One of Donald Trump’s superpowers as a politician is his ability to spread false and misleading claims without any apparent shame or indication that he knows better. Most politicians will stumble over themselves when confronted with their own whopper, as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) did in this month’s vice-presidential debate. Trump just charges forward with all the assurance of a man who is surprised to hear you even question his ridiculous claims. That gives his devoted supporters license to embrace his alternate reality.
Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, does not have Trump’s superpower. But what he does pack is a remarkable willingness to defend false claims in blatant, almost Machiavellian terms.
And he’s done it again, this time in response to Trump’s false claims about a Venezuelan gang taking over a city in Colorado.
This first example cropped up last month when Trump and Vance promoted the false claim about Haitian migrants stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. Vance ultimately all but acknowledged they were saying these debunked things to draw attention to a related but distinct issue: the fraught situation brought on by an influx of Haitians in Springfield and other large numbers of migrants coming to this country.
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” Vance told CNN’s Dana Bash, “then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana. Because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”
Vance engaged in a similar exchange Sunday on ABC News with regard to Trump’s claim — which Trump made alongside the Springfield one at last month’s presidential debate — that a Venezuelan gang had taken over Aurora, Colo.
When ABC’s Martha Raddatz brought up the subject and noted that Republican Mayor Mike Coffman had called such claims “grossly exaggerated,” Vance saw his opening.
“Well, Martha, you just said the mayor said they were exaggerated,” he said, adding: “That means there’s got to be some — that means there’s got to be some element of truth here.”
Raddatz noted that, in fact, there were “incidents” with Venezuelan gang members that “were limited to a handful of apartment complexes.”
“Martha, do you hear yourself?” Vance said. “Only a handful of apartment complexes in America were taken over by Venezuelan gangs, and Donald Trump is the problem, and not Kamala Harris’s open border?”
Vance added: “I really find this exchange, Martha, sort of interesting because you seem to be more focused with nitpicking everything that Donald Trump has said rather than acknowledging that apartment complexes in the United States of America are being taken over by violent gangs.”
Trump’s campaign and conservative media and social media users have hailed Vance for fighting back and winning against the supposedly censorious and biased liberal media.
But it’s worth reflecting on the exchange, the actual details in Aurora, and what it says about one side of our political divide’s view of the importance of truth.
Despite Vance’s framing, Raddatz had not granted the premise that the apartment complexes had been “taken over” by a Venezuelan gang; she merely cited “incidents” involving the gang.
Plenty of local officials, too, have described the problem as incidents, not a takeover. In fact, Coffman, after initially saying the gang took over apartment complexes, backed off that claim and said more than a month ago that “a Venezuelan gang is not in control of either of these two apartment complexes.” Local police and other officials also debunked this long ago, including before Trump said it at the Sept. 10 debate.
It’s also worth emphasizing just how far removed that reality is from what Trump continues to say about the situation. Trump has said not only that apartment complexes were taken over, but that the gang “took over large sections of a town, large sections of an area of Colorado.” He mentioned Aurora at the debate while accusing migrants of “taking over the towns.”
The difference here isn’t between taking over a city and taking over some apartment complexes; it’s between taking over a city and taking over … nothing.
Vance’s argument is apparently that Trump is using some license here to highlight a real issue — to use a falsehood to draw attention to an underlying truth. As with Springfield, he’s suggesting that the political ends justify the dishonest means.
That’s certainly a calculation that politicians make. But it’s rare you see them acknowledge it so forthrightly, because implicit in it is that you can’t strictly believe what they’re saying. And if you can’t trust Trump on this, what else can you trust him on? (The answer is: Not much, given Trump’s 30,000 false and misleading claims as president.)
Vance himself once asked such a question about Trump. He suggested in 2016 that Trump’s dishonesty made it hard to believe him when he denied sexually assaulting a woman.
Vance is making a far different calculation today — one that conveniently gives the guy he’s running with license to say pretty much whatever he wants. Which, perhaps not coincidentally, is what Trump was going to do anyway.
Eight years ago, it was Kellyanne Conway’s infamous claims that Trump had “alternative facts.” Today, Vance is putting a new sheen on that.
It’s basically, “Trump 2024: There’s got to be some element of truth here.”