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| Mary Trump on Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell |
Tim Walz was not expected to dazzle anyone at Tuesday night's vice presidential debate. And for most of the evening, it was clear that J.D. Vance was the slicker debater on stage. But Walz, after a slow start, gained his footing and gave substantive answers to questions about issues that likely will receive plenty of attention between now and election day. Perhaps most importantly, Walz waded through Vance's lies, which were so voluminous, they were hard to keep up with. For example, many of Vance's answers included statements that went something like this: (1) We're not doing a good job with that issue, and we need to do better (although he usually offered no policy statements on how we could do better); (2) Kamala Harris is to blame for that problem. (You would have thought Harris had been president the past four years, not Joe Biden.)
As the debate was winding down, Walz asked the question that unmasked Vance as an election-denying traitor who is little more than a shill for the guy at the top of the Republican ticket, Donald Trump. In putting Vance on the spot, Walz produced what probably will be the most memorable moment from any of this year's debates. And he probably disabused anyone of the notion that Vance is just a younger, more coherent version of Trump. Unless Vance falls out of Trump's good graces -- and lots of people in Trump's orbit seem to fall out of his good graces -- he is likely to be around for a while. And Walz showed that Vance is a true believer of Trump's ideas (or what passes as a Trump idea), which means some form of Trumpism disease could be with us for some time. That's a problem Americans will have to deal with at some point in the future -- unless Trump loses at the ballot box in November or winds up in jail (or both). But the present is our current topic. and Mary L. Trump -- clinical psychologist, best- selling author, Substack writer, frequent guest on news programs, and Donald Trump's niece, is our focus. Mary has been a vocal opponent of her uncle's efforts to reclaim the White House, knowing far better than most of us that he is off-the-charts unfit for the job. So, she watched Tuesday night's debate with an unusual set of concerns and insights. She provides her analysis at her Substack site ("The Good In Us"), under the headline "More Than One Way to Win; More than one way to lose. Here are Mary Trump's thoughts on the debate and the important role Tim Walz played in revealing J.D. Vance to simply be a repackaged Donald Trump, one who doesn't seem to have a mind of his own. Mary Trump writes:
If any of you who watched our livestream of the vice-presidential debate at Mary Trump Media (Tuesday) night, you probably know I was pretty unhappy with the way things unfolded.
Maybe it’s because we’re so used to the IV drip of poison that Donald has injected into the body politic—just think about the massive amounts of stress that often warp our expectations—but it’s almost as if we've lost touch with what's normal.
One could argue that, from a certain perspective, this was a normal debate. There were no fireworks, nobody ranted and raved, the participants were generally civil. So, yes, if we look at the debate through the lens of what a debate should be in normal times, nothing unexpected happened.
If, however, you look at the debate through the lens of what’s at stake in this election, and what it meant that J.D. Vance was even on that stage, the evening did not go as I thought it would. Right before the debate started, the last thing I said was that, although I was worried Vance was going to be normalized in some way, I was much more concerned that he was going to be seen as viable.
The thing is, even though this might sound paranoid and hyperbolic, in an "everything is stacked against the Democrats" sort of way, my paranoia was not without grounding. Corporate media, for example, have spent the past nine years normalizing a business failure, racist, traitor, criminal, and sexual assaulter of women. It is in large part because of this normalization that Donald Trump is able to run for the presidency again.
Then, of course, there’s the electoral college. Democrats have to run 3 to 5 points ahead nationally in order to win. And because of the Supreme Court’s corrupt illegitimate super-majority, we can’t even be certain that winning will be enough.
With the deck so stacked against us, when we are presented with opportunities to gain advantage over our opponents, we need to seize them with both hands. And Tim Walz didn’t do that last night, at least not toward the beginning.
In the hours since the debate, I’ve come to feel differently than I did while watching it. In many ways, Walz did what he needed to do in appealing to swing voters. I think, on balance, he won—not on style, perhaps, but on substance. If only that were enough.
Because J.D. Vance is a notorious misogynist who hates women in a way that is deep and multi-faceted, the discussion on abortion rights gave Walz an opportunity to do what he does best—make the conversation personal and heart-felt. He had one of his best moments when he talked about Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old woman who died from complications after taking abortion medication. She sought help in an Atlanta-area hospital but was forced to wait 20 hours before doctors were willing to treat her.
“She happened to be in Georgia, a restrictive state,” Walz said. “Because of that, she had to travel a long distance to North Carolina to try and get her care. Amber Thurman died in that journey back and forth. The [fact of the] matter is, how can we as a nation say that your life and your rights, as basic as the right to control your own body, is determined on geography? There’s a very real chance, had Amber Thurman lived in Minnesota, she would be alive today.”
I think we can say almost unequivocally that Amber would absolutely be alive today if she had lived in a state that believed women were first-class citizens who had an unfettered right to health care.
It took more than an hour and a half, but the moderators finally got around to asking about January 6th. This is when Walz showed up in the way I’d hoped he would have from the beginning. Not only was his answer pitch perfect, but his exchange with Vance revealed that Donald’s running is an anti-American, election-denying traitor.
“[Donald] is still saying he didn’t lose the [2020] election,” Walz said. And then he turned to Vance and asked, “Did he lose the 2020 election?”
“Tim,” Vance said, “I’m focused on the future.”
And that’s when Gov. Walz gave his best response of the night:
“That is a damning non-answer.”
Having had time to reflect, I do think Walz accomplished much of what he set out to accomplish. But he did something else that will reverberate outside of the confines of the debate and this election.
J.D. Vance’s running mate is an almost 80-year-old fascist and authoritarian who also happens to be deeply unwell, both physically and psychologically. Forty-year-old Vance is also a fascist and, if Donald gets back into the White House, he will almost certainly become president at some point during the next term.
Last night Vance did one of the things he needed to do, considering most Americans don’t know what a vile, creepy, cruel, and violent man he is—he seemed reasonably measured and, at times, even thoughtful and almost sincere. Of course, he had to lie almost 100 times in order to create that impression, but since the moderators didn’t bother to fact check him, he got away with it.
Walz knew this debate was not going to be fact checked; he knew J.D. Vance is an inveterate liar, a despicable racist, and a misogynist, so I found the concessions he made to his opponent shocking; I could not believe how much ground he ceded. When you have a really decent guy like Walz say to a really bad guy like Vance: “I agree with you;” “I can meet you halfway;” “You have a point,” it becomes concerning. Vance, one of the most abnormal and dangerous politicians in America, not only gets normalized, he actually seems viable.
Polls before the debate showed that Vance was the most unpopular vice-presidential candidate in American history, with only 30% of Americans viewing him favorably. After the debate, that number jumped 11% to 41%. That’s a problem. It's also a sign that Walz' agreeableness helped Vance be viewed favorably, and that certainly was not one of Democrats' goals going into the debate. Mary Trump says:
Democrats need to understand that you don’t make common cause with fascists. You just don’t.
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