Since Donald Trump won reelection, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have both done what the now-president-elect and his fellow Republicans refused to do in 2020: publicly accept loss and advocate for a peaceful transition of power.
In a Thursday morning speech outside the White House, Biden told Americans, “We accept the choice the country made.”
“I’ve said many times,” he continued,“you can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree.” He added, “Something I hope we can do, no matter who you voted for, is to see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans. Bring down the temperature.”
President Biden: "Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable … The American experiment endures. We're going to be okay, but we need to stay engaged. We need to keep going." https://t.co/627FiKv7Szpic.twitter.com/hZoGsFc7yl
Seemingly alluding to Trump’s attacks on the voting system, Biden on Thursday also added that he hoped “we can lay to rest a question about the integrity of the American electoral system. It is honest, it is fair, and it is transparent, and it can be trusted, win or lose,” he said.Of course, now that Trump has won,the GOP suddenly appears to agree with this, despite the fact that they and their candidate spent years sowing doubt in the electoral system—including up until election night.
The president also told Americans who voted for Harris they had to keep the faith and keep peacefully fighting for what they believe in. “Setbacks are unavoidable,” Biden said. “Giving up is unforgivable.”
“The American experiment endures, we’re going to be okay, but we need to stay engaged,” the president added. “We need to keep going, and above all, need to keep the faith.”
Harris struck a similar tone during her concession speech at Howard University on Wednesday.“The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for,” Harris told the crowd. “But hear me when I say, hear me when I say, the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”
Harris also acknowledged that “folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now,” but urged her supporters to still accept the election results.
“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” she continued. “That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny.”
The dual speeches came at a moment of widespread concerns that American democracy and so many civil liberties hang in the balance with Trump’s return to power. But with a future so unknown—and even frightening—to many, both Harris’ and Biden’s post-election remarksreminded Americans what leadership looks like: recognition of, and respect for, the will of the people, and a reminder that the future of American democracy remains worth peacefully fighting for.
Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There are more than 45 million people with student loans, and many more who are gearing up to go to college at a time when tuition is at record highs: The average annual cost of a private university hit nearly $60,000 in 2024.
The next president will have the power to either ease that financial burden or aggravate it. And while Donald Trump’s bluster on the campaign trail has not included a lot of clarity on his policy plans, his public statements, along with the actions of his previous administration, set out a roadmap for the many ways he will try to gut the affordability of higher education for future students—while sinking those who already have student debt into a deeper financial hole.
What’s more, the agenda authored by the conservative Heritage Foundation for a future Republican administration, known as Project 2025, also offers a blueprint. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but because it was written by some of his closest allies, it is likely that, should Trump win in November, pieces of the project will become policy priorities.
Here’s what a second Trump term could mean for student debt:
Defunding and closing the Education Department could decimate college affordability for low-income students: At a rally in Wisconsin last month, Donald Trump said that he wants to shut down the Department of Education should he return to the Oval Office. “I’m dying to get back to do this,” he said. “We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education.”
As president, Trump proposed cutting nearly $4 billion from the Pell Grants reserve fund—and redirecting half to NASA for space exploration: “So that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!”
Trump couldn’t close the Education Department singlehandledly: it would require an act of Congress. But defunding the department would have far-reaching implications for education funding. A key one: The department administers $39 billion of Pell Grants, scholarships awarded to students from low-income backgrounds. About half of Pell Grants go to students whose families earn less than $20,000 per year. Without the department, it’s unclear who would distribute and oversee Pell Grants; if they’re thrown into chaos, low-income students will have little choice but to take on additional student loans. Trump has shown a willingness to compromise this crucial source of financial aid in the past: During his presidency, he proposed cutting nearly $4 billion from the Pell Grants reserve fund—and redirecting half of that to NASA for space exploration: “So that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!” Trump tweeted at the time.
Ending Public Service Loan Forgiveness: Signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007, the PSLF program promises to cancel the remaining debt for public servants, from police offices and prosecutors to public defenders, who have made 10 years of payments on their loans. In the last four years, the Biden-Harris administration has awarded $74 billion in student debt relief to public servants who’ve met PSLF’s payment requirements.
