VP Face-Off

The Wildest Facts to Know About JD Vance Before the VP Face-Off

Watching Tuesday’s debate? CBS won’t be fact-checking—so read this first.

Julianne McShane

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) has said a lot of wild things since former President Trump announced him as his running mate back in July.

Since it may all seem like a chaotic blur in retrospect, we took it upon ourselves to highlight some of his past falsehoods, stances, and general absurdities before his Tuesday night debate against Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.)—especially since the CBS moderators will not be fact-checking the candidates in real time.

If you have been living under a rock for the past few months, a) smart move, and b) here are some of Vance’s greatest (worst?) hits to know before he and Walz face off:

• Vance helped spread the racist lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, even after local officials told his office there was no truth to the rumors, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal. Please keep your pets away from this man.
• He seems to harbor an obsession with childfree women (who are, contrary to his assertions, quite happy), whom he has alleged should have less voting power than parents…
• …yet despite his apparent obsession with organizing society around the nuclear family, he also has not ruled out resuming family separations under Trump’s promised “mass deportation” plan. Hypocrisy, thy name is Vance.
• Like Trump, Vance has strong ties to some of the authors of Project 2025—the extremist guidebook for a second Trump term—despite their campaign’s attempts to distance themselves from it. Vance wrote the introduction to a 2017 report published by the Heritage Foundation—the group behind the publication of Project 2025—that promoted banning abortion nationwide and criticized IVF.
• Vance also wrote the introduction to a forthcoming book by Kevin Roberts, president of Heritage and architect of Project 2025, that promises to be a roadmap for conservatives to “take back” the country.
• Speaking of books he’s endorsed: Vance also praised a book that called progressives “unhumans” (my eighth-grade English teacher would like a word), praised insurrectionists, and, as my colleague Noah Lanard wrote, “celebrates right-wing political violence and dictators who committed some of the most notorious atrocities of the 20th century.” I would truly love to know what else is on his bookshelf.
• He is staunchly anti-abortion, and has said he would support a national abortion ban; argued against rape and incest exceptions; compared abortion to slavery; and said the Department of Justice should use the 19th-century Comstock Act to criminalize “mail-order abortions,” as Project 2025 recommends.
• Like the rest of the GOP, Vance has more recently been trying to be seen as having “softened” on abortion, claiming he supports access to mifepristone and leaving abortion laws to the states. Trump, however, proved otherwise—at his first debate against Harris, he twice refused to clarify whether he would veto a national abortion ban if Congress passed it…despite the fact that Vance previously affirmed Trump would.
• Vance used to strongly dislike Trump, having once called him “America’s Hitler” and lambasted some of his supporters as racist (fact-check: true)…

…but he’s come a long way: Now, Vance is helping Trump spread the false claim that Democrats are responsible for the two recent attempted assassinations of the former president, which threat assessment experts told my colleague Mark Follman could give rise to even more political violence.

You may, of course, also hear some half-truths or even straight-up falsehoods from Walz during the debate. Vance is likely to repeat the claims he has already been making that Walz lied about his military record (the truth is more complicated) and about his family’s use of IVF (Walz has clarified his family used intrauterine insemination, another type of fertility treatment). As one of my former editors used to say, “everybody lies”—particularly, I would add, politicians.

The thing to keep in mind, though, is that the two campaigns facing off in November do not lie at anywhere near the same rate or with the same level of significance. Trump, of course, has continued falsely claiming that he won the 2020 election—a lie that Vance has also amplified, despite the fact that more than 60 court cases have found otherwise. After Vance helped spread the racist lie about Springfield, Trump repeated it during his first debate to the more than 67 million viewers who watched; Springfield subsequently received bomb threats and had to evacuate schools and its city hall, while the local Haitian population was left reeling and in fear.

And the lie about Springfield was not the only one Trump told during his first face off with Harris: According to CNN, he lied 30 times in total; Harris, on the other hand, once.