JD Vance covered up the disturbing truth in his debate performance

During the one and only vice-presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle, JD Vance surprised everyone by sounding relatively sane. After getting used to comments about childless cat ladies and immigrants eating pets, the bar for that was relatively low. While he still refused to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election, Vance spent much of the debate sounding shockingly cogent and perhaps a little more moderate, reaching across the aisle and saying that he agreed with Tim Walz on some things.

However, that was very much a show for the cameras and the national audience he knew was watching. JD Vance has demonstrated himself to be a man willing to say what he needs to in order to attain power. His historical flip flop from Trump hater to Trump VP pick clearly demonstrated that, and the debate just showed another side of that. And, before he even took to the stage, Vance did a great job of making that extremely clear.

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Pumpkin is all of us

During the VP debate itself, LGBTQ+ issues were not discussed at all. This was in spite of the fact that the Republicans candidates have been pushing anti-trans rhetoric around the country as much as possible, Trump included. But around the debate, the Trump campaign had a new attack on trans people and Trump and Vance were working together in harmony on that point.

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Trump has previously railed about kids going to school and coming home with “surgeries” because the schools are making them trans. But the new attack is a variation on that. The day before the VP debate, Trump sat down with Kellyanne Conway on Fox News to talk about his plans for the Department of Education. Those plans amount to removing it, and he explained why: “We want reading, writing and arithmetic […] Right now, you have mostly transgender. Everything’s transgender.” He continued, claiming “Some of these school programs, I looked at it the other night—they’re destroying our country.” The outlandish argument is clearly poised to double as a way to fire up the anti-trans part of his base and to help his plan to move everything from abortion to schooling “back to the states.”

Trump’s claim is clearly nonsense: there aren’t transgender classes and teaching about gender diversity isn’t knocking reading, writing, and arithmetic off the curriculum. But when JD Vance talked to an anti-LGBTQ+ pastor, Lance Wallau, on the Saturday before the debate, he was using the same language that Trump would go on to use. He told Wallau that schools were teaching “radical ideas” and “we’re not teaching them reading, writing, arithmetic.” He called for the US to “stop spending your tax dollars on radical organizations that are poisoning the minds our kids,” because “we’ve got American children that can’t add five plus five, but they can tell you that there are 87 different genders, and I think both of those things are related.”

On the debate stage, JD Vance tried to seem normal and friendly. He was (mostly) reasonable and wanted to find common ground with Tim Walz. But it’s important to remember who he really is. A man who will read the script he’s given if it means that he can get some power. A man who will tell bold faced lies to get media attention. And a man who is willing to stand with Trump.

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