Key V.P. Debate Takeaway Shows How Out of Touch Trump Is on Abortion

American voters had one unanimous takeaway from the vice presidential debate Tuesday night, and it veered directly into territory that the Republican ticket has spent months trying to avoid.

Google Trends data indicates that, despite the country’s divided attention on various key political issues, all 50 states were laser focused on just one topic after the 90-minute matchup between Ohio Senator JD Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz: abortion.

Vance, who has previously likened abortion to murder, spent some of his time outright flaunting his support for a national abortion ban for cameras, attempting to frame himself as a flexible moderate on the issue rather than a politician who in 2023 described the procedure’s near-total restriction as a “minimum national standard.” Language on Vance’s website from his 2022 Senate race also described him as “100 percent pro-life.”

“I never supported a national ban,” Vance claimed during the debate. “I did, during when I was running for Senate in 2022, talk about setting some minimum national standard. For example, we have a partial-birth abortion ban … in place in this country at the federal level. I don’t think anybody is trying to get rid of that, or at least, I hope not, though I know the Democrats have taken a very radical pro-abortion stance.”

Vance also made an appeal to the hearts of Americans, invoking the image of a friend who he said required an abortion to escape an abusive relationship. But he failed to mention that the legislation he supported would have forced her to remain in the situation.

That discrepancy was enough to catch the attention of the country, who merged their disparate interests into a unanimous search engine query that swept the nation.

That data flies in the face of a major Republican claim: that people don’t actually care about abortion and are more interested in other issues.

The Republican ticket has attempted to soften its anti-choice position in the weeks building up to the election in an attempt to appeal to women’s rights activists and draw more voters to Donald Trump’s campaign. But the practical effects of Trump’s last administration are still obvious, not least of all instilling a hyperconservative Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade, which Trump has proudly taken credit for. In 2023, the former president also claimed that he should be celebrated for every single state abortion ban.

Project 2025, the far-right, Christian nationalist blueprint for a potential second Trump administration, is also all in on banning the procedure, going so far as to propose criminalizing the mailing of abortion medications and devices.

Donald Trump and his MAGA fans have aligned on one sad talking point about Tuesday’s vice presidential debate: CBS did a bad job and broke its own fact-checking rules. 

“Margaret Brennan just ‘fact checked’ JD, incorrectly, on ‘Climate Change.’ When is she going to fact check Tampon Tim on all of his false statements?” wrote Trump on Truth Social as the debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz aired live.

Trump got especially heated after fellow moderator Norah O’Donnell asked about his efforts to steal the 2020 election. “CBS is LYING AGAIN about the 2020 Election,” complained Trump, calling the question a “statement.”

“CBS IS FAKE NEWS!” he declared. 

To be clear, though CBS said the onus was on the candidates to correct each other, the moderators made no promise to stay out of the fray completely. But that didn’t stop Republicans. Perhaps the biggest outrage came when Vance freaked out after being fact-checked live on his immigration claims, as the moderators cut his microphone and reminded him that Haitian immigrants in Ohio have legal status. Many of Trump’s biggest fans, including Elon Musk, quickly complained that CBS wasn’t playing fair.

Fox News’s Sean Hannity took to the spin room to slam the vice presidential debate moderators as “blatantly biased.”

“CBS, they should frankly be ashamed, they didn’t keep to the rules,” said Hannity Tuesday night. “So-called moderators immediately broke their promise not to serve as fact-checkers in order to help Tim Walz.”

“CBS was terrible,” said Fox News’s Jesse Watters. 

Megyn Kelly put it simply: “F you CBS—how DARE YOU.”

On Wednesday, Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told Newsmax she wasn’t happy with the network. “When they fact-checked Senator Vance and shut off his mic, I thought that was pretty alarming,” Leavitt whined. “The rules they agreed to were not to fact-check the candidates on the stage, but they just could not help themselves.”

“They were getting triggered by Senator Vance speaking the truth so powerfully and so eloquently.”

During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Ohio Senator JD Vance refused to answer a direct question on whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called Vance’s response “a damning nonanswer.”

CNN’s Jim Acosta tried to ask the same simple question to Corey Lewandowski, a senior adviser with the Trump campaign, in an interview on Wednesday.

“Yeah Corey, why is this so difficult for the Trump campaign to answer? I mean, it’s 2024,” Acosta said. “Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election, can you answer that?”

Like Vance, Lewandowski attempted to sidestep actually answering the question.

