JD Vance is a con artist, and the debate proved it 

JD Vance’s performance in this week’s vice presidential debate was real slick. A radical devotee of the MAGA cause, branded as “weird” by his critics and unpopular in polls, the Republican VP nominee used the debate to debut Vance 2.0. Or is it Vance 3.0 now? Maybe 4.0? 

This version of Vance resurrected former President George W. Bush’s brand of compassionate conservatism. Voters heard nothing of his previous claims regarding childless cat ladies, immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, or how “Universities Are the Enemy.” 

No, the man who made millions as a corporate lawyer and ruthless venture capitalist used the debate to reinvent himself as a dedicated servant of the downtrodden and dispossessed. He flipped the playbook on the Harris-Walz campaign and at every turn tried to address the concerns of America’s middle class. With a straight face, he even managed to seem like he takes climate change seriously. 

Vance’s debate performance was an elaborate ruse, whether he was talking about himself or his running mate. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “JD Vance’s Version of Trump Is Better Than the Real Thing.” 

Let the voter beware. 

The ruse started when Vance rolled out a conveniently abbreviated version of his biography. “I was raised in a working-class family. My mother required food assistance for periods of her life. My grandmother required Social Security help to raise me. And she raised me in part because my own mother struggled with addiction for a big chunk of my early life….I stand here asking to be your vice president with extraordinary gratitude for this country, for the American dream that made it possible for me to live my dreams.” 

There was no mention of Yale Law School, no mention of his wealth, nor of that fact that his rise in the Republican Party has been “powered by a small group of technology billionaires, with Peter Theil, who poured millions into Vance’s 2022 Senate race, at the center.” 

As the New York Times has said of Vance, “behind his cynical culture-warring — behind his professed allegiance to Everyman totems like Mountain Dew — he’s closely tied to a tech-sector ethos that’s anything but populist.” 

You wouldn’t know it from anything the Ohio senator said Tuesday night. 

Vance used a question about climate change to trot out some of his well-rehearsed compassionate conservative lines, calling Hurricane Helene “an unbelievable, unspeakable human tragedy.   

“I mean,” he continued, “these are communities that I love, some of them I know very personally. In Appalachia, all across the Southeast, they need their government to do their job. And I commit that when Donald Trump is president again, the government will put the citizens of this country first when they suffer from a disaster.” 

Perhaps he was channeling former President Bush, but recall also how horribly Bush handled his hurricane disaster. 

And how about former President Trump ‘s anything-but-compassionate response to the suffering of the Puerto Rican people after Hurricane Florence in 2018, when he thoughtlessly tossed rolls of paper towels to a crowd in a church on the island? Even some of his aides conceded that he was “acting insensitively.” The Washington Post got it right when it said that the moment “has come to symbolize…Trump’s inability to sympathize with others — and his self-absorbed leadership in a time of crisis.” 

Vance’s sudden embrace of neighborly love in his otherwise hate-filled campaign with Trump can’t obliterate that stain. 

There were several other standout moments in Vance’s 90-minute con-job; among the highlights was his response to a question about immigration.  

After his opponent, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, reminded viewers of the lies Vance previously told about migrants in Springfield, Ohio, Vance said “Governor Walz brought up the community of Springfield, and he’s very worried about the things that I’ve said in Springfield.”  

Look,” Vance continued, “in Springfield, Ohio and in communities all across this country, you’ve got schools that are overwhelmed, you’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.” 

Vance seemed to have forgotten what he had posted on Sept. 9 — that Haitian migrants in Springfield are “generally causing chaos…people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”

Still another example of Vance’s compassionate con came when he talked about abortion. From what he said on Tuesday, you would never know that a scant two years ago he announced he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally.” On Tuesday, there was no talk of such a ban from Vance; quite the opposite, in fact. 

“I grew up,” Vance reiterated, “in a working-class family in a neighborhood where I knew a lot of young women who had unplanned pregnancies and decided to terminate those pregnancies because they feel like they didn’t have any other options….What I take from that is that my party, we’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue where they frankly just don’t trust us. And I think that’s one of the things that Donald Trump and I are endeavoring to do.” 

Like his fellow travelers in the con-man trade, Vance pretended to be a person he is not, selling views he does not hold, trying to persuade voters to believe something that is not true — anything to fuel his own political ambitions. He hoped to capitalize on the well-known penchant of Americans to “get conned again and again.”

JD Vance showed himself to have no shame, even as he gave a thoroughly shameful debate performance. 

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. His views do not necessarily reflect those of Amherst College.