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      Giuliani’s attempts to overturn 2020 election partly thwarted by wrong number

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      Rudy Giuliani texted the wrong number as he tried to persuade Michigan legislators to help overthrow the 2020 election.According to a document unsealed in federal court on Wednesday, on 7 December 2020, Giuliani tried to send a message urging someone unspecified to help in the plan to appoint a slate of fake electors.“So I need you to pass a joint resolution from the legislature that states the election is in dispute, there’s an ongoing investigation by the legislature, and the Electors sent by Governor Whitmer are not the official electors of the state of Michigan and do not fall within the Safe Harbor deadline under Michigan law,” Giuliani wrote.As Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election, his allies sought to appoint alternate slates of electors in states that he lost to send to Congress. These false slates of electors met in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona and signed certificates in which they represented that they were valid electors in their states. Trump allies then attempted to send those certificates to Congress for counting on 6 January 2021. The plan failed.Some of the electors have since been charged criminally, while others have not. Some have said they were told that they were instructed they were acting as a backup in case Trump won court cases challenging the election results.Prosecutors said Giuliani failed to send the message because “he put the wrong number into his phone,” prosecutors wrote.The detail was included in a legal brief by the special counsel Jack Smith that was unsealed by the US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the federal election interference case against Trump.The brief, which contains several new details about Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 race, argues why Trump should be held accountable – specifically, why he is not entitled to immunity after the US supreme court held that presidents cannot be charged for “official acts” while in office.Giuliani is an unnamed co-conspirator in the case.He also faces criminal charges in Georgia and Arizona over his efforts to overturn the election results.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe has had his law license suspended in New York and has been disbarred in Washington DC over his involvement in the scheme. He is also appealing a judgment that he owes two Georgia election workers nearly $150m for defaming them after the 2020 election.Giuliani has a history of sloppy cellphone use. According to New York magazine, he once accidentally called an NBC reporter and left a message in which he could be heard discussing overseas business and said: “We need a few hundred thousand.”He also once appeared to accidentally text a reporter one of his passwords. More

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      JD Vance is the handpicked leader of the antidemocracy movement in America | Robert Reich

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      JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice-president, will almost certainly be the Republican presidential candidate in 2028, regardless of whether Donald Trump wins in November.But who is JD Vance, really? An opportunist chameleon who once viewed Donald Trump as “Hitler” and is now his pit bull?Or does Vance have an agenda over and above mere political ambition?In one of the most important exchanges of Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, Vance refused to say that the former president lost the 2020 election, and he downplayed the violent events of January 6. Vance also declined to rule out challenging the outcome of the upcoming election even if votes were certified by every state leader as legitimate.Trump picked Vance as his running mate because Vance publicly stated he’d do what Mike Pence refused to do – overturn democracy and place the US under Maga control.In response to a question ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Vance last February – “Had you been vice-president on January 6th, would you have certified the election results?” – Vance said: “If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there.”In 2020, Vance alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country”. In 2022, he suggested that Democrats were attempting to “transform the electorate” amid an immigrant “invasion”.Echoing the so-called “great replacement theory”, Vance told voters, “You’re talking about a shift in the democratic makeup of this country that would mean we never win, meaning Republicans would never win a national election in this country ever again.”In contrast to Trump, who has no ideology except accumulating power and wealth for himself and taking revenge on those who would deny these to him, Vance does have an ideology. He’s the emerging leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US.Vance would never have become a senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for the billionaire tech financier Peter Thiel, who staked $15m on Vance’s election – a major portion of all the funds that went into Vance’s race.Thiel knew what he was buying. Vance had worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm before running for the Senate and was part of Thiel’s libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers and disaffected far-right intellectuals.Because Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had significant influence with Trump when urging him to pick Vance for his vice-president.Why has Thiel been such a strong sponsor of Vance? Because Thiel sees in his protege a future leader of a political movement to turn the US away from democracy. “For Peter,” said one of the people familiar with his thinking, “Vance is a generational bet.”Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat’s the point. Thiel and Vance – along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement – believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the US is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the US establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.Yarvin comes as close as anyone as being the intellectual godfather of the anti-democracy movement. He has written that real political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding social order.In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful; they should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.How to achieve Yarvin’s vision? The first step, as Vance offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say” – as did Andrew Jackson – that “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”Vance has been anointed by Thiel and the rest of the anti-democracy movement as the post-Trump president, tasked with replacing the US establishment with an authoritarian regime.Make no mistake: the foundation for the US’s first anti-democracy president is being laid right now.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Melania Trump’s abortion views baffle both sides: ‘Hard to follow the logic’

