Called Upon to Lie for Trump, JD Vance Stumbled

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it is said. And in Washington, so is stealing credit.

Is there a better example than Republican lawmakers praising themselves for “saving” the federal health-care law that they fought long and hard to defeat, repeal and otherwise sabotage?

Now we can count both former President Donald Trump and his GOP running mate — and ideological Mini-Me — Sen. JD Vance of Ohio in that number.

You don't have to be a TV network “fact checker” to know that Trump and Vance are telling whoppers about the Republican record on health care reform. You only need to have been mildly sentient during Trump's presidency.

For example, during the vice presidential debate with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vance proudly claimed that Trump "salvaged" the Affordable Care Act, informally known as “Obamacare,” and tried to improve it during his time in office.

"When Obamacare was crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden and health care costs, Donald Trump could have destroyed the program,” said Vance. ”Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care."

Oh, please. Whatever the Trump administration may have done to "save" the ACA came after repeated attempts to kill it.

On his very first day as president, Trump eagerly happily signed an executive order to repeal the government-funded Obamacare. That made for a suitable photo op but had little impact in real life on the complicated behemoth of government health care.

More legislative proposals to “repeal and replace” the law followed. They included measures to restructure Medicaid, weaken protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions and shift funding of private insurance away from the poorest and sickest toward those who were healthier and wealthier.

Many of us who care about this important issue recall how vigorously Trump worked his signature pen to weaken Obamacare marketplaces, cut spending for advertising and enrollment assistance, and channel funds to different priorities — such as funding videos and social media messaging criticizing the ACA — to please conservatives.

“We’ll let Obamacare fail,” Mr. Trump said in July 2017, when the repeal bills were struggling. “And then the Democrats are going to come to us.”

As it happened, despite widespread public skepticism about the ACA, inspired in no small part by the vigorous efforts of Republicans to trash it, once the law was enacted, millions of uninsured Americans gained access to real health care and the program’s popularity grew. Republicans now recognize it for the “third rail” that it is on Capitol Hill: Touch it and you die.

So we have Donald Trump to thank for the success of Obamacare? I can only imagine the mental gymnastics that it took for Vance, a highly intelligent and educated person, to convince himself of that proposition, or at least to pretend he believed it.

Mark it down to chutzpah, if you like, but there was a different lie, a much more serious lie, that Vance could not bring himself to enunciate.

For most of the night, the more polished and media savvy Vance seemed to be winning the debate, in my view. But when Walz challenged him to say who won the 2020 election, Vance’s discomfort with his running mate's growing web of half-truths, fabrications and outright lies seemed to show itself.

As simple as the question "Who won the 2020 election?" might be to answer in most galaxies, in MAGA world it is the defining issue, the shibboleth that separates the true Trump believers from the perfidious RINOs — Republicans in name only.

Vance, a rising star in that world, refused to give a direct answer.

He ducked, dodged, obfuscated and tried to change the subject. He tried to do a little sidestep, saying he preferred to stay "focused on the future,” an old dodge by politicians who find themselves to be thoroughly uncomfortable with the present.

Reeled back toward the question at hand, he tried another dodge. He wanted to answer a question he asked himself about whether Kamala Harris censored Americans from speaking their minds in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

No dice. Walz then cut in with one of his most aggressive attack lines of the evening: “That is a damning non-answer.”

Indeed, having dug himself into a hole, Vance figuratively pulled dirt in on top of himself: He declined to rule out challenging the outcome of the 2024 race, a mission Trump tried unsuccessfully to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to complete.

Now Pence is widely praised for having done the right thing on Jan.6, 2021. With our constitutional system at stake, he would not lie for Trump.

That’s integrity young JD should learn from and emulate, if he can.

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(Clarence Page, who won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1989, was a member of the Tribune Editorial Board from 1984 to his retirement in 2024. He can be reached at cptimee@gmail.com.)