Shutting Down JD Vance's Debate Lies

The vice presidential candidate tried to sugarcoat his misogyny

It’s hard to pick JD Vance’s smarmiest moment: Was it the lie about a national abortion ban? The way he shared a friend’s abortion story without mentioning that his laws would have forced her into childbirth? I mean really, even the way he continually said “Margaret” to one of the moderators managed to send a shiver down my spine. The common denominator of it all, though, was just how easily Vance lied and sugarcoated Republicans’ regressive agenda for American women. So let’s get into it.

‘Minimum National Standard’

You could probably hear me screaming from Brooklyn when Vance claimed that he “I never supported a national ban” but instead “talk[ed] about setting some minimum national standard.” As you all know by now—those are the same thing.

Republicans know abortion bans are deeply unpopular, so they’ve come up with this cheap rhetorical trick to fool voters. But as I’ve reported previously, Vance has slipped up about what ‘minimum standard’ really means. When a reporter asked him about Sen. Lindsey Graham’s 15-week abortion ban—a law that would force women to carry nonviable pregnancies to term—Vance interrupted to say that it wasn’t a ban, but a “federal minimum standard.”

That’s because Vance has adopted the anti-abortion redefinition of ‘ban’ that says the word means a prohibition on abortion in all cases, even when a woman’s life is at risk. Under this definition, there are no abortion bans in America! That switch up provides Republicans a lot of political cover: When Donald Trump says, for example, that he would veto a federal abortion ban, it simply means that he would veto a ban that has no exceptions for women’s lives.¹

Feigned Compassion

Vance knows that women voters really don’t like him, so he worked hard to appear compassionate and understanding on issues like abortion and childcare. But regardless of the slick delivery, Vance wasn’t able to escape his Reddit-level misogyny.

Take the anecdote Vance shared about a friend who had an abortion in order to escape an abusive relationship. The story was clearly meant to make it appear that the Republican candidate understood that ending a pregnancy can be a fraught decision.

Yet what Vance doesn’t mention is that his laws would have forced this friend to carry that pregnancy to term against her will—perhaps preventing her from leaving the relationship, and certainly tying her to her abuser for life. This is a pregnancy Vance says his friend believed “would have destroyed her life.” How is that compassion?

Most importantly: If Vance would do this to his own friend, someone he claims to love, what does that mean for the rest of us?

That simmering sexism underpinned all of Vance’s attempts to sound ‘softer’ for women voters. For example, we know that Vance hates ‘childless cat ladies’ and is obsessed with forcing women back into the home, but he used incredibly insidious language to hide that fact in the exchange on child care:

“But the cultural pressure on young families, and especially young women, I think, makes it really hard for people to choose the family model they want. A lot of young women would like to go back to work immediately. Some would like to spend a little time home with the kids. Some would like to spend longer at home with the kids. We should have a family care model that makes choice possible.”

The claim that a Trump administration would make “choice” possible for young women had me yelling at the television. This is a person who wants women to have no say about if and when to start a family—a person who knows that forced pregnancy will strip women from the public sphere.

As Moira Donegan put it, “Vance talking about people choosing the ‘family model’ (*shivers*) that they prefer is code for pushing more women out of the paid workforce and coercing them into being housewives.”

Trusting Women

Finally, I have to flag the way that Vance used the word ‘trust’ in the exchange on abortion rights. He mentioned abortion rights overwhelming win in his home state of Ohio, saying, “I think what I learned from that is that we got to do a better job at winning back people’s trust.” He repeated the line a second time:

“So many young women would love to have families. So many young women also see an unplanned pregnancy as something that's going to destroy their livelihood, destroy their education, destroy their relationships. And we have got to earn people's trust back. And that's why Donald Trump and I are committed to pursuing pro-family policies. Making childcare more accessible, making fertility treatments more accessible, because we've got to do a better job at that.”

So when Vance says that Republicans need to earn back women’s trust, he doesn’t mean he actually wants to trust women with their own decisions. In fact, he’s not saying anything new about abortion at all; Vance is simply framing forced pregnant as something that women actually want, we just don’t know it yet.

I’ll have more about the debate—including the anti-abortion attacks on Gov. Tim Walz—in the daily report later today.

1. I am begging reporters to ask Vance and Trump what the difference is between an abortion ban and a minimum national standard, and whether Trump would veto the latter. Because waking up to a barrage of headlines claiming that Trump would veto a ban—without any explanation of what that really means—was enough to send me over the edge. More on this in the daily newsletter today.