If you show up to a J. D. Vance campaign event and ask some of the red-hat-wearing attendees whether they’re fans of the senator from Ohio, they will say: No, they are fans of Donald Trump.

Yet Vance is better than his ticketmate at one important job: He can squeeze Trumpism through his own post-liberal-populist tube and produce something that looks like a coherent ideology. While Democrats are fond of mocking Vance for being socially awkward, Trump’s supporters see him as their very own Pete Buttigieg: a man with a theory of the case who is eager to defend it both on television and in real life. He is the sharp TV-soundbite counterweight to Trump’s rambling rally speech:

“There is this Christian idea that you owe the strongest duty to your family, and then you owe the next duty to your community, and then to your country, and then to everybody else,” Vance said at a Christian-revival event on Saturday in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, in response to a question about his approach to immigration policy. “It doesn’t mean that you have to be mean to other people, but it means that your first duty as the American leader is to the people of your own country.”

Trump’s supporters will tell you that they appreciate this ability to articulate their values. Maybe they didn’t like Vance at first, but now they believe that he is smart. He brings a wholesome substance to their movement, like a bowl of leafy greens before the red-meat entrée. “He balances Trump out,” Diane Ernest, a retiree from Southampton, Pennsylvania, told me at a Vance event on Saturday in Bucks County. “He’s a good speaker, and he doesn’t run off—just gets right to the facts.”

“In the beginning, I wondered why Trump picked Vance,” 77-year-old Carol Cavanaugh told me at the same event. But she gets it now. Unlike Trump, “Vance keeps his composure,” she said. She’s proud that Trump “went out of his comfort zone and didn’t pick someone just like him.” For voters like these, the symbiotic relationship makes the two men stronger.

Among MAGA voters, no real equivalence exists between the two men. On the trail, Trump gets Beatlemania; Vance receives polite applause. Retail politics requires a level of regular-guy-ness that Vance does not appear to possess. (Exhibit A: his painful interaction with a worker at a Georgia doughnut shop.) This is partly because Vance is not, strictly speaking, a regular guy: Vance is a Yale grad turned venture capitalist with a reputation for ruthless ambition. He also comes off as far more cerebral, and more conservative, than his running mate. He and his intellectual allies view America as being in a state of “civilizational crisis,” and employ phrases like “postmenopausal females” and “replacement fertility rate” in everyday parlance. He once wrote a 7,000-word essay about his conversion to Catholicism in which he quotes theologians and philosophers at length.

Every Vance event follows roughly the same trajectory. He’ll start with a few jabs at Kamala Harris and her reluctance to do media interviews. Then, once the crowd has been worked into a mild froth, Vance will turn to inflation, gas prices, and housing. He will suggest that the solution to these problems involves more energy and more deportations. He’ll say, “Drill, baby, drill!” and everyone will clap. Then he’ll declare that it’s time to send the “illegal aliens” home, and people will clap even harder. To wrap up, he’ll take a handful of questions from the media.

The stump speech does contain a few moments of cringe. When Vance talks about the price of eggs, for example, he likes to replay a bit about his three kids, who love eggs. In Traverse City, Michigan: “My kids eat a lotta eggs!” In Monroeville: “A lotta eggs in my family!”

But the awkward moments seem not to stick with Trump’s base. What matters to them, these supporters say, is how Vance eloquently articulates their positions—and makes them feel righteous for holding them. Harris, Vance often tells his audience, believes that the people complaining about illegal immigration in places like Springfield, Ohio, are racist. “Kamala Harris, stop telling the people of your own country that they’re bad people!” he said on Saturday, to cheers. “You’re a bad person for not doing your job!”

Vance’s biggest strength, though, may be his eagerness and ability to engage with the media. He will announce, at the end of each rally, that it’s time for a few questions from reporters, and every head in the audience will swivel to gawk at the press pen. They will boo and jeer at each question, regardless of its content, and Vance will smile at them like a proud parent, dispelling the tension with something ostensibly magnanimous: “This is America, folks! She has a right to ask the question, and you have a right to tell her how you feel about it.”

