By Nick Catoggio
Wednesday, October 02, 2024
I thought J.D. Vance cleaned Tim Walz’s clock at
Tuesday’s vice presidential debate. But then, I thought Donald Trump was
destined for landslide defeats in 2016 and 2020.
My instincts are terrible. Honestly, I don’t know why any
of you read this newsletter.
An hour into last night’s event, my verdict was that Walz
shouldn’t be too hard on himself afterward since Trump was going to win this
election anyway. But then I remembered how atrocious my instincts are and
wondered if viewers would see things differently.
Would it surprise you, dear reader, to learn that viewers
saw things differently?
CNN’s
post-debate snap poll found Vance winning by only a whisker, 51-49 percent. CBS News’
survey had it even closer, 42-41. Politico’s
version saw a dead heat at 50 percent apiece. According to that last poll,
independents deemed Walz the victor by a margin of 16 points, 58-42, and
preferred him as vice president on balance.
And while both candidates emerged more popular than they
were going in, Walz easily topped Vance. He went from plus-14 in favorability
to plus-37 in CNN’s poll and from plus-11 to plus-25 in CBS News’. By
comparison, Vance went from minus-22 to minus-3 and from minus-14 to plus-2 in
those two surveys, respectively.
Maybe Walz’s bug-eyed terror at being quizzed on policy
before an audience of millions made him more sympathetic to the audience,
especially in contrast to Vance’s unflappability. Politicians in our era seldom
benefit from seeming like the slicker, more polished option of voters’ two
choices. It would be ironic if J.D. Vance of all people ran afoul of Americans’
populist instincts.
Or maybe this was the debate equivalent of a boxing match
in which one fighter dominates for 11 rounds before getting knocked unconscious
in the 12th. The anticipated exchange over Trump’s 2020 coup plot didn’t come
until the very end, but Vance took it on
the chin when it did. If you believe CNN’s panel of undecided voters in
Michigan, that
mattered. A lot.
Still, I’m inclined to trust my terrible instincts. Vance
won, Walz lost.
It’s hard not to feel buyer’s remorse on Kamala Harris’
behalf at this point. The other finalist to be her running mate was
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a forceful speaker and a man with obvious
appeal in a must-win state that’s currently dead even at
48.2 percent, if you can believe it. Walz hasn’t done Harris any harm but
he hasn’t added much to the ticket either; even his television appearances,
which put
him on the political map during the VP audition process, have dried up. She
should have picked Shapiro.
Walz wasn’t the story on Tuesday night, though. Vance
was, as he managed to achieve something very difficult: He made his party look
… not “good,” exactly, but competent. Sober. Even decent. He put a happy face
on Trumpism.
And that’ll help him in this presidential cycle and in
cycles to come.
Very demure, very mindful.
The dominant emotion among the commentariat after the
debate was surprise at how cordial the evening had been.
There were no attacks on “Tampon Tim” or digs at Vance’s
“weirdness.” The candidates found themselves in agreement on policy at several
points, to the dismay
of Reagan conservatives watching. At the end their spouses joined them
onstage and they all chatted amiably. It was shockingly normal, a glimpse of
what once was and
what might be again. America’s civil war had turned, well, civil.
Was it really so surprising, though?
Recently a wise
man (with terrible instincts) argued that Vance should have been playing
good cop on the trail all along to Trump’s bad cop. J.D. has the brains, policy
chops, and message discipline to act as the GOP’s “suburbs-whisperer” while his
running mate runs around starting fires. He should have been the party’s
“populism for grown-ups” pitchman. Instead, idiotically, he was consumed with
rage-tweeting about Haitian immigrants eating cats.
On Tuesday we saw the “suburbs-whisperer” at last.
“Anyone who feared that Trump 2.0 would be a mad ride into authoritarian chaos
could listen to Vance’s soft-spoken policy pitch and feel reassured that
there’d be some sweetness amid all the bitterness,” I wrote last month,
imagining how Vance in “good cop” mode might help the ticket. That’s the Vance
we got at the debate—very demure, very mindful, to borrow a meme of recent
vintage.
And that Vance can only help Trump. Undecided voters who
are trying to get to yes on the Republican nominee but worry that by doing so
they’ll be voting for idiocracy with a mood disorder could have watched J.D.
last night and come away optimistic. He didn’t seem
“weird,” as the media had repeatedly insisted he was. And despite his
tender age, he didn’t appear unqualified for the top job. How could he have?