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      The revelation on Wednesday evening that Melania Trump’s forthcoming memoir includes a full-throated defense of abortion rights, an issue her husband Donald Trump has repeatedly flip-flopped on during his presidential campaign, left people on both sides of the issue less than impressed.“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body,” Melania Trump wrote in her memoir. “I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”Melania Trump also defended the right to abortion later on in pregnancy – a procedure that her husband has repeatedly demonized. (Less than 1% of abortions occur at or past 21 weeks of gestation.)“Sadly for the women across America, Mrs. Trump’s husband firmly disagrees with her and is the reason that more than one in three American women live under a Trump abortion ban that threatens their health, their freedom and their lives,” Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in an email. “Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear: If he wins in November, he will ban abortion nationwide, punish women and restrict women’s access to reproductive health care.”Melania Trump’s remarks also took anti-abortion activists by surprise.“It’s hard to follow the logic of putting out the former First Lady’s book right before the election undercutting President Trump’s message to pro-life voters,” Kristan Hawkins, president of the powerful Students for Life of America, posted on Twitter/X on Wednesday night. “What a waste of momentum.”Over the last several weeks, anti-abortion activists have grown increasingly fed up with the former president, who has struggled, alongside the rest of the Republican party, to redefine his messaging on abortion rights amid outrage over the overturning of Roe v Wade.Earlier in his campaign, Trump bragged about appointing three of the US supreme court justices who voted to overturn Roe, branded himself the “most pro-life president ever”. After Kamala Harris became the presidential nominee, however, Trump has pledged that his administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights” as well as vowed not to sign a national abortion ban – just weeks after refusing to say that he would veto one.Melania Trump’s comments may feel like a further insult to the anti-abortion voters who feel abandoned by Trump, said Republican campaign strategist Liz Mair, adding anti-abortion advocates run potent get-out-the-vote operations. Those advocates were key to Trump’s 2016 victory.“This might be just another thing that piles on to make pro-lifers think: ‘I just can’t with this guy.’ A lot of them were single-issue voters anyway,” Mair said. “He’s not really giving them much of an incentive to show up and do anything to his benefit.”When Tresa Undem, a pollster who has surveyed people about abortion for more than two decades, heard the comments, she immediately thought: “Wow”. Then she thought: “It’s a campaign move.”However, Undem is not sure who, exactly, the move is for – especially given the Trumps’ sometimes frosty relationship in public. Melania Trump has rarely aired her political views and has largely vanished from Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.The odds of Melania Trump’s comments comforting moderate or conservative voters who support abortion rights are “fairly slim”, Undem said.“These strong feelings – they did not suddenly appear this year, right? So she clearly has had no influence on him when it comes to policy related to abortion,” Undem said. “I don’t think she’s ever been positioned, or voters ever think of her, as having any kind of policy position or weight or influence on Trump.” More