Vance seems most at ease in these moments, because he has shifted the focus away from his personality and back toward his well-studied message. He, like most lawyers, is comfortable with debate and confrontation, turning the media’s questions into opportunities to get back to the issues: inflation and immigration. He will not lose the thread as Trump does, when he gets lost in his own stories about Hannibal Lecter and electric boats. Vance will answer the question, or at least provide an elegant-sounding nonanswer. Asked in August if he and Trump would support raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour, Vance made a quick pivot: “Whether you have a higher minimum wage or a lower minimum wage, the way to destroy the wages of American workers is to import 20 million illegal aliens and let them stay here with work visas,” he said.

His willingness to do this sets him apart from Harris, who has mostly refused to grant interviews. Vance’s supporters recognize this. “He’s good unscripted, which a lot of people in this race aren’t,” Milo Morris, an opera singer at the Bucks County event, told me.

Vance has been a political shape-shifter, changing his views on politics, Trump, and even the lessons of his own 2016 book. But that slipperiness is easy for MAGA supporters to ignore when he’s applying a gloss of coherence to their movement. If Vance performs well in tonight’s debate with Harris’s vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz, it will be because he has what Trump voters see as talents. A debate isn’t a doughnut-shop photo op or a glad-handing line-walk requiring baby-kissing and charm. A debate is a contest of ideas—something that Vance has spent his whole life preparing for.

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This weekend, at his rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump descended into a spiral of rage and incoherence that was startling even by his standards. I know I’ve said this before, but this weekend felt different: Trump himself, as my colleague David Graham wrote today, admitted that he’s decided to start going darker than usual.

At this point, voters have everything they need to know about this election. (Tomorrow, the vice-presidential candidates will debate each other, which might not have much of an impact beyond providing another opportunity for J. D. Vance to drive down his already-low likability numbers.) Here are some realities that will likely shape the next four weeks.

Trump is going to get worse.

I’m not quite sure what happened to Trump in Erie, but he seems to be in some sort of emotional tailspin. The race is currently tied; Trump, however, is acting as if he’s losing badly and he’s struggling to process the loss. Other candidates, when faced with such a close election, might hitch up their pants, take a deep breath, and think about changing their approach, but that’s never been Trump’s style. Instead, Trump gave us a preview of the next month: He is going to ratchet up the racism, incoherence, lies, and calls for violence. If the polls get worse, Trump’s mental state will likely follow them.

Policy is not suddenly going to matter.

Earlier this month, the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote about very specific policy questions that Kamala Harris must answer to earn his vote. Harris has issued plenty of policy statements, and Stephens surely knows it. Such demands are a dodge: Policy is important, but Stephens and others, apparently unable to overcome their reticence to vote for a Democratic candidate, are using a focus on it as a way to rationalize their role as bystanders in an existentially important election.

MAGA Republicans, for their part, claim that policy is so important to them that they’re willing to overlook the odiousness of a candidate such as North Carolina’s gubernatorial contender Mark Robinson. But neither Trump nor other MAGA candidates, including Robinson, have any interest in policy. Instead, they create cycles of rage: They gin up fake controversies, thunder that no one is doing anything about these ostensibly explosive issues, and then promise to fix them all by punishing other Americans.

Major news outlets are not likely to start covering Trump differently.

Spotting headlines in national news sources in which Trump’s ravings are “sanewashed” to sound as if they are coherent policy has become something of a sport on social media. After Trump went on yet another unhinged tirade in Wisconsin this past weekend, Bloomberg posted on X: “Donald Trump sharpened his criticism on border security in a swing-state visit, playing up a political vulnerability for Kamala Harris.” Well, yes, that’s one way to put it. Another would be to say: The GOP candidate seemed unstable and made several bizarre remarks during a campaign speech. Fortunately, Trump’s performances create a lot of videos where people can see his emotional state for themselves.

News about actual conditions in the country probably isn’t going to have much of an impact now.

