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The Real Loser of the V.P. Debate
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M. Gessen, an Opinion columnist, watched Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate with a sense of dread. In their mind, the question was not who would win the debate but, rather: How much did we lose? In this audio essay, Gessen argues that when we put Trump and his acolytes on the same platform as regular politicians and treat them equally, “that normalization degrades our political life and degrades our understanding of politics.”
Below is a lightly edited transcript of the below audio piece:
The Real Loser of the V.P. Debate
M. Gessen: I went into Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate with a sense of dread because I thought that the last debate was kind of a disaster.
And by disaster I don’t mean that Kamala Harris didn’t hold her own against Donald Trump, or that Donald Trump scored any points in the debate, but that the fact of the debate itself and the format of the debate, which placed these two candidates on a sort of level footing, treated them both as normal politicians and treated the things they said as normal political statements.
And so, while there were some, I would say, halfhearted attempts at fact-checking Donald Trump, basically, it turned into a “he said, she said,” where on the one side you had a lie and on the other side you had facts.
So, for example, the way that the moderators of the presidential debate handled the Springfield, Ohio, slander ——
Audio clip of presidential debate:
Donald Trump: They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats …
Gessen: And the moderator said, well, we called the city manager ——
Clip of presidential debate
David Muir: I’m not taking this from television. I’m taking it from the city manager.
Trump: But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.
Muir: Again, the Springfield city manager says there’s no evidence of that.
Gessen: When you place lies and facts on an even footing, it basically creates a political sphere in which there’s no fact-based reality. That’s a pre-totalitarian condition. You can’t have politics if you don’t have a shared reality and if you don’t place an absolute value on the truth. I think that normalization degrades our political life and degrades our understanding of politics.
What was a kind of failure of the presidential debate — which is that they tried to counter Trump’s lies in some way, but couldn’t handle all of them — in the vice-presidential debate, this was by design. They made an agreement ahead of time that they were not going to do real-time fact checking by the moderators. And not only did they allow JD Vance to lie, for example, about Trump saving the Affordable Care Act, but the moderator asks Tim Walz a yes or no question that, according to Trump, Walz has said that abortions in the ninth month are absolutely fine.
Clip of vice-presidential debate
Norah O’Donnell: Former President Trump said in the last debate that you believe abortion, quote, in the ninth month is absolutely fine. Yes or no? Is that what you support?
Gessen: So the moderator asks Walz about something that, A) she knows isn’t true, B) it’s not a thing, and puts it on him to deny that he ever said such a thing or that the thing even exists. And of course he fumbles. He fumbles because it is almost impossible to answer a question like that without somehow also implicating yourself in the lie.
We, as journalists, do our absolute worst when we engage in a kind of false evenhandedness. What I think their thinking was — and I can only conjecture — but their thinking was probably: We have one candidate who is in the habit of lying, as is his running mate. Let’s find a way that we can show that we’re equally critical of both candidates.
So before Vance even has to face a question about Jan. 6 or about whether Trump lost the 2020 election, let’s ask Walz why he lied about being in Hong Kong during Tiananmen Square.
Clip of vice-presidential debate
Margaret Brennan: You said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989. But Minnesota public radio and other media outlets are reporting that you actually didn’t travel to Asia until August of that year. Can you explain that discrepancy? You have two minutes.
Tim Walz: Yeah. Well, and to the folks out there who didn’t get at the top of this …
Gessen: The idea that that is in any way comparable to the kinds of really malignant lies that Trump and Vance have been spreading intentionally. There is no equality here.
Clip of vice-presidential debate
Norah O’Donnell: Senator Vance, you have said you would not have certified the last presidential election and would have asked the states to submit alternative electors. That has been called unconstitutional and illegal. Would you again seek to challenge this year’s election results, even if every governor certifies the results? I’ll give you two minutes.
JD Vance: Well, Norah, first of all, I think that we’re focused on the future …
Gessen: Vance absolutely leaned into the Trump framing of Jan. 6 as, on the one hand, a peaceful protest, on the other hand, a question of freedom of speech, a reflection of fundamental American values. And this, as many people have noted, was when Walz finally seemed to find his footing, in the last 10 minutes of the debate. And I think this is another thing that was so disappointing to me.
It’s a classic false equivalence. Walz is talking about his time in Hong Kong and possibly fibbing, possibly misremembering, but it’s a minor, minor thing in his background. Versus Vance’s out-and-out lies about an actual insurrection and actual violent attack on our institutions of state. To put them on the same level is absurd.
It’s easy for me to sit here and say the debate is bad and the moderators are bad and the format is bad and everything is bad, which it is. Also, there is a predicament that we’re in, that we do have an election coming up in which one of the candidates is a liar and an aspiring autocrat and the other is not those things. And voters, at least some voters, are genuinely choosing between them, and that is already damaging to our politics.
As journalists, we can’t not cover this reality. So the question is: How do we cover this reality in a way that doesn’t amplify the damage, that doesn’t exacerbate the damage, but that reduces the damage?
I think we need a harm reduction philosophy of covering Trump and his party and the election. And these are some things to consider: One is to cut his or Vance’s mic when they start lying. And I know this is a hugely controversial idea, and it’s usually controversial because it will enable them to scream censorship, but there needs to be a philosophy of journalism that is oriented toward the public good.
When I talk to my students about it, I always say: Imagine that information is water and some of the water is poisoned. And if you are tasked with conveying the water to the public, it would be a crime for you to convey poisoned water. And I think that political lies, lies in the public sphere, are just as poisonous to our politics as poisoned water is to humans. And if we think of ourselves as conveyors, as mediators, as media, who transport this information, this water, then we have this abiding responsibility to do something about it. We can’t just turn to one of the candidates and say, “I’d like to see you take a sip of that. And see what happens to you.”
I think we also need to figure out ways to contextualize the candidates. Certainly, this two-minute-per-person debate format is not conducive to creating nuanced or contextualized pictures. But what if we had a different format? What if journalists prepared fact-based reports to create context for the debate? Who said that the debate absolutely has to be broadcast live? If we have one person who is lying in the debate, maybe that’s not the best possible format.
These are just some ideas. I mean, I don’t sit around all day thinking about debates. But there are people whose job it is to think about debates all the time. And I don’t think they’re doing a very good job.
So the debate was truly worse than I feared. If you think back to the presidential debate and how in the immediate aftermath everybody said that Kamala Harris won it, which she did, she was a better debater if you judge it as a debate. But if you judge it in terms of its influence and think about who dominated the news cycle afterward, well, it was clearly Donald Trump and his lies, and Vance’s lies about Springfield, Ohio.
I fear that we’re going to see even more of that now because Vance got his message out and it’s going to be Vance normalized, Vance validated, Vance quoted, Vance clipped, and we have another MAGA news cycle.
Thoughts? Email us at theopinions@nytimes.com.
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Derek Arthur.
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