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      in Elections

      Special counsel pushes to use Pence against Trump in 2020 election case

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      Special counsel prosecutors intend to make Donald Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence and his efforts to recruit fake electors the centerpiece of his criminal prosecution against the former president, according to a sprawling legal brief that was partly unsealed on Wednesday.The redacted brief, made public by the presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan, shows prosecutors are relying extensively on Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence to support the charge that Trump conspired to obstruct the January 6 certification of the election results.And prosecutors used an equally voluminous portion of the 165-page brief to express their intent to use evidence of Trump trying to get officials in seven key swing states to reverse his defeat to support the charges that he conspired to disenfranchise American voters.The brief’s principal mission was to convince Chutkan to allow the allegations and evidence buttressing the superseding indictment against Trump to proceed to trial, arguing that it complied with the US supreme court’s recent ruling that gave former presidents immunity for official acts.As part of the ruling, the court ordered Chutkan to sort through the indictment and decide which of the allegations against Trump should be tossed because of the immunity rules and which could proceed to trial.The brief was the first round of that process that could take months to resolve and involve hearings to decide what allegations should be kept. Chutkan has the power to decide how much of the indictment can be kept and what evidence can be presented by prosecutors as she makes her decision.According to the redacted brief, prosecutors want to use Trump’s conversations with Pence in the lead-up to the January 6 Capitol attack, interactions between Trump and Pence and other private actors, as well as interactions between White House aides and private actors.The bottom line from prosecutors was that each of the episodes reflected Trump acting not as president but as a candidate for office, which meant the default presumption that conversations between Trump and Pence were official could be rebutted.For instance, prosecutors argued that evidence of Trump using personal lawyers Rudy Giuliani or John Eastman to pressure Pence should be permitted, since using private actors to commit a crime would not be an official act of the presidency or infringe on the functioning of the executive branch.At the White House on 4 January 2021, prosecutors wrote, Trump deliberately excluded his White House counsel from attending a meeting with Pence – meaning the only attorney in the room was Eastman.“It is hard to imagine stronger evidence that the conduct is private than when the president excludes his White House counsel and only wishes to have his private counsel present,” the brief said.View image in fullscreenAnd on a 5 January 2021 phone call, prosecutors wrote, Trump and Eastman were the only ones on the line to make a final effort to pressure Pence to drop his objections and agree not to count slates of electors for Joe Biden when he presided over the congressional certification the next day.“For the defendant’s decision to include private actors in the conversation with Pence about his role at the certification makes even more clear that there is no danger to the executive branch’s functions and authority, because it had no bearing on any executive branch authority,” it said.Prosecutors added that the conversations between Trump and Pence that they wanted to present at trial should be allowed because there was nothing official about them discussing electoral prospects as candidates for office.Referencing previously undisclosed evidence, prosecutors showed that Pence at various points suggested that “the process was over” and that Trump consider running again in 2024 – key evidence that Trump was on notice from his own running mate that he had lost the election.And prosecutors reiterated that charging the most damning evidence that Trump’s lawyers knew they were violating the law – emails where Eastman asked Pence’s counsel Greg Jacob to consider one more “minor violation” of the Electoral Count Act – did not impact the functioning of the executive branch.The expansive brief also included prosecutors asking to take to trial evidence of Trump’s effort to pressure state officials to reverse the results and his effort to then rely on fake slates of electors.The response from Trump’s lawyers is almost certain to be that Trump was calling state officials because he was executing the clause in the US constitution that the president has a duty to ensure the general election was run without interference or fraud.But prosecutors included a pre-emptive rebuttal: “Although countless federal, state, and local races also were on the same ballots … the defendant focused only on his own race, the election for president, and only on allegations favoring him as a candidate in targeted states he had lost.” More

