The only moment from the VP debate that mattered

At the end of the vice presidential debate, Gov. Tim Walz asked Sen. JD Vance a pointed question: Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? Vance’s response: “Tim, I’m focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?”

There is a clear right answer — that the 2020 presidential election was in fact legitimate — and Vance refused to offer it. It was, as Walz immediately noted, “A damning non-answer,” one that showed viewers who JD Vance is and what he stands for. 

Ultimately, every issue discussed earlier that night comes in second to the fundamental question of whether America’s democratic institutions deserve to endure. On that question, Vance truly is radical, and his exposure as such was the only truly important moment of the night.

Many Republicans have embraced Trump’s lies about the last election. Some have done so reluctantly, but Vance has been enthusiastic. He has, among other things, fundraised for January 6 rioters and said he would have illegally thrown the 2020 election result to Congress had he been in Mike Pence’s position at the time.

But what’s most distinctive about Vance is the degree to which he has paired 2020 conspiracy theories with a coterie of other anti-democratic positions and ideologies.

In a 2021 podcast interview, Vance said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in the US government and “replace them with our people.” If the Supreme Court intervened, Vance suggested that Trump simply ignore the ruling and dare the Court to stop him. In the interview, he explicitly cited Curtis Yarvin — a Silicon Valley blogger who advocates for overthrowing democracy and replacing it with a form of monarchy — as an influence on his views in this area.

None of this should come as a surprise. Anti-democratic radicalism has been central to Vance’s political identity since he began running for Senate in Ohio, widely discussed since he was tapped to be Trump’s vice president earlier this year.

And yet, it wasn’t central to the vice presidential debate tonight. The moderators left it until the very last minutes of the event, only coming up after the debate was originally scheduled to end. Despite democracy being at the core of the difference between the two candidates onstage — in fact, the core ideological difference between the two parties today — it was treated as an afterthought. 

In doing so, the moderators created an illusion of normalcy: allowing the two candidates to civilly discuss issues like housing and the deficit in a basically standard-politician manner, when in fact they disagree on an existential question about the nature of American government itself. 

It’s also worth dwelling on Vance’s attempt at deflection — the confusing line about Harris trying to “censor Americans from speaking their mind” on the Covid-19 pandemic — because I think it’s essential to understanding the ideological scaffolding of anti-democratic politics on the right today.

There are multiple theories on the right about how the Biden administration colluded with Big Tech to censor Americans, and it wasn’t exactly clear which particular one Vance was referencing. For present purposes, the details of the issue are less important than the ideological role they play.

For Vance and others like him, it is essential to do more than just insist that Trump was right in 2020 — to go the extra mile and say that Democrats are the true threat to democracy in America today. That argument, the claim that he and Trump are democracy’s real defenders, serves as justification for taking aggressive action to seize power.

When Vance proposed to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in 2021, he didn’t sell it as a naked power grab. Rather, he positioned it as a kind of counter-offensive: a necessary response to the left’s alleged stranglehold over the “deep state” in Washington. The rallying cry of Trump’s campaign to overthrow the 2020 election wasn’t that democracy was illegitimate, but rather that Trump had been robbed of his authentic victory by Democratic cheating. Stop the steal!

The argument that “Democrats are worse” does more than just legitimize power grabs. It also is a powerful disciplining tool for wavering Republicans, the kind that aren’t on board with Trump or Vance’s rough-and-tumble politics. If they waver or blanch, the response that Democrats are more dangerous helps bring them back onside — producing the phenomenon known as anti-anti-Trumpism.

In just one moment, in short, the veneer of normalcy carefully built up over the past 90 minutes was punctured. Vance not only exposed the true center of his candidacy, but also some of the key ideological scaffolding underpinning the Republican Party’s turn into anti-democratic territory.

This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.