The Bottom Line Question In The VP Debate
Trump or democracy, that was the question. The question that Governor Tim Walz put before the American people in the closing minutes of the vice presidential debate with Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance.
After almost 90 minutes of imitating Walz, portraying himself as a normal politician, Vance veered hard into denialism: election denialism first, refusing to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election, then insurrection denialism, claiming that Trump “peacefully gave over power.”
That’s when Walz pointed out the obvious—“When Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage,” and questioned whether Vance would do the same, and be “the firewall with Donald Trump…. Will you stand up? Will you keep your oath of office even if the President doesn’t?”
He and Kamala Harris both would, of course, Walz noted, “So, America, I think you’ve got a really clear choice on this election of who’s going to honor that democracy and who’s going to honor Donald Trump.
All this came about as a result of Vance refusing to answer CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell’s question, “Would you again seek to challenge this year’s election results, even if every governor certifies the results?”
But that wasn’t the only question that Vance refused to answer, as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell (no relation) noted afterward, “He said words, but didn’t answer. For example, the first one he didn’t answer, Norah O’Donnell asked him, Donald Trump says climate change is a hoax, do you agree? That’s a one-word answer, ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ He didn’t answer that. He just kept talking.”
And that’s what Vance — a Yale-trained lawyer — was very good at, talking without answering. And doing so in a way designed to make you forget what the question even was. There’s a term for that — it’s called gaslighting. And Vance proved himself a master of it. The point of gaslighting is not just to deceive about specific facts (as in lying), or about your intentions (as in bullshitting), but to undermine the whole sense of reality on which reasoning depends, and impose your invented reality on your victims.
It’s the key to how sexual abusers like Donald Trump operate, for example — how they keep their victims from leaving them. It was reflected in Trump’s recent claim that if he were elected President again, “You will no longer be in danger… You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector.”
After recounting Trump’s actual record on abortion, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff correctly told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, “Make no mistake, where he says I will be the protector of women, that is yet more lies and more gaslighting.”
Vance is the same, but more polished.
Lies are part of the process, of course. But specific lies are less important than the purpose they serve, which invariably involves disorientation, misdirection, and the creation of false heroes and villains.
So, in the course of gaslighting about climate change, Vance lied, “Donald Trump and I support clean air, clean water. We want the environment to be cleaner and safer,” when Trump’s environmental record showed exactly the opposite, fighting to roll back environmental protections on dozens of different fronts. He also marginalized the main issue he was being asked about, dismissing climate concerns as “weird science,” and went onto falsely paint Harris as the villain: “If we actually care about getting cleaner air and cleaner water, the best thing to do is to double down and invest in American workers and the American people. And unfortunately, Kamala Harris has done exactly the opposite.” In reality, Harris cast the deciding vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which included the largest-ever investment in clean energy, resulting in a dramatic explosion of new investments, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs in just the first two years. While it’s important to recognize the specific lies involved in Vance’s non-answer to the question, it’s more important to recognize what he’s doing with these lies: erasing reality — both the original question and the real-world situation it came out of — and replacing it with a false reality, with phony heroes and demonized villains.
Throughout the first segment of the debate, Walz barely held his own with Vance, focused far too narrowly on trying to communicate facts, while Vance was spinning stories—most involving some degree of gaslighting. Walz was also hampered by his own genuine desire to seek solutions and work with anyone—themes he’s stressed since his first run for Congress almost 20 years ago. Vance disingenuously tried to feign a similar reasonableness, which neither his nor Trump’s record supports, and Walz’s genuine desire in this regard seemingly restrained him from vigorously calling Vance out for the first segment of the debate.
But things began to shift after the break, until Walz finally ended with his vigorous defense of democracy and push-back against Vance’s gaslighting about the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.
“This was a threat to our democracy,” Walz said. “And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump’s inability to say, he is still saying he didn’t lose the election. I would just ask that. Did he lose the 2020 election?
And Vance gaslighted, “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… That is a damning non-answer.” Walz shot back. It was also a lie, of course. Harris didn’t censor Americans, but again, the specific lie is secondary to the gaslighting purpose that it serves: to erase actual reality and replace it with an imaginary one in which heroes and villains switch roles.
The exchange caught disinformation researcher Kate Starbird’s eye. “Wait. Calling bullshit is the REAL threat to democracy?” she wrote on Bluesky. “And not, like, using bullshit to try to overthrow democracy? Right.”
But she was mistaken. It wasn’t just using bullshit, it was gaslighting.
This is what ultimately led to Walz to put the bottom line question:
“So, America, I think you’ve got a really clear choice on this election of who’s going to honor that democracy and who’s going to honor Donald Trump.”