This morning, the CNN anchor John Berman talked with the Republican House member Tom Emmer, who said that Joe Biden and Harris “broke the economy.” Berman countered that a top economist has called the current U.S. economy the best in 35 years.

Like so many other Trump defenders, Emmer didn’t care. He doesn’t have to. Many voters—and this is a bipartisan problem—have accepted the idea that the economy is terrible (and that crime is up, and that the cities are in flames, and so on). Gas could drop to a buck a gallon, and Harris could personally deliver a week’s worth of groceries to most Americans, and they’d probably still say (as they do now) that they are doing well, but they believe that it’s just awful everywhere else.

Undecided voters have everything they need to know right in front of them.

Some voters likely think that sitting out the election won’t change much. As my colleague Ronald Brownstein pointed out in a recent article, many “undecided” voters are not really undecided between the candidates: They’re deciding whether to vote at all. But they should take as a warning Trump’s fantasizing during the Erie event about dealing with crime by doing something that sounds like it’s from the movie The Purge.

The police aren’t allowed to do their job. They’re told: If you do anything, you’re going to lose your pension; you’re going to lose your family, your house, your car … One rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out, and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know? It’ll end immediately.

This weird dystopian moment is not the only sign that Trump and his movement could upend the lives of wavering nonvoters. Trump, for months, has been making clear that only two groups exist in America: those who support him, and those who don’t—and anyone in that second group, by his definition, is “scum,” and his enemy.

Some of Trump’s supporters agree and are taking their cues from him. For example, soon after Trump and Vance singled out Springfield, Ohio, for being too welcoming of immigrants, one of the longtime local business owners—a fifth-generation Springfielder—started getting death threats for employing something like 30 Haitians in a company of 330 people. (His 80-year-old mother is also reportedly getting hateful calls. So much for the arguments that Trump voters are merely concerned about maintaining a sense of community out there in Real America.)

Nasty phone calls aimed at old ladies in Ohio and Trump’s freak-out in Erie should bring to an end any further deflections from uncommitted voters about not having enough information to decide what to do.

I won’t end this depressing list by adding that “turnout will decide the election,” because that’s been obvious for years. But I think it’s important to ask why this election, despite everything we now know, could tip to Trump.

Perhaps the most surprising but disconcerting reality is that the election, as a national matter, isn’t really that close. If the United States took a poll and used that to select a president, Trump would lose by millions of votes—just as he would have lost in 2016. Federalism is a wonderful system of government but a lousy way of electing national leaders: The Electoral College system (which I long defended as a way to balance the interests of 50 very different states) is now lopsidedly tilted in favor of real estate over people.

Understandably, this means that pro-democracy efforts are focused on a relative handful of people in a handful of states, but nothing—absolutely nothing—is going to shake loose the faithful MAGA voters who have stayed with Trump for the past eight years. Trump’s mad gibbering at rallies hasn’t done it; the Trump-Harris debate didn’t do it; Trump’s endorsement of people like Robinson didn’t do it. Trump once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote. Close enough: He’s now rhapsodized about a night of cops brutalizing people on Fifth Avenue and everywhere else.

For years, I’ve advocated asking fellow citizens who support Trump whether he, and what he says, really represents who they are. After this weekend, there are no more questions to ask.

Related:

Trump is taking a dark turn. Peter Wehner: The Republican freak show

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Evening Read

Director Bartlett Sher, star Robert Downey Jr., and writer Ayad Akhtar OK McCausland for The Atlantic

The Playwright in the Age of AI

By Jeffrey Goldberg

I’ve been in conversation for quite some time with Ayad Akhtar, whose play Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, about artificial generative intelligence and its impact on cognition and creation. He’s one of the few writers I know whose position on AI can’t be reduced to the (understandable) plea For God’s sake, stop threatening my existence! In McNeal, he not only suggests that LLMs might be nondestructive utilities for human writers, but also deployed LLMs as he wrote (he’s used many of them, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini included). To my chagrin and astonishment, they seem to have helped him make an even better play. As you will see in our conversation, he doesn’t believe that this should be controversial.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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