JD Vance Keeps Knocking ‘Em Out of the Park

by Stephen Kruiser

There was such a flood of debate post-mortem material yesterday that I began to think today’s Briefing would be a post-mortem post-mortem. That prospect made me entertain the idea of fleeing to Mexico, becoming a beer blogger, and enjoying life as much as I can until President Harris invites China to occupy North America.

Obviously, I needed something more positive to focus on. I quickly found it, but to set it up well, I am going to bring up one more thing from the debate—one that was a source of frustration. This is from Schlichter’s latest column:

Second, Trump was undisciplined as usual, and that’s very annoying to those of us who appreciate traditional argument with focused points and concise statements. He took long, meandering paths to get to what he wanted to say and it is irritating to people (like me and most pundits) who are direct and succinct when arguing. He will be crucified by such people. But does Trump’s unique style resonate with normal people? It has before. See, he is not bereft of facts; he just can’t be focused and direct when presenting them.

As my ultra-MAGA friend and colleague Kevin Downey Jr. said, “He missed a lot of layups.” That was because of the meandering. I should remind everyone that I am a big fan of that meandering style when he’s firing up a rally crowd. However, there’s a time and a place for it.

Until the end of July, I was frequently praising Trump’s focus during this campaign. A lot of Trump fans, including me, thought he lost some of it when the Kamala Harris wild card was thrown into the mix. He’s been getting it back, and I think he’s still in a good position to win this thing. He just risks losing when he misses layups.

One of Trump’s greatest moves this year was choosing JD Vance as his running mate. As we’ve discussed a few times, one of Vance’s greatest strengths is that he was already media savvy when he got into politics. He has been handling the always anti-Republican, hostile mainstream media to perfection.

Vance routinely rejects idiotic “Gotcha!” lines of questioning and highlights the failures of the media hacks. He does it with casual ease. He knows what’s coming; he handles it and shuts it down.

Like Trump should have done in the debate.

My HotAir colleague David Strom covered a post-debate media masterstroke of Vance’s. CNN’s Kaitlin Collins was talking to Vance about Trump mentioning the Springfield, Ohio, cat rumors in the debate. She asked, “Why push something that’s not true?” Vance quickly pointed out that her story setup wasn’t completely accurate. He then went through a laundry list of what the residents of Springfield are suffering from while under siege from Haitian migrants, pointing out that Kamala Harris’s policies are irresponsible and that the “media didn’t care about the carnage wrought by these policies until we turned it into a meme about cats.”

KABOOM.

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