But when the first wave of borrowers qualified for relief in 2017, Trump’s Education Department rejected 99 percent of applicants. His administration then proposed a 2021 budget that would have nixed PSLF entirely. That did not pass, but the goal remains: Project 2025 includes an explicit recommendation to terminate PSLF should there be a Republican president.
Hampering other forms of student debt relief: In June 2023, the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s attempt to cancel up to $10,000 of student debt for low- and middle-income borrowers. Trump called the decision a “massive win” that halted an “unconstitutional student loan gimmick.”
In the wake of this decision by the Supreme Court, the Biden-Harris administration sought to provide relief another way: They launched the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan, an income-driven repayment program that would lower required payments for many borrowers, and forgive the remainder of their debt after somewhere between 10 and 25 years, depending on the original loan balance. Within months, more than a dozen Republican-led states had sued to shut down the program. Those lawsuits are ongoing. And it is safe to say that a Trump-Vance administration would do little to stop them: In June, Trump called Biden’s latest student debt relief efforts “vile,” while Vance has encouraged Republicans to fight student loan cancellation “with every ounce of our energy of power.” Plus, Project 2025 suggests that a future Trump administration should end all existing income-driven debt repayment plans because they are too generous.
Weakening debt relief for borrowers defrauded by for-profit schools: When Betsy DeVos served as Trump’s education secretary, she rewrote an existing department rule that discharges the loans of students who attended fraudulent colleges. Her version shrunk the amount these loans could be canceled, limiting them to just three cents for every dollar spent on their degrees. Congress passed a bipartisan resolution to overturn DeVos’s rule, but Trump vetoed it, leaving her restrictions in place until Biden undid them upon taking office. Should Trump return to the White House, this relief for borrowers would very likely be on the chopping block.
Causing some student loans to accrue more interest: In 2018, the Trump administrations budget proposed ending subsidized Stafford loans, which don’t accrue interest while undergraduate students are in school. This change would lead to thousands of additional dollars of debt for borrowers, many of whom are also from low-income families—about 70 percent of subsidized loan borrowers also qualify for Pell Grants. In 2018, the Center for American Progress estimated that an end to subsidized loans would saddle nearly 6 million students with an additional $2.8 billion in costs each year.
There are more than 45 million people with student loans, and many more who are gearing up to go to college at a time when tuition is at record highs: The average annual cost of a private university hit nearly $60,000 in 2024.
The next president will have the power to either ease that financial burden or aggravate it. And while Donald Trump’s bluster on the campaign trail has not included a lot of clarity on his policy plans, his public statements, along with the actions of his previous administration, set out a roadmap for the many ways he will try to gut the affordability of higher education for future students—while sinking those who already have student debt into a deeper financial hole.
What’s more, the agenda authored by the conservative Heritage Foundation for a future Republican administration, known as Project 2025, also offers a blueprint. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but because it was written by some of his closest allies, it is likely that, should Trump win in November, pieces of the project will become policy priorities.
Here’s what a second Trump term could mean for student debt:
Defunding and closing the Education Department could decimate college affordability for low-income students: At a rally in Wisconsin last month, Donald Trump said that he wants to shut down the Department of Education should he return to the Oval Office. “I’m dying to get back to do this,” he said. “We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education.”
As president, Trump proposed cutting nearly $4 billion from the Pell Grants reserve fund—and redirecting half to NASA for space exploration: “So that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!”
Trump couldn’t close the Education Department singlehandledly: it would require an act of Congress. But defunding the department would have far-reaching implications for education funding. A key one: The department administers $39 billion of Pell Grants, scholarships awarded to students from low-income backgrounds. About half of Pell Grants go to students whose families earn less than $20,000 per year. Without the department, it’s unclear who would distribute and oversee Pell Grants; if they’re thrown into chaos, low-income students will have little choice but to take on additional student loans. Trump has shown a willingness to compromise this crucial source of financial aid in the past: During his presidency, he proposed cutting nearly $4 billion from the Pell Grants reserve fund—and redirecting half of that to NASA for space exploration: “So that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!” Trump tweeted at the time.
