JD Vance and Tim Walz remain civil in policy-driven debate but Trump is inescapable

Donald Trump was not the elephant in the room. He was the room.

During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, his running mate JD Vance was tasked with wrangling policy positions out of Trump’s chaos, while Walz sought to make the case why the former president should never be elected again, even quoting his opponent’s statement that he once believed Trump “unfit” for higher office.

The 90-minute debate in New York is likely to be the last among any of the candidates before Election Day, and the only prime-time matchup between Democratic and Republican running mates who offered up their starkly different visions for America’s future.

Both men shook hands before and after the debate, and Vance often mentioned that he agreed with Walz about finding solutions for a number of crises facing Americans, especially lower-income and middle-class families.

Vance sought to distance himself from hisfalse claims about migrants eating pets and his “cat ladies” remarks that have dominated the campaign.

But he used his newly polished veneer to make false and misleading claims about Trump’s agenda, from calling his anti-abortion platform a way to “make it easier for moms to have babies” to brazen revisionist history that suggested the former president saved the Affordable Care Act.

Vance also praised Trump for agreeing to leave the White House in January 2021 as part of his peaceful transfer of power – papering over the violent attack on the Capitol days earlier.

The two candidates juggled more than a dozen detailed questions about foreign policy, the climate crisis, immigration, childcare, housing, gun violence and abortion rights before concluding with a biting back-and-forth about the 2020 election, January 6 and whether Trump and