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      in US Politics

      Special counsel reveals new details of Trump bid to overturn 2020 election

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      Donald Trump “resorted to crimes” in a failed bid to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, federal prosecutors said in a newly unsealed court filing that argues that the former US president is not entitled to immunity from prosecution.The filing was unsealed on Wednesday. It was submitted by special counsel Jack Smith’s team following a supreme court opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents and narrowed the scope of the prosecution.Trump’s legal team have employed a delaying strategy in all the numerous legal cases that Trump faces that has mostly been successful.The 165-page filing is probably the last opportunity for prosecutors to detail their case against Trump before the 5 November election given there will not be a trial before Trump faces the Democratic vice-president, Kamala Harris.Prosecutors laid out details including an allegation that a White House staffer heard Trump tell family members that it did not matter if he won or lost the election, “you still have to fight like hell”.The new filing cites previously unknown accounts offered by Trump’s closest aides to paint a portrait of an “increasingly desperate” president who, while losing his grip on the White House, “used deceit to target every stage of the electoral process”.“So what?” the filing quotes Trump as telling an aide after being alerted that his vice-president, Mike Pence, was in potential danger after a crowd of violent supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6.“The details don’t matter,” Trump said, when told by an adviser that a lawyer who was mounting his legal challenges would not be able to prove the false allegations in court, the filing states.The filing includes details of conversations between Trump and Pence, including a private lunch the two had on 12 November 2020, in which Pence “reiterated a face-saving option” for Trump, telling him: “Don’t concede but recognize the process is over,” according to prosecutors.In another private lunch days later, Pence urged Trump to accept the results of the election and run again in 2024.“I don’t know, 2024 is so far off,” Trump told him, according to the filing.But Trump “disregarded” Pence “in the same way he disregarded dozens of court decisions that unanimously rejected his and his allies’ legal claims, and that he disregarded officials in the targeted states – including those in his own party – who stated publicly that he had lost and that his specific fraud allegations were false,” prosecutors wrote.“Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one,” Smith’s team wrote, adding: “When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office.”Trump has pleaded not guilty to four criminal charges accusing him of a conspiracy to obstruct the congressional certification of the election, defraud the US out of accurate results and interfere with Americans’ voting rights.Prosecutors working with Smith divulged their evidence to make the case that the remaining allegations against Trump survive the US supreme court’s ruling that former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official actions taken as president.Prosecutors have said the filing will discuss new evidence, including transcripts of witness interviews and grand jury testimony, but much of that material will not be made public until a trial.Senior officials in Trump’s administration including the former vice-president Mike Pence and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows appeared before the grand jury during the investigation.Prosecutors submitted the court filing on Thursday, but US district judge Tanya Chutkan had to approve proposed redactions before it was made public.Trump’s lawyers opposed allowing Smith to issue a sweeping court filing laying out their evidence, arguing it would be inappropriate to do so weeks before the election. They have argued the entire case should be tossed out based on the supreme court’s ruling.Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called the brief “falsehood-ridden” and “unconstitutional” and repeated oft-stated allegations that Smith and Democrats were “hell-bent on weaponizing the justice department in an attempt to cling to power”.“The release of the falsehood-ridden, Unconstitutional J6 brief immediately following Tim Walz’s disastrous debate performance is another obvious attempt by the Harris-Biden regime to undermine American Democracy and interfere in this election.”The US presidential election is a neck-and-neck contest, with Harris establishing a slight but solid lead over Trump in most national voting surveys. The picture in the all-important swing states is more complex, however, as tight races in these key contests will decide the election.If Trump wins the election, he is likely to direct the justice department to drop the charges.Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      in US Politics

