This is what you could have gotten: That’s what I kept thinking during the vice presidential debate. The showdown between Tim Walz and JD Vance was a vision of what American politics could be without the distorting gravitational field generated by Donald Trump – a political interlude beamed to you from Planet Normal.

How soon will that day come? The most surprising moment of the debate came right at the end, when it became clear that the outwardly submissive Vance is already mapping out his future after Trump. Don’t tell the crazy old king, but his most loyal baron looks at the crown and wonders how well it would fit on his head.

More on that later, but first let’s enjoy the climate on Planet Normal. On stage in New York were two people with regular attention spans and an above-average ability to remember names and details. Vance, the Republican, gave slick, coherent and blissfully short answers to the CBS moderators’ questions. (The stronghold compared him to a “smoother Marco Rubio from 2016.”) Tim Walz, the Democrat, started off nervously and quickly discovered that it’s hard to be cozy in an empty room — though he certainly didn’t go down in Dan Quayle-esque flames . The debate was cordial — too cordial for many Democrats, who wondered why Walz wasn’t throwing the punches they longed to see.

Both candidates committed political sins well within the expected range: Vance freely ignored the first question about Iran, and instead summarized his appealing backstory for viewers unfamiliar with Iran. Hillbilly elegy. Walz dodged a question about his inflated biography, before eventually admitting that he had “made a mistake” when he claimed to have been in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. The two men also managed several substantive discussions on policy, we discuss what we can learn from Finland’s approach to gun crime, and to what extent mental health issues interact with mass shootings. All of which reminded us of what American political debates were like in the distant past, oh, the early 2010s.

The pundits have largely called this debate on behalf of Vance, who successfully downplayed his unpopular positions on abortion and health care and took several opportunities to highlight his main ideological theme of protectionism. America must become self-sufficient, and not just in heavy industry, he said, because “the pharmaceuticals we put into the bodies of our children are manufactured by countries that hate us.” That sentence sounded less paranoid than it once might have, after former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson revealed last week that at the height of the coronavirus pandemic he had flirted with sending a commando team to retrieve vaccines in the hands of the European Union .

However, the public polls were closer. Walz recovered from his shaky start and delivered some spirited lines. On gun violence, he talked about his own teenage son witnessing a shooting, and got an empathetic response from Vance; he also talked about meeting the parents of the students who died at Sandy Hook – realizing that he had a photo of his own child hanging on the office wall, while the people before him had lost their own children. Asked to explain why he changed his mind and now supported an assault weapons ban, Walz simply said, “I sat in that office with those Sandy Hook parents.”

All very civilized, healthy, normal. Very subdued. But every now and then, an alternate reality began to pour into the CBS studio. Or rather –us reality started to bleed in. The one in which Donald Trump is the Republican candidate. The clearest signal was Vance’s frequent tic to refer to his running mate: Donald Trump’s energy policy, Donald Trump’s border policy, The wisdom and courage of Donald Trump. Walz, on the other hand, mentioned Kamala Harris as rarer.

You and I both know why Vance dropped his name with the enthusiasm of an unemployed actor. Trump is one of those people who picks up a political memoir and flips to the index to see how many times he’s mentioned. Over the past eight years, the entire Republican Party has reshaped itself around his gargantuan ego, and it is filled with many men far smarter than Trump — men like JD Vance, even — who believe they can manipulate him through flattery. The former president will not have paid attention to the finer details of Finnish policy, but instead listened to his name. Throughout the debate, the Trump campaign’s rapid response team aired “fact checks,” but the candidate’s Truth Social feed wandered through its usual obsessions: CBS’s low ratings; praises his own greatness and acumen – “America was GREAT when I was president,” “I saved our country from the China virus,” “Everyone knows I wouldn’t support a federal abortion ban” – and praise for “a great defense of self” by Vance.

The great mystery of this moment in American politics is that Trump’s shortcomings – his self-obsession, his lack of self-control, his casual lies – are so obvious. And yet all attempts to replace it with a lab-grown alternative with the defects removed have failed. (If Vance had participated in the Republican primaries, I suspect he would have done about as well as Ron DeSantis.) The Republican base loves the chaos, drama, and darkness that Trump provides, and resists any attempts to replace those qualities with boring competence.