Ending Public Service Loan Forgiveness: Signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007, the PSLF program promises to cancel the remaining debt for public servants, from police offices and prosecutors to public defenders, who have made 10 years of payments on their loans. In the last four years, the Biden-Harris administration has awarded $74 billion in student debt relief to public servants who’ve met PSLF’s payment requirements.
But when the first wave of borrowers qualified for relief in 2017, Trump’s Education Department rejected 99 percent of applicants. His administration then proposed a 2021 budget that would have nixed PSLF entirely. That did not pass, but the goal remains: Project 2025 includes an explicit recommendation to terminate PSLF should there be a Republican president.
Hampering other forms of student debt relief: In June 2023, the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s attempt to cancel up to $10,000 of student debt for low- and middle-income borrowers. Trump called the decision a “massive win” that halted an “unconstitutional student loan gimmick.”
In the wake of this decision by the Supreme Court, the Biden-Harris administration sought to provide relief another way: They launched the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan, an income-driven repayment program that would lower required payments for many borrowers, and forgive the remainder of their debt after somewhere between 10 and 25 years, depending on the original loan balance. Within months, more than a dozen Republican-led states had sued to shut down the program. Those lawsuits are ongoing. And it is safe to say that a Trump-Vance administration would do little to stop them: In June, Trump called Biden’s latest student debt relief efforts “vile,” while Vance has encouraged Republicans to fight student loan cancellation “with every ounce of our energy of power.” Plus, Project 2025 suggests that a future Trump administration should end all existing income-driven debt repayment plans because they are too generous.
Weakening debt relief for borrowers defrauded by for-profit schools: When Betsy DeVos served as Trump’s education secretary, she rewrote an existing department rule that discharges the loans of students who attended fraudulent colleges. Her version shrunk the amount these loans could be canceled, limiting them to just three cents for every dollar spent on their degrees. Congress passed a bipartisan resolution to overturn DeVos’s rule, but Trump vetoed it, leaving her restrictions in place until Biden undid them upon taking office. Should Trump return to the White House, this relief for borrowers would very likely be on the chopping block.
Causing some student loans to accrue more interest: In 2018, the Trump administrations budget proposed ending subsidized Stafford loans, which don’t accrue interest while undergraduate students are in school. This change would lead to thousands of additional dollars of debt for borrowers, many of whom are also from low-income families—about 70 percent of subsidized loan borrowers also qualify for Pell Grants. In 2018, the Center for American Progress estimated that an end to subsidized loans would saddle nearly 6 million students with an additional $2.8 billion in costs each year.
In a Sunday morning media blitz, vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) tried to clean up former President Donald Trump’s disturbing comments about his domestic political opponents being “the enemy within.”
Trump has made such comments multiple times. Earlier this month, he told Fox host Maria Bartiromo, “We have the outside enemy and then we have the enemy from within—and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries.” Trump added that he considers California Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff among those enemies. And in a podcast interview with Joe Rogan on Friday, Trump said the “enemy from within” was more dangerous than North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
Tapper, host of CNN’s State of the Union, pressed Vance on those comments from the very start of their interview, as well as John Kelly’s characterization this week of Trump as a fascist who admires Hitler. Vance said Kelly’s comments about Trump were inaccurate. At one point, Vance said, “I believe Donald Trump is the candidate of peace.” Later in the interview, Vance said Trump was reserving his threats to send the military after “people rioting after the election” rather than all Americans.
TAPPER: "He wants to use the military to go after the enemy within."
At another point, Tapper reminded Vance that Trump shared a social media post saying Liz Cheney—now among the Republicans campaigning for his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris—should be put before a war tribunal. “None of that sounds fascistic to you at all?” Tapper asked. “No, of course it doesn’t,” Vance responded, before alleging Tapper was taking Trump’s statements out of context.