He’s plainly twice as smart and 10 times as well-informed as his running mate,
who’s already served as president.
There are few figures in either party as
chameleonic as Vance, a man who began his political journey as a Never
Trumper when it looked like Trumpism would be a passing fad and became a
Trumpist zealot once it became clear that it wasn’t. It’s the opposite of
surprising that he’d adapt again before a primetime national audience by
swapping out his demagoguery about the Haitian menace for something resembling
statesmanship.
He made a good impression on swing voters, judging by the
polls. But the group he really helped himself with, I think, is the right-wing
professional class.
“Exceptionally competent and conspicuously congenial” is
how one establishment Republican excitedly described his performance to New
York magazine. We’re approaching 10 full years since the GOP has been
able to say either of those things about its leader. Rank-and-file
right-wingers might not care about it, but the professional class—politicians,
donors, consultants, pundits, educated upscale Republicans various and
sundry—yearns for a candidate who can replicate Trump’s appeal to the working
class without drowning the party in filth in the process.
I imagined nationalist intellectuals and the
“reformicons” of yesteryear watching intently on Tuesday, their eyes aglow, as
Vance realized their vision of Trumpism without Trump and populist policy
without populist culture. Here at last was a man from their own class, of their
own educated sensibility, making a calm, measured case for the MAGA agenda
without the demagogic histrionics that unfailingly accompany it. Even some
Democrats were cheered: “I Have Seen the Republican Future—and It’s Less
Terrible Than Trump,” Damon
Linker announced afterward.
If you squinted hard while watching, you could imagine
Vance expanding Trump’s coalition in 2028, offering populist red meat to keep
the base happy with a patina of intellectualism that might entice wayward
college graduates into returning to the GOP. Or, if you were feeling really
good, you might convince yourself that J.D.’s latest incarnation as a
Trump bootlicker extraordinaire is just another way station on his
political journey and that “the real Vance” will emerge once he’s free from his
patron’s influence.
In 2028, with Trump retired, J.D. 5.0 might
reinvent himself as the sort of populist-conservative fusion candidate of whom
right-wing intellectuals dream and which Ron DeSantis tried but failed this
year to be. Perhaps the toxic, juvenile race-baiting about Haitian pet-eaters
will be quietly retired and replaced by more respectable passions like whether,
ackshually, tariffs are good.
Respectable Trumpism: As of Tuesday night, that’s Vance’s
political “brand.”
It’s a contradiction in terms.
Trumpism without Trump?
The right-wing professional class doesn’t care about
respectability on the merits because it desires a more decent Republican Party.
If it did, it wouldn’t still be invested in J.D. Vance.
It cares about respectability only insofar as Trump’s
indecency is an electoral drag on their party. Swing voters worry about coup
plots and felony convictions and glaring sociopathy in their political leaders,
and in a democracy the right’s leaders are obliged to worry about whatever
swing voters are worried about. If, 33 days from now, we find out that swing
voters don’t care much about that stuff after all, those leaders will drop
whatever pretense remains that they do too.
In fact, Vance’s sudden transformation into the
“suburbs-whisperer” at Tuesday’s debate plays like a satire of how facile the
professional right’s pretensions to decency are. Over the past few weeks he’s
engaged in some of the ugliest politics of his career—only to be eagerly
redeemed as the future of the GOP after 90 minutes of sounding competent-ish on
television.
He, not Trump, got the ball rolling online in demonizing
Haitians in Ohio as dog-eating savages. He, not Trump, made two appearances this
month with Tucker Carlson after Tucker offered his megaphone to a
Holocaust revisionist. He, not Trump, showed up at a town hall last week
hosted by a
Christian nationalist leader who’s far out even by the exceedingly wacky
standards of grassroots right-wing populism. And as we were reminded again in
the closing minutes of Tuesday’s debate, there remains every reason to think
that as vice president he’d try to obstruct the transfer of power if
Republicans lost a national election.
The sharpest line of the evening came when Walz pointed
out that there’s a reason Vance rather than Mike Pence was onstage. Pence did
everything Trump asked of him as vice president—except for one thing. But that
one thing was so unforgivable to his boss and to his party that it
single-handedly disqualified Pence from joining the ticket a third time.
Vance, the supposed avatar of respectable Trumpism, would
do the one thing if given the chance. In a contest between him and Walz for
a job that famously carries almost no actual duties, that’s the
only detail about him that ultimately matters. He’s a happy-face killer.