The moments when Vance seemed to be in real trouble were when he had to defend Trump’s behavior, and his own transition from critic to sycophant. He offered an outrageous – but superficially convincing – explanation for how he went from thinking Trump was “America’s Hitler” to his last and only hope. “I was wrong in the first place because I believed some media stories that turned out to be unfair fabrications of his reputation,” he said. Likewise, the only real flash of the obnoxious “childless cat lady” version of Vance – familiar to me from sharp podcasts and cozy Fox News interviews – came when he had to defend Trump’s lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio . . When the moderators noted that the Haitians in question were in America legally, Vance responded: “The rules were you weren’t going to do fact checking.” Not precisely the reaction of a man who is convinced that he is telling the truth.

At the very end, Vance was asked if he would challenge the election results in a way that violated the law and the Constitution. “I think we’re focused on the future,” he said, before diving into standard Republican talking points about the threat of Big Tech censorship. (The two main instances of this in right-wing lore involve Hunter Biden’s laptop and COVID discussions on Facebook and Spotify.) Harris, Vance said, would want to “censor people who engage in misinformation. I think this is a much greater threat to democracy than anything we’ve seen in this country in the last four years, in the last 40 years.”

Walz found new equipment. The Folksy Midwestern father was now not angry, but disappointed in his wayward son, who had returned long past curfew and smelled suspiciously of weed. Vance, Walz’s attitude implied, had let himself down. “I enjoyed tonight’s debate, and I think there were a lot of similarities here,” he began, before launching a scathing attack on Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021. “He lost this election, and he said he didn’t. . One hundred and forty police officers were beaten at the Capitol that day, some carrying the American flag. Several later died.” As Walz got into a discussion about being a football coach and told his team that playing fair was more important than winning at all costs, Vance reflexively began to nod slightly.

In his response, Vance went out of his way to point out that Hillary Clinton had raised the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 election. But Walz shot back: “January 6 was not Facebook ads.” (We might also note that Clinton, regardless of her misgivings about the election, attended Trump’s inauguration and explicitly recognized the peaceful transfer of power to an opponent. Trump, on the other hand, did not stay in Washington DC to see Joe Biden being sworn in as president. , but instead flew to Florida in a huff.)

Walz then asked Vance point-blank if Trump lost the 2020 election. Once again, all the Republican could offer was a way out – “Tim, I’m focused on the future” – and a return to Big Tech’s censorship, allowing Walz to commit the murder. “This is not a debate,” he said. “It’s nowhere else but in Donald Trump’s world, because look, when Mike Pence made the decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence is not on this stage.”

What’s special about Vance’s waffle here isn’t that he refused to tell the truth — to say the 2020 election was valid. The Real What’s remarkable is that the Republican vice presidential candidate can’t bring himself to agree with his boss and say the 2020 election was stolen. Over the past four years, the Trump campaign has filed multiple lawsuits challenging the results; the candidate himself encouraged the crowd to protest against them on January 6 – culminating in threats of violence against Congress and then-Vice President Pence – and his stump speeches regularly included invective on the issue. This year he has suggested that he will only lose if the Democrats “cheat like hell.”

Vance did not repeat this language, nor did he repeat his previous suggestion that he would not have done what Pence did in January 2021, which was certify the results. On the most fundamental issue of this year’s battle – whether America is still a functioning democracy with free and fair elections – the Republican fortunes are not quite in line.

Now I’m more than surprised that Vance wouldn’t tell the truth. But I’m intrigued that when he was given the biggest platform of his career to date, he couldn’t bring himself to lie either. After so many humiliating concessions, this is the point at which Vance decided to adapt poet EE Cummings’ famous line: “There’s some shit I won’t eat.” He switched so deftly to his talk of disinformation that many of the experts missed his sleight of hand.

Why wouldn’t he agree with his boss about what happened in 2020? The inevitable conclusion must be that JD Vance – smart, ambitious and only forty years old – is already thinking about the future after Trump. Once the former president is out of the picture, what is the point of harping on his personal bitterness over the American people’s rejection? The voters of 2028 or 2032 will undoubtedly be more concerned about gas prices and housing costs than an old man’s grudge. Might as well continue with Trump’s crazy stuff about sharks and Hannibal Lecter.

Regardless, Vance did pretty well last night. But I wonder if Trump has noticed that amid all the name-calling and flattery, his running mate is “focused on the future” – a future that doesn’t involve him.