      Melania Trump passionately defends abortion rights in upcoming memoir

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      Melania Trump made an extraordinary declaration in an eagerly awaited memoir to be published a month from election day: she is a passionate supporter of a woman’s right to control her own body – including the right to abortion.“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” the Republican nominee’s wife writes, amid a campaign in which Donald Trump’s threats to women’s reproductive rights have played a central role.“Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”Melania Trump has rarely expressed political views in public. The book, which reveals the former first lady to be so firmly out of step with most of her own party, Melania, will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.View image in fullscreenHer decision to include a full-throated expression of support for abortion rights is remarkable not just given her proximity to a Republican candidate running on an anti-abortion platform, but also given the severe deterioration of women’s reproductive rights under Donald Trump and the GOP.In 2022, in the supreme court case Dobbs v Jackson, three justices installed when Donald Trump was president voted to strike down Roe v Wade, the ruling which had protected federal abortion rights since 1973. Republican-run states have since instituted draconian abortion bans.Donald Trump has tried to both take credit for the Dobbs decision – long the central aim of evangelical and conservative Catholic donors and voters – and avoid the fury it has stoked, saying abortion rights should be decided by the states.But Democrats have scored a succession of election wins by campaigning on the issue, even in conservative states, and threats to reproductive rights, among them threats to fertility treatments including IVF, are proving problematic for Republicans up and down this year’s ticket.Amid a blizzard of statements opponents deem misogynistic and regressive, JD Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for vice-president, has indicated he would support a national abortion ban – a move it seems his boss’s wife would be against.Donald Trump himself recently got into a tangle over whether he would vote in November to protect abortion rights in Florida, a ballot his wife will also cast given their residence at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. He eventually said he would vote no. Judging by her own words, Melania Trump appears likely to vote yes.Her memoir is slim, long on descriptions of her youth in Slovenia, life as a model in New York and love for the man whose third wife she became, correspondingly short on policy discussion. But Donald Trump provides a blurb, praising his wife’s “commitment to excellence … insightful perspective … [and] entrepreneurial achievements”.Before discussing abortion, Melania Trump says she disagreed with her husband on some aspects of immigration policy, not least as an immigrant herself.“Occasional political disagreements between me and my husband,” she says, are “part of our relationship, but I believed in addressing them privately rather than publicly challenging him.”And yet, later in her book, she states views on abortion and reproductive rights diametrically opposed to those of her husband and his party.“I have always believed it is critical for people to take care of themselves first,” Melania Trump writes of her support for abortion rights. “It’s a very straightforward concept; in fact, we are all born with a set of fundamental rights, including the right to enjoy our lives. We are all entitled to maintain a gratifying and dignified existence.“This common-sense approach applies to a woman’s natural right to make decisions about her own body and health.”Melania Trump says her beliefs about abortion rights spring from “a core set of principles”, at the heart of which sits “individual liberty” and “personal freedom”, on which there is “no room for negotiation”.After outlining her support on such grounds for abortion rights, she details “legitimate reasons for a woman to choose to have an abortion”, including danger to the life of the mother, rape or incest, often exceptions under state bans, and also “a congenital birth defect, plus severe medical conditions”.Saying “timing matters”, Melania Trump also defends the right to abortion later in pregnancy.She writes: “It is important to note that historically, most abortions conducted during the later stages of pregnancy were the result of severe fetal abnormalities that probably would have led to the death or stillbirth of the child. Perhaps even the death of the mother. These cases were extremely rare and typically occurred after several consultations between the woman and her doctor. As a community, we should embrace these common-sense standards. Again, timing matters.”More than 90% of US abortions occur at or before 13 weeks of gestation, according to data from the CDC. Less than 1% of abortions take place at or after 21 weeks.On the campaign trail, Republicans have blatantly mischaracterized Democrats’ positions on abortion. Last month, debating Kamala Harris, Donald Trump falsely said his Democratic opponent’s “vice-presidential pick … says that abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. [Tim Walz] also says: ‘Execution after birth’ – execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born – is OK.”He was factchecked: it is not legal in any state to kill a baby after birth.On the page, Melania Trump issues a distinctly un-Trumpian appeal for empathy.“Many women opt for abortions due to personal medical concerns,” she writes. “These situations with significant moral implications weigh heavily on the woman and her family and deserve our empathy. Consider, for example, the complexity inherent in the decision of whether the mother should risk her own life to give birth.”Recent reporting has highlighted cases of women who have died in states where abortion has been banned.She goes on to appeal for compassion.“When confronted with an unexpected pregnancy, young women frequently experience feelings of isolation and significant stress. I, like most Americans, am in favor of the requirement that juveniles obtain parental consent before undergoing an abortion. I realize this may not always be possible. Our next generation must be provided with knowledge, security, safety, and solace, and the cultural stigma associated with abortion must be lifted,” writes the former first lady.Finally, Melania Trump offers an expression of solidarity with protesters for reproductive rights.“The slogan ‘My Body, My Choice’ is typically associated with women activists and those who align with the pro-choice side of the debate,” she writes. “But if you really think about it, ‘My Body, My Choice’ applies to both sides – a woman’s right to make an independent decision involving her own body, including the right to choose life. Personal freedom.” More

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      JD Vance’s debate lines were so polished you could forget they made no sense | Moira Donegan