“Jim, I think it’s very simple,” Lewandowski said. “The American people have passed the 2020 election, and focused on an election which is just under five weeks away.”

“So look, we can go back and relitigate the 2020 election or we can look at what we can do to make America for the everyday Americans who are struggling under Bidenomics—”

“Yeah, but Corey,” Acosta interjected. “It’s not relitigating, it’s just a simple question. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? I mean, that’s easy.”

“Why are we talking about 2020 anymore?” Lewandowski said. “Does the American people care about the 2020 election anymore?”

Acosta pointed out that on the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly claimed that there was “widespread fraud” in 2020, and had already begun to tee up challenges to election results.

“But Jim, Jim, we know there was fraud, there’s no question there was some fraud that took place in the 2020 election,” Lewandowski said. “There’s no question about that.”

“No widespread fraud,” Acosta clarified.

“But what does widespread mean, Jim? I mean, is one vote that was illegal enough?” Lewandowski said, exasperated.

“There were instances of voter fraud from Trump supporters,” Acosta pointed out. “I mean, you know that from the 2020 campaign.”

Trump and his allies have been accused of coordinating a plot in which 84 fake electors across seven states signed false electoral certificates claiming that Trump won the presidential election in their states.

Acosta noted that experts, including officials from the Trump campaign, had affirmed that there was no widespread voter fraud, as Lewandowski continued to spiral about what “widespread” actually meant.

“So I guess what you’re saying is, is that Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election,” Acosta interjected. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“What I’m saying is Joe Biden is the president of the United States. You recognize that, and I recognize that,” Lewandowski said, continuing to whine about how they ought to talk about the 2024 election instead.

“Will Donald Trump honor the results of the 2024 election?” Acosta pressed. “Will he do that?”

“Jim, did-did-did Hillary Clinton honor the results? No. Did Democrats honor the results?” Lewandowski cried.

“Yes, she did. She called and conceded the election,” Acosta replied.

As Lewandowski continued to rant, Acosta explained, “Corey I was with you guys on election night in Manhattan in 2016. She called, she called the then president elect and conceded the election.”

Completely unwilling to address any of Acosta’s “hypotheticals” or reckon with his own damning nonanswer, Lewandowski continued to rant about illegal immigration and the economy.

It’s become increasingly clear that no member of the Trump campaign is willing to answer simple questions about the previous election, or ensure a peaceful transition of power in the next one.

On Tuesday night, Donald Trump made a threat against the electoral process that was quickly overshadowed by the vice presidential debate.

The former president was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for a campaign speech, after which he took questions from the press. Trump was asked whether “he trusts the process this time around,” alluding to his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election and attempts to overturn it.

“I’ll let you know in about 33 days,” Trump said, about the time until November’s elections.

It’s a disturbing statement from Trump, and this close to the election, it’s a promise to follow through on the other similar election threats he’s made in the last few months. It’s worth remembering that he’s been refusing to say that he would accept unfavorable election results since his 2016 campaign for president. And his infamous rejection of the 2020 presidential election results was followed by the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, as well as fake elector plots across the country in states including Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

This time around, his supporters are already plotting to swing the election in his favor. In Georgia, his supporters are using the state election board to make changes that would help him. Across the country, many Republicans say they won’t accept the election results if he loses and even pledge to take action. Trump himself is attacking the U.S. Postal Service and laying the groundwork to delegitimize mail-in ballots, even though his handpicked Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is hurting the postal system on his own.

November’s election could very well be chaotic, especially if results are very close in battleground states. Trump is desperate to return to the White House and enact vengeance on his enemies, as well as bury the legal cases against him. Will the electoral system be able to withstand MAGA’s plots?

JD Vance’s big idea to prevent school shootings is … bigger locks?

During the vice presidential debate Tuesday, Vance offered his answer to how he would address school shootings. “And I say this, not loving the answer,” Vance said.

“We have to make the doors lock better. We have to make the doors stronger,” Vance explained. “We’ve got to make the windows stronger, and, of course, we’ve got to increase school resource officers. Because the idea that we can magically wave a wand and take guns out of the hands of bad guys, it just doesn’t fit with recent experience.”

It was a particularly weak moment for Vance, who had previously touted that he had “well-developed views on public policy” he planned to put on display during the debate.

Online, it seemed like Vance was the only one into his limp answer to gun violence.

A Gen-Z college student interviewed by MSNBC after the debate called Vance’s answer “ridiculous.”

