JD Vance and Tim Walz remain civil in policy-driven debate but Trump is inescapable

Donald Trump was not the elephant in the room. He was the room.

During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, his running mate JD Vance was tasked with wrangling policy positions out of Trump’s chaos, while Walz sought to make the case why the former president should never be elected again, even quoting his opponent’s statement that he once believed Trump “unfit” for higher office.

The 90-minute debate in New York is likely to be the last among any of the candidates before Election Day, and the only prime-time matchup between Democratic and Republican running mates who offered up their starkly different visions for America’s future.

Both men shook hands before and after the debate, and Vance often mentioned that he agreed with Walz about finding solutions for a number of crises facing Americans, especially lower-income and middle-class families.

Vance sought to distance himself from his false claims about migrants eating pets and his “cat ladies” remarks that have dominated the campaign.

But he used his newly polished veneer to make false and misleading claims about Trump’s agenda, from calling his anti-abortion platform a way to “make it easier for moms to have babies” to brazen revisionist history that suggested the former president saved the Affordable Care Act.

Vance also praised Trump for agreeing to leave the White House in January 2021 as part of his peaceful transfer of power – papering over the violent attack on the Capitol days earlier.

The two candidates juggled more than a dozen detailed questions about foreign policy, the climate crisis, immigration, childcare, housing, gun violence and abortion rights before concluding with a biting back-and-forth about the 2020 election, January 6 and whether Trump and Vance will accept 2024’s results.

Vance avoided answering a yes-or-no question from CBS News moderators about whether he would challenge this year’s election results, as well as a direct question from Walz himself about whether he believes Trump lost the 2020 election.

“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said in response. “I’m pretty shocked by this. … Where is the firewall with Donald Trump?”

Earlier, during a segment about immigration, a frustrated Vance tried to continue speaking about mechanisms for immigrants with legal status, but the moderators made good on their pledge to mute microphones when candidates spoke out of turn.

Walz — often staring into the camera while drawing on stories that speak directly to Americans — stumbled over some of his words in the first half of the debate and was confronted with previous statements he made that he was in China during pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

“I’ve been a knucklehead at times … I got there that summer and misspoke on this,” he finally admitted.

But the former school teacher and congressman-turned-Minnesota governor took aim at Vance over Republican threats to abortion rights and healthcare, offering up specific examples about women in Texas, Kentucky and Georgia who experienced life-threatening pregnancy complications under Republican anti-abortion laws.

Vance falsely claimed that he “never supported a national abortion ban” but instead supported “some minimum national standard”. In 2022, he supported a proposal to impose a national ban on abortion care at 15 weeks of pregnancy.

He also brought up a story about a woman who “is actually very dear to me” and “is watching tonight” who told him “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”.

“My party — we’ve got to do a better job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue where they, frankly, just don’t trust us,” Vance said. “And I think that’s one of the things that Donald Trump and I are endeavoring to do.”

Asked to explain Trump’s much-lampooned “concepts of a plan” response to questions about his plans for healthcare during last month’s presidential debate, Vance claimed that Trump tried “in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care”.

But Trump famously sought to destroy the Affordable Care Act, including support for legislation that would have revoked prohibitions on charging higher insurance prices to people with pre-existing conditions. He also tried, and failed, to repeal the law through the Supreme Court.

“We have laws to protect people with pre-existing conditions,” Vance said. Those laws are in the Affordable Care Act.

A short time before the VP debate began, after unfocused remarks purportedly about education, Trump was speaking to reporters in Milwaukee, where he amplified bogus claims about immigrants in Colorado, cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election, and claimed that the climate crisis is no longer an issue.

He once again said that Iran should be blown to “smithereens”, then downplayed traumatic brain injuries that affected more than 100 American troops as merely “headaches”.

“That’s the diplomacy of Trump,” Walz said on the debate stage as he brought up Trump’s “headaches” statement and repeatedly struck at the former president’s “fickle” leadership.

Both Walz and Vance are military veterans — the Minnesota governor was in the National Guard for 24 years, and Vance served four years in public affairs with the Marines.

A first round of questions addressed immediate crises, including whether they would support Israel launching a pre-emptive strike against Iran, and their plans to combat the climate crisis in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

“When Iran shot down an aircraft in international airspace, Donald Trump tweeted,” Walz said. “A nearly 80-year-old Donald Trump talking about crowd sizes is not what we need in this moment.”

Vance argued that Trump “consistently made the world more secure” while he was in office. He later dodged a question from debate moderators about whether he believes Trump made a mistake by pulling out of the Iran nuclear agreement.

In a following segment about the climate crisis, Walz said: “Donald Trump called it a hoax, and then joked that these things would make more beachfront property to be able to invest in.”

“To call it a hoax and take oil executives to Mar-a-Lago, and say, ‘Give me money for my campaign then I will let you do whatever you want’ — we can be smarter about that,” he added.