This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 3 episode of “All in With Chris Hayes.”
Sen. JD Vance lies with such ease that even sometimes when you’re paying attention, you don’t know you’re being lied to and, frankly, it drives me insane.
Just take this moment from Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate:
If [Democrats] really believe that climate change is serious, what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America and that’s not what they’re doing … If you really want to make the environment cleaner, you’ve got to invest in more energy production. We haven’t built a nuclear facility, I think one, in the past 40 years.
But that’s just not true: The United States, under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, already produces more energy than any other nation on earth. Biden’s Energy Department helped open the second of two nuclear reactors in Georgia in May. These were the first new reactors built in the United States in more than 30 years. And in July, Biden signed a bipartisan bill into law aimed at vastly growing domestic nuclear energy.
So, what do you call it when someone says the opposite of the truth? Let’s just call it the Trump-Vance campaign: an entire political movement premised on Americans not believing their lying eyes and directing hate and rage at out–groups, rather than dealing with the thorny work of attempting to solve real problems with actual solutions.
Vance proved as much with his debate performance Tuesday night. He claimed there were 25 million unauthorized immigrants in the country, a made-up figure he’s repeated often on the campaign trail. The actual number, experts say, is less than half of that. He then suggested Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were “illegal immigrants” when they in fact hold protected status.
He falsely claimed that Mexican cartels were running guns across the border into the U.S. But everyone who covers the border knows guns flow from America, where they’re readily available, to Mexico which has some of the strictest gun laws in the world. Vance also said crime, inflation and border crossings are up. The opposite is true; they are all falling. This is about Trump and Vance gaslighting you into not knowing what to believe. But my favorite lie from Tuesday’s debate was when Vance said — in a manner so assured that I literally had a moment where I thought I maybe was missing something — that Donald Trump spearheaded a bipartisan effort to save the Affordable Care Act. Again, this just isn’t true. In 2016, Trump ran on a promise to kill the ACA. And, as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, pointed out during the debate, Trump came within one Senate vote of succeeding in killing it. Look, this isn’t about two parties having good-faith disagreements on whether some policy will have the promised effects. It’s about Trump and Vance gaslighting you into not knowing what to believe. Creating this alternate reality has become a central part of their campaign.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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