“I mean, the issue is guns, the issue is not better locks on doors,” she said.

California Representative Adam Schiff wrote in a post on X, “Vance solution for gun violence? Stronger doors at school? Stronger windows? Really?How about an assault weapons ban and background checks. And a VP who put kids over the NRA.”

Meanwhile, Vance’s opponent, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz replied, “Sometimes it is just the guns.”

Last month, after a deadly mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia, Vance resigned himself to school shootings as a bleak “fact of life” and made a similar suggestion about school security being the solution.

“We’ve got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able to,” Vance said.

At the time, Vance was criticized for his callous acceptance of mass violence and blatant reluctance to strengthen gun laws.

Donald Trump has fleshed out his Project 2025–inspired Department of Education plan, and it involves handing the reins and lofty responsibilities of public school administration over to a group of people with all the time in the world: parents.

“I figure we’ll have like one person plus a secretary,” the Republican presidential nominee told a crowd in Milwaukee Tuesday night. “You’ll have a secretary to a secretary. We’ll have one person plus a secretary, and all the person has to do is, ‘Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing? Reading, writing, and arithmetic. And are you not teaching woke?’

“Not teaching woke is a big factor,” Trump continued. “We’ll have a very small staff. We can occupy that staff right in this room, actually I think this room is too large. And all they’re going to do is they’re going to see that the basics are taken care of. You know, we don’t want someone to get crazy and start teaching a language that we don’t want them to teach.”

Not only do parents already have enough on their plates without trying to run the public school system, it’s likely that Trump has a specific group of parents in mind to direct education policy.

The goals he lays out are startlingly akin to the policy points of the far-right “parents’ rights” group Moms for Liberty, who hosted Trump as the keynote speaker at their annual conference in September. Moms for Liberty has recently ingratiated itself significantly into national politics and was listed as a member of Project 2025’s advisory board.

In the same speech, Trump also drew attention to the amount of real estate occupied in D.C. by Department of Education buildings, plotting that the dissolution of the federal agency would allow “somebody else to move in.”

“They’re run by the state, and run by the parents, because in Washington—you know half of the buildings, such a large number, every building you pass in Washington says Department of Education,” Trump said. “You’re gonna have a lot of vacant space. Now we can have maybe somebody else move in.”

Trump’s proposal to dismantle the Department of Education wholesale is nearly identical to Project 2025, despite his campaign spending months trying to distance itself from the 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto.

Project 2025 has also proposed revisiting federal approval of the abortion pill, banning pornography nationwide, placing the Justice Department under the control of the president, slashing federal funds for climate change research in an effort to sideline mitigation efforts, and increasing funding for the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate may not have changed many minds in the electorate. 

Polls following the contest between Republican Senator JD Vance and Democratic Governor Tim Walz don’t show an uncontested winner, with CNN reporting that 51 percent of viewers gave the edge to Vance versus 49 percent for Walz.

The favorability numbers for both candidates improved after the debate: Walz’s went from 46 percent favorable and 32 percent unfavorable to 59 percent favorable and 22 percent unfavorable among people who watched the debate. Vance’s numbers went from 30 percent favorable and 52 percent unfavorable to 41 percent favorable and 44 percent unfavorable.

But largely, the debate didn’t change many people’s minds.

Politico’s polls found that who viewers thought won the debate depended on their political loyalties. About 72 percent of Democrats think Walz won the debate, with a similar number of Republicans thinking Vance won. Perhaps more importantly, Walz won over independents, with 58 percent of them saying that he was the winner as opposed to 42 percent for Vance—but these people were also more likely to say they didn’t even watch the debate.  

Demographically, Walz’s strongest support came from people who tend to support the Democratic Party: younger people, those aged between 25 and 34, people with college degrees, and Black and Latino poll respondents, according to Politico. Vance drew his support from Republican standbys: people over 55, white voters, and people without college degrees. Men and women were evenly divided on who won. 

Vance came into Tuesday night’s debate in a massive polling deficit, showing him as more unpopular than any other vice presidential pick in modern U.S. history at this point in the race. He may have improved his standing somewhat given that starting point, but it wasn’t at the expense of Walz. Republicans don’t have much of an answer for Vance’s unpopularity, so it’s up to the Republican vice presidential nominee to improve his stock. 

On Tuesday night, while Vance did say some horrific things about January 6 and immigration, it doesn’t appear to have hurt him, at least according to these early polls. Now he just has the task of staying away from weirdness and hoping more damaging statements from his past don’t resurface.

