. Kemp, but Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who has praised the federal response. Trump long ago earned a reputation for lying about hurricanes; this is not the sort of person who should be overseeing federal emergency agencies.
2. Fentanyl overdose deaths surged under Trump and are leveling off or dropping under Biden (or Biden–Harris).
When Vance used fentanyl deaths as another weapon to go after Harris on the border, Walz correctly pointed out the recent drop in opioid overdose. What he didn’t mention: Trump’s border policies certainly didn’t do much to curb the ravages of fentanyl. While the upward trend in synthetic opioid-related (mostly fentanyl) deaths began after 2012, the biggest spike actually happened under the Trump administration: according to the CDC, the annual number of fentanyl deaths went from 19,413 in 2016 to 56,516 in 2020. Yes, the trend continued under Biden, with deaths reaching over 73,000 in 2022, but the growth leveled off in 2023 and, as Walz said, the trend since then has been downward.
3. Harris did not cause inflation (and neither did Biden).
Vance worked hard to hang inflation around Harris’s neck. In fact, inflation surged around the world in 2020 due to the COVID pandemic, and most experts believe that the United States has actually done better than Europe at bringing down inflation. This point could have also been a chance for Walz to mention the Trump administration’s largely botched response to COVID.
4. Harris has not been president—or “border czar”—for the last three and a half years.
Somewhere during first two hours of the debate, Walz could have found a way to stress a simple fact: Harris did not become president of the United States in January 2021, Joe Biden did (inheriting a COVID-battered economy). Nor did she become the top official in charge of the southern border; her mandate as the point person on immigration was to work with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala on diplomatic solutions to reduce the flow of migrants to the border, an area in which Biden administration initiatives achieved some success.
5. Trump is not a leader who projects strength and security. He’s the guy who sucks up to Vladimir Putin.
Strength? Stability? Please. Trump is the guy who stood next to Vladimir Putin and said he believed him over U.S. intelligence agencies when it comes to Russian interference in the 2016 election. He’s the guy who got impeached for withholding aid from Ukraine because he wanted Volodymyr Zelensky to help dig up dirt on Biden. He’s the guy who still treats Putin and Zelensky as if they were morally equivalent and still brags about his good relationship with the Kremlin dictator. Also, the claim that Putin never would have attacked Ukraine if Trump had been president? In fact, Russia’s covert war in Eastern Ukraine continued all through the Trump presidency, escalating in February 2017—just two weeks after Trump took office.
Obviously, this would have also been an opportunity to tie Vance himself to his amply demonstrated hostility to Ukraine. It’s not a good issue for Vance: Despite a drop in support for aid to Ukraine since the start of the war, primarily among Republicans, Ukraine still has considerable sympathy even among GOP voters, who are just about evenly split on whether military aid should continue.
6. There’s a startling gap between JD Vance’s sensitive debate persona, particularly on the subject of women and families, and Vance’s radical rhetoric on these issues in recent years.
The JD Vance we saw last night was the ultimate sensitive guy. He talked about the GOP’s need to do more to win the trust of women who worry that an unwanted pregnancy may upend their careers and their lives. He mentioned, with apparent affection, a female friend who had an abortion and who told him it was essential for her because she was in an abusive relationship. But there’s that other JD Vance: the one who keeps bashing “childless cat ladies” (and refers to childless people in general as “sociopaths”) and who has suggested that staying in unhappy and “maybe even violent” marriages was a good thing. The one who didn’t just say, on the subject of abortion in case of rape, that “two wrongs don’t make a right” (as Walz pointed out), but also repeatedly described such pregnancies as merely “inconvenient.”
I realize that a lot of people appreciated the niceness and civility of the Walz/Vance debate, especially compared to Harris/Trump. But “would the real JD Vance please stand up?” is a valid question.
7. Trump’s behavior during the attempted coup of January 2021 was far worse than most people realize. Also, there’s no comparison to Hillary Clinton.
Walz was generally quite strong on this issue, with such a huge assist from Vance himself. But a couple of important points could and should have been made.
First, Trump did not simply tell his supporters to protest “peacefully.” He said “peacefully” once in his hour-long speech to the rally near the White House, and “fight” 20 times. As the rioters stormed Capitol Hill, he resisted pleas from staffers to urge the mob to stand down and continued slam Mike Pence on Twitter for refusing to enable his election-theft attempt.
Second, Hillary Clinton’s comments as a private citizen two years after losing the election that Trump’s victory was tainted by Russian interference are not even in the same universe as Trump’s nearly two-month-long scramble to overturn a legitimate election. Clinton conceded privately on election night and publicly the next day. Trump pressured local officials to “find” more votes, filed bogus lawsuits, and pushed fake elector slates. In her concession speech, Clinton even said that “we owe Trump an open mind.” After January 6th, we don’t.