Vice Presidential nominees Senator JD Vance and Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota participated in the first and only Vice-Presidential debate of the 2024 election season.
During the ninety-minute exchange moderated by "CBS Evening News" anchor and managing editor Norah O'Donnell and "Face the Nation" host and chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan, Vance appeared to gain and hold momentum continuously while Walz began unsteadily, approached a moderate stride before crumbling in seeming “agreement” with Vance at many times.
At several points during the debate Vance’s responses were definitive, clear and unassailably logical, even to his opponent.
Speaking of diplomacy about nine minutes into the debate addressing the question of supporting Israel and opposing Iran Vance defended President Donald Trump’s foreign policy record and criticized Vice President Kamala Harris’.
“Diplomacy is not a dirty word. You just said, Iran is as close to a nuclear weapon today as they have ever been. You blame Donald trump. Who has been the Vice president for the last 3.5 years? The answer is your running mate, not mine. Donald trump consistently made the world more secure. We talk about the sequence of events that led us to where we are right now. You can't ignore October 7th. Which I appreciate Governor Walz bringing up. When did Iran and Hamas in their proxies attack Israel? It was during the administration of Kamala Harris. Governor Walz can criticize Donald Trump's tweets. But effective, smart diplomacy and peace through strength is how you bring stability back to a very broken world. Donald Trump has done it once before. When was the last time that an American president didn't have a major conflict breakout? The only answer was the four years that Donald Trump was president.”
Near the fifteen-minute mark, the moderators directed Vance and Walz toward the climate change narrative in which Vance was quick to point out the inherent hypocrisy of the Biden-Harris environmental and energy policy.
“The democrats and their leadership really believe climate change is serious. What they would be doing is more manufacturing and energy production in the United States of America. That’s not what they are doing. Clearly Kamala Harris herself doesn’t believe her own rhetoric on this. If she did, she would agree with Donald trump’s energy policies. Something is important to touching on.
When we talk about clean energy, that’s a slogan that the democrats will use here. The issue is that you are spending hundreds of billions of dollars of American taxpayer money on solar panels that are made in China. You’re going to make the economy dirtier. We should be making more solar panels in the United States. A lot of them are being made overseas in China. Especially the components that go into the solar panels.
If you want to make the environment cleaner, you’ve got to invest in energy production. We haven’t built a nuclear facility in the past 40 years. We have to invest more in natural gas. Kamala Harris has done the opposite. That’s raise energy prices and also meant that we’re doing worse by the climate.”
Approximately fifteen minutes later responding to criticism that President Trump acts contrarily to advice from scientists and economists Vance again identified that Harris has been in office for three and a half years and has implemented none of her “plans,” drawing the clear difference that he and Trump have a positive record to defend, not mere theory.
“First of all, you will hear a lot from Tim Walz this evening, a lot of what Kamala Harris proposes to do, and some of it, I’ll be honest with you, it even sounds pretty good. Here's what you won't hear, is that Kamala Harris has already done it. She has been the vice president for 3.5 years. She's had the opportunity to adopt all these great policies and what she has actually done instead is drive the cost of food higher by 25%. Drive the cost of housing higher by about 60%. Open the American southern border and make middle-class life unaffordable for a large number of Americans.
If Harris has such great plan for how to address middle-class problems, then she ought to do it now. Not when asking for promotion but in the job the American people gave her three and a half years ago, and the fact that she isn't tells you a lot about how much you can trust her actual plan.
Donald trump's economic plan is not just a plan but it is also record.
A lot of those same economist that attacked Donald Trump plans have PhD’s but they don't have common sense and they don't have wisdom. Because Donald trump's economic policies liver the highest take-home pay in a generation in this country, 1.5% inflation, and peace and security all over the world. And people think Donald trump's economic plan doesn't make sense, I say look at the record. He delivered rising take-home pay for American workers. Tim admirably admits they want to undo the trump tax cuts. But if you look at what so difference about Donald Trump's tax cuts is that a lot of those resources went to giving more take-home pay to the middle-class and working-class America. It was passed in 2017 and we saw an economic boom unless -- unlike we've seen in a generation in this country. That's a record I’m proud to run on and were going to get back to that common sense wisdom so that you can afford to live the American dream again. I know a lot of your struggling, worried about paying the bills. Is going to stop -- it's going to stop when Donald trump brings back common sense to the country. “
Predictably, the moderators and Walz offered a blunt redirect to discuss the January 6th Capitol Riots, a Democrat favorite talking point and Vance was quick to dismiss them and parried Walz’s attacks admirably. Most important in the exchange was the moment when JD Vance utterly refuted the Democrat J6 narrative:
“First of all, we are focused on the future. We have to figure out the inflation crisis, make housing affordable, groceries affordable. I want to answer your question. What President Trump has said is there were problems in 2020 and my own belief is we should debate those issues peacefully in the public square and that is all I said and all that Donald Trump has said. He said on January 6, the protesters must protest peacefully.
On January 20, Joe Biden became president, Donald trump left the White House and now we have all the negative policies that have come from the administration. I believe we have a threat to democracy in this country, but it is not the threat to democracy that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to talk about. It is the threat of censorship. Americans casting aside lifelong friendships because of disagreements over politics. It is big technology company silencing their fellow citizens and it is Kamala Harris saying rather than debate and persuade fellow Americans, she would like to censor people who engage in misinformation. I think that's a much bigger threat to democracy than anything we've seen in this country in the last four years, last 40 years.“
Finally, Vance directed attention to the fact that the Trump campaign is offering the truest form of a unity campaign as opposed to the censorship and division of the Biden-Harris White House saying,
“I am really proud, given that I was raised by two lifelong blue-collar democrats, to have the endorsement of Bobby Kennedy, Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard. They don't agree with me and Donald Trump on every issue. We don't have to. We are united behind the basic American first amendment principle that we ought to debate our differences. Kamala Harris is engaged in censorship at an industrial scale. She did it during COVID. She's done it over a number of other issues and that is the much bigger threat to democracy than what Donald Trump said when he said the protesters should peacefully protest on January 6th.”
Matthew Holloway is a contributor for Conservative HQ. Follow him on X for his latest stories, or email tips to Matthew@theconservativefreelancer.com.
2024 Election
vice presidential debate
J.D. Vance
CBS Moderators
media bias
Norah O'Donnell
Margaret Brennan
Israel
Iran
Kamala Harris
Donald Trump