Dana Milbank: “You weren’t supposed to fact check me!”

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank was quick to respond to the vice presidential debate last night:

Half an hour into Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, J.D. Vance filed a whiny protest.

“Margaret,” he told moderator Margaret Brennan of CBS News, “the rules were you weren’t going to do any fact checking!”

It was a lie on top of another lie, supplemented by a few other lies to support an even bigger lie.

There was no ‘rule’ against fact checking. And Vance had just told some guy about it. He had claimed that in Springfield, Ohio, “you have schools that are overwhelmed, you have hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have housing that is completely unaffordable because we have brought in millions of illegal immigrants.”

There is no “open border,” Kamala Harris is not the president, and the thousands of Haitian migrants Vance referred to have legal status, as Brennan rightly pointed out. But Vance claimed that “what is actually going on” was that the Haitian migrants are there as part of “facilitating illegal immigration” – and he continued until the moderators turned off the candidates’ microphones.

Donald Trump cheered on his running mate from the sidelines. “Margaret Brennan just lied again about the ILLEGAL MIGRATION brought into our country by Lyin’ Kamala Harris, and then she turned off JD’s mic to keep him from correcting her!” he posted on Truth Social.

The up-and-down moment was all the more galling because it was a response to Vance’s original slur about Springfield’s Haitian immigrants: that they brought crime, disease and, yes, the cats and dogs of the city’s residents. Vance declined to back down from that smear during the debate, instead saying, “The people I’m most concerned about in Springfield, Ohio, are the American citizens whose lives have been destroyed by Kamala’s open border Harris.”

It feels completely appropriate that CBS has chosen to hold the vice presidential debate in a studio that was once home to “Captain Kangaroo.”

For three decades beginning in the mid-1950s, the Captain, along with Mr. Green Jeans, Mr. Bunny Rabbit, Mr. Moose and other friends, treated children to fantastic stories, a magical drawing board and cartoons featuring the likes of Tom. Awesome, a shape-shifting boy who lived in a treehouse and could transform himself into anything he wanted by using the funnel-shaped hat that sat on his head.

But Captain Kangaroo has never conjured up as bizarre a figure as JD Vance.

This shape-shifting kid has gone from a never-Trump author who compared the “reprehensible” Trump to Adolf Hitler in 2016, to a venture capitalist who said in 2020 that Trump “completely failed to deliver,” to the junior senator from Ohio who, as Trump’s running mate in 2024, worships the ground the former president walks on.

Vance has used his own magical drawing board to create a playful portrait of reality this election season. He has embraced the fiction that Trump won the 2020 election. He has falsely claimed that Democrats were responsible for two assassination attempts on Trump. He has supported Trump’s routine lies about crime, jobs, tariffs and the border. He has vilified his vice presidential opponent, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, accusing him of “stolen courage” after Walz’s 24 years of honorable military service. And he has led the despicable demonization of Haitians in Springfield.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he admitted on CNN last month.

And that’s exactly what he did during the debate. Walz was not a particularly skilled debater; he stumbled over words, at one point saying, “I’ve become friends with school shooters,” when referring to the families of school shooting victims. But even if Walz had been quicker on his feet, there would have been no way to keep up with the fictions Vance advanced.

The senator said Harris “became the appointed border czar.” She has not received such an appointment.
He said “more than $100 billion” of Iranian assets were released “thanks to the Kamala Harris administration.” Not so.

On abortion, he said he has “never supported a national ban.” When he ran for Senate two years ago, he said he would “certainly want abortion to be illegal nationally.”

On the health care front, he was the headline of the evening when he said Trump “saved” the “collapsing” Affordable Care Act. Instead of destroying Obamacare, Vance said, “Donald Trump has worked in a bipartisan manner to ensure that Americans have access to affordable care.”
In reality, of course, Trump did his best to kill Obamacare. (John McCain famously thwarted efforts in the Senate.)

Vance concluded the evening by saying that Trump had “peacefully” transferred power four years ago. When Walz asked him point-blank whether Trump lost that election, Vance didn’t answer.

Throughout the debate, Vance acted as if Harris was the president, referring to “Kamala Harris’ open border” and “Kamala Harris’ atrocious economic record.” He claimed that “Kamala Harris allowed fentanyl in” and “enabled the Mexican drug cartels to operate freely in this country.”

And on Truth Social, Trump added even crazier claims. “Tim Walz wants to abolish ICE. …I saved our country from the China virus. …CBS IS LYING AGAIN about the 2020 election.” And best of all: “JD Vance just CRUSHED Tampon Tim with the FACTS.”

Fact check: half true. JD Vance just crushed the facts.

In addition:

NPR fact-checked the debate in real time.