The Happy-Face Killer

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.