There was another incredible fact-check during debate night on Tuesday that came only after the stage lights turned off.

In the spin room, Donald Trump Jr. spoke with CNN journalist Kaitlan Collins, using the opportunity to complain about what he sees as the demonization of his father by the media.

“The media has radicalized the people that are trying to kill my father. I’ve had to deal with that twice now in the last two months,” said Trump’s eldest son. “That didn’t just magically happen, that’s not him. The media created the fake Russia scenario,” he continued, winding up to place the blame of political violence squarely on Democrats and journalists.

“You can’t blame the media for those threats,” Collins replied. “There’s been no evidence that that’s what drove those—”

“When someone calls and allows people to have a platform to call someone literally Hitler every day for nine years, it creates it,” Trump interjected. “Whether you want to believe it or not, that’s a fact.” What he didn’t realize, however, is that he set the journalist up for a scathing correction.

“But as you know, JD Vance once likened your dad to Hitler as well. He questioned if he was America’s Hitler,” Collins reminded him.

One wonders how Don Jr. could even forget this, considering that Vance himself was asked about his disparaging comments about Trump, including the Hitler comparison, on the debate stage just an hour before.

In his response, Vance similarly blamed the media for misleading him about the former president. “I believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record,” said Vance, using the typical MAGA scapegoat to explain away his long list of previous critiques.

Donald Trump’s potential second vice president—Ohio Senator J.D. Vance—brushed off the events of January 6 during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, and refused to definitively say whether he would challenge November’s election results.

While cooking up an answer for the last question of the debate, Vance dove into the hypercharged history of the attempted MAGA coup, but with his own revisionist twist.

“The governors of every state in the nation, Republicans and Democrats, certified the 2020 election results and sent a legal slate of electors to Congress for January 6,” said CBS News’s 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?”

Vance immediately attempted to deflect the question, focusing instead on inflation, housing, and groceries, before quickly addressing the actual content of O’Donnell’s question.

“Look, what President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020, and my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully, in the public square, and that’s all I’ve said, and that’s all that Donald Trump has said,” Vance said, without making mention of any of the multiple instances in which Trump has publicly defended his supporters who ransacked the U.S. Capitol.

Vance opted to double down during a heated back and forth with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz moments later.

“He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said, turning to face Vance. “I would just ask that, did he lose the 2020 election?”

“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance responded, twisting his argument into a weird tie-in about Vice President Kamala Harris and Facebook’s content moderation policies during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“That is a very damning nonanswer,” Walz said.

“I don’t run Facebook,” Walz continued. “What I do know is I see a candidate out there who refused and now, again, and I’m pretty shocked by this. He lost the election. This is not a debate. This is not, anywhere other than in Donald Trump’s world. When Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage.

“Where is the firewall, if he knows he can do anything including taking an election, and his vice president’s not going to stand to it? That’s what we’re asking you, America. Will you keep your oath of office, even if the president doesn’t?” Walz said. “So, America, I think you’ve got a really clear choice on who is gonna honor that democracy and who is gonna honor Donald Trump.”

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was asked to respond to Donald Trump’s outlandish abortion talking point during the vice presidential debate Tuesday.

“Former President Trump said in the last debate that you believe that abortion ‘in the ninth month is absolutely fine.’ Yes or no, is that what you support?” asked CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell.

“That’s not what the bill says, but look, this issue is what’s on everyone’s mind,” Walz replied, explaining that Trump had made way to destroy national protections for abortion.

During the presidential debate last month, Trump had claimed that Walz supported abortion in the ninth month—and after. Trump claimed that Walz “also says, ‘Execution after birth’—execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born—is OK. And that’s not OK with me.”

No one supports “abortion in the ninth month,” which is not a medical procedure, but Republicans continue to claim Democrats do in order to fearmonger about abortion.

During the vice presidential debate, Trump posted an all-caps rant on Truth Social claiming he doesn’t support a national abortion ban.

The moderators repeatedly asked questions of Walz that were shaped around right-wing talking points. When asking the two candidates to explain their leadership qualities, Walz was asked specifically to respond to reporting Tuesday that suggested he’d lied about being in Tiananmen Square in May 1989—a startlingly specific question, which clearly knocked Walz off his game. Walz took the opportunity to introduce himself to the viewers, and when pushed on the question, said that he “misspoke.”

Meanwhile, J.D. Vance was not asked about admitting to blatantly lying about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.