The fact that so many Vance apologists are prone to
glossing over that detail made the rave reviews for J.D. ironic, our friend David
French noted. The candidate’s calm demeanor and genial approach to Walz was
designed to reassure voters that he’ll be a restraining influence on Trump but
the substance of his answer about the 2020 election proves the opposite. Pence
couldn’t tame the populist beast; an enabler like Vance won’t bother to try.
“In choosing Vance and discarding Pence, Trump traded
actual decency for a man who can simulate decency,” David wrote. “Simulating
decency” is a nice, pithy summary of what “respectable Trumpism” means in
practice.
I’m also less sold than the right-wing professional class
is on how much Vance improved his chances in 2028 last night—although I do
think he improved them.
No one knows how many Republicans will accept the results
next month if Trump loses this election, and it’s a safe bet that Mr.
Respectable will parrot whichever conspiracy theories to explain the outcome
that he’s tasked with by his running mate. But to the extent right-wingers do
concede that Trump lost, they’ll find it easy to rationalize the result as a
problem with the messenger, not the message. There’s nothing wrong with
populism, we’ll be told; the GOP lost because the wild man at the top of the
ticket scared away more voters in the upper class than he managed to attract
among the working class.
What the party needs is a calmer, more cerebral populist,
someone capable of pants-ing his Democratic opponent in a battle of wits on a
national stage without so much as raising his voice. Someone more …
respectable. Vance might not be the natural first choice of grassroots
Trumpists but watching him handle a liberal with ease in a big spot will earn
him significant goodwill among them. After two straight presidential defeats,
they might be amenable to sacrificing a bit of bravado in their next nominee for
greater electability.
They might be. But neither you nor I would wager
very much on it, would we?
“Do Trump voters want a kinder, gentler version of
MAGA?” a skeptical Jonathan
Last wondered today. I share that skepticism. I suspect the great hope of
reformicons and nationalist intellectuals is that in time right-wing populists
will develop an appetite for policy rather than for combative spectacle, the
steak rather than the sizzle. The pro-wrestling aspect of Trumpism is what got
their attention, the theory goes; now that they’re engaged, they’ll mature and
begin thinking harder about what the two parties are offering once the
ringmaster finally leaves the ring.
What if they just like wrestling?
“The craziest son of a b–ch in the race,” to quote Rep.
Thomas Massie, has won the Republican presidential nomination in three
straight cycles. GOP voters passed on the steak offered by various candidates
in this year’s primary because they preferred the sizzle. Vance will have
meaningful advantages in 2028—extremely high name-recognition, for starters,
and probably the backing of the Reaganite rump as the least bad option in a
post-Trump party—but he surely won’t be the craziest son of a b–ch in the race.
How would he fare, do you think, in a one-on-one debate
with the
Riddler?
“Respectable Trumpism” is a smart pitch for a general
election, but ask the governor of Florida how smart it is in a primary when
you’re facing an opponent with more Trumpian sizzle. Right-wing intellectuals
dream of Trumpism without Trump; my sense of right-wing voters is that they’d
happily keep Trump if he ditched Trumpism.
The least bad option.
Maybe I’m wrong, though. (Remember: terrible instincts!)
If there’s anyone in the party capable of shape-shifting
deftly enough to satisfy primary voters and general election voters in
turn, it’s J.D. Vance. And his simulation of decency on Tuesday night might
hold more appeal for Republican voters than I’ve given them credit for. Once
Trump is gone and his persona no longer defines what it means to be right-wing,
a party that runs on nostalgia might find itself feeling nostalgic for how
politicians used to interact.
And less nostalgic about other
elements of the Trump era.
I’ll believe it when I see it, though. “Trump’s secret
sauce is his ability to turn out low-propensity voters who were never closely
affiliated with the old Republican Party,” Last writes, pointing to the outcome
of this year’s primary. “And those voters show no sign of being
interested in either kinder or gentler. They want the chaos. The transgression.
The violence.”
To impress those voters and get out of a primary in 2028,
J.D. Vance, the respectable Trumpist, will need to indulge in quite a lot of
unrespectable politics. But I know he has it in him, just like I know his
cheerleaders among the professional right have it in them to keep looking the
other way as he goes about behaving disgracefully. He’s a terrible
person, unfit for office—and, in their eyes, very possibly the best this
rotten party can realistically do. They might be right.
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