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      Maybe he thought the pink tie could help. JD Vance, the Ohio senator and Donald Trump’s running mate, clearly set out to make himself seem less creepy at Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, and a major target of this project was aimed at convincing women voters to like him. Vance, after all, has what pollsters call “high unfavorables”, which is a polite way of saying that people hate his guts.Much of this stems from Vance’s extreme and inflexible views on abortion, his hostility to childless women, and his creepy statements about families and childrearing. He had to convince women that he’s not out to hurt them or monitor their menstrual cycles; he had to try and seem kindly, empathetic, gentle. The resulting 90 minutes felt like watching a remarkably lifelike robot try to imitate normal human emotion. He smiled. He cooed. He spoke of an anonymous woman he knew whom he said was watching, and told her: “Love ya”. And occasionally, when he was fact-checked or received pushback on his falsehoods or distortions, the eyes of his stiff, fixed face flashed with an incandescent rage.A generous characterization of Vance’s performance might be to call it “slick”. Vance delivered practiced answers to questions on healthcare, abortion rights and childcare that were dense with lies and euphemism. Asked about his call for a national abortion ban, Vance insisted that what he wanted was a national “standard” – a standard, that is, to ban it at 15 weeks.He spoke in what was probably supposed to be empathetic terms about a woman he had grown up with who had told him that she felt she had had to have the abortion she got when they were younger, because it allowed her to leave her abusive relationship – without clarifying that the laws that Vance supports would have compelled that woman he purports to care about to carry her abuser’s child to term, and likely become trapped with him.He claimed that Americans didn’t “trust” Republicans on the abortion issue, but did not mention that they don’t trust Republicans because those are the ones taking their rights away.When asked about childcare, Vance spoke in eerily imprecise terms about encouraging people to choose their preferred “family model”, without specifying exactly which “model” he had in mind. He spoke of the “multiple people who could be providing family care options” but did not specify if these “people” had anything in common with each other. In media appearances throughout his career, Vance has been more explicit: he means that women will perform childcare for free – dropping out of paid work in the public sphere to do so, if necessary.Vance was confident and smiling as he delivered these lines; he had the greasy self-assurance of someone who is used to lying to people he thinks are stupider than him. He sounded every bit like the Yale Law lawyer that he is. Even when he was not degrading women’s dignity or condescending to the two female moderators, his answers were often delivered with a polish that seemed intended to conceal the fact that they made no sense.Asked about the housing crisis, for instance, he said that mass deportations – a horrific ethnic-cleansing operation proposed by the Trump campaign that would ruin communities, families and lives – would lower prices by decreasing demand. It was a kind of repeat of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, but this time it wasn’t satire. He also suggested that the government could build housing on federal lands – but neglected to mention that most of those lands are in the vast, rural, empty Mountain West, in regions with lots of tumbleweeds and absolutely no jobs.Perhaps Vance’s quintessential moment of the night came early, when he was attempting to further his smears of the Haitian immigrant community of Springfield, Ohio, whom he had previously targeted with lies that they eat pets. Vance was cut off by the moderators, but talked over them insistently. “Margaret. Margaret. Margaret. Margaret”, he said repeatedly, trying to strong-arm one of the women into letting him talk. As they corrected his misstatements, he whined to the women: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check!”Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, reportedly told Kamala Harris when he was being vetted for the job that he does not consider himself a good debater. Going in, expectations for him were low. And indeed Walz had an uneven night, sometimes appearing flustered or nervous. An early answer on foreign policy, in particular, was confused and unconvincing. But Walz visibly gained confidence throughout the debate, issuing more forceful answers, attacking Trump and Vance’s record, and emphasizing himself, often successfully, as a homespun purveyor of goodwill and common sense.He was most convincing on what seems to be, for him, the most morally animating issues: healthcare and abortion. Walz named Amber Thurman, a woman killed by an abortion ban, as someone whose life could have been saved were it not for Trump’s policies; he spoke with passion and clarity of how Trump’s plan to reverse the Affordable Care Act would kick millions off their insurance.But perhaps Walz’s best moment came near the end of the debate, in a conversation about democracy, when he pointedly asked JD Vance to say whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance dodged.“That’s a damning non-answer,” Walz said. It could have summarized Vance’s whole performance.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More