.@jaketapper: "Liz Cheney, [Trump] said, should be put before a war tribunal. None of that sounds fascistic to you at all?"@JDVance: "No, of course it doesn't." pic.twitter.com/3YuiEI3MGH
When Welker, of NBC’s Meet the Press, asked Vance if he agreed with Trump that Pelosi and Schiff “are more dangerous than Russia and China,” he dodged. “Well, I think what Donald Trump said is that those folks pose a greater threat to United States’ peace and security, because America’s strong enough to stand up to any foreign adversary,” Vance replied.
In his interview with Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, he gave a slightly clearer answer. While she didn’t ask specifically about his response to Trump’s comments about “the enemy from within,” Brennan did ask Vance, “What price should Moscow pay for trying to manipulate American voters?”—referring to a Friday announcement by the FBI that Russia was behind a fake video of mail-in ballots being destroyed in Pennsylvania.
“A lot of countries are going to try to manipulate our voters. They’re going to try to manipulate our elections. That’s what they do,” Vance replied. After Brennan pressed him, Vance condemned Russia’s actions, but said he would not commit to how the US should or would respond.
Asked what price Moscow should pay for posting fake videos to interfere with the U.S. elections, JD Vance says: "I don't think that we should set American foreign policy based on a foreign country spreading videos on social media. I think we should set American foreign policy… pic.twitter.com/SC1rVgH12o
As my colleague Inae Oh and I have tracked, Trump has indeed threatened to prosecute, or called for the prosecution of, a long list of political opponents, including Harris, Cheney, President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former President Barack Obama, and a slew of others. So—contrary to Vance’s assertions—Trump has given us ample reason to take his threats seriously.
During the vice presidential debate, CBS news moderator Margaret Brennan pressed Ohio Sen. JD Vance about former President Donald Trump’s proposal to seize public lands to use them for housing construction. “Senator, where are you going to seize the federal lands?” she asked. “Can you clarify?”
“Well, what Donald Trump has said is we have a lot of federal lands that aren’t being used for anything,” Vance replied. “They’re not being used for national parks. They’re not being used. And they could be places where we build a lot of housing.”
Vance was referring to an idea Trump floated in 2023 when he announced that his next administration would solve the nation’s housing crisis by holding a contest to charter 10 new “freedom cities” on public land. “These freedom cities will reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and, in fact, the American dream,” he said in a video announcing the proposal. (In the same video, Trump also pledged to solve the country’s transit woes with flying cars.)
Whether he realized it or not, Trump’s ”freedom cities” put a new face on an old pet cause of Western conservatives and Sagebrush Rebellion sympathizers. For years,these anti-government activists have been agitating for the federal government to sell off public lands or place them under state control. But affordable housing has never been part of their agenda. After all, most public land out West is in remote places with little water and infrastructure, and where few people want to live. (Dunn County, North Dakota, anyone?)
The push to sell off public lands has long been backed by big corporations seeking cheap land for grazing, oil and gas drilling, or coal and uranium mines, all free from many federal environmental regulations. Even so, Trump isn’t the first politician to propose using public land for housing. The idea was most recently, and most prominently, brought into circulation by the far-right agitator Ammon Bundy.
He’s the son of rogue Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who engaged in a 2014 armed standoff with the Bureau of Land Management when the agency attempted to impound cows he’d been illegally grazing for years on federal land. Two years later, Ammon Bundy orchestrated the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, a confrontation that ultimately led an FBI agent to fatally shoot one of the occupiers, LaVoy Finicum. Bundy was tried twice for his role in the standoffs. The first case, in Nevada, ended in a mistrial after misconduct by the government. A jury in Oregon ultimately found him not guilty of the Malheur occupation.
The confrontations—and the failure of the Justice Department to punish him—turned Bundy into an outlaw hero to those who oppose federal control of public lands in the West. After instigating protests against Covid restrictions during the pandemic, in 2021, he leveraged his fame into a political campaign and announced he was running as a Republican for governor of Idaho. And that’s when his housing policy came into play. Bundy stumped heavily on using public lands in Idaho to help state residents buy affordable homes. On his campaign website, he wrote:
If we are going to maintain our historic and traditional values, and ultimately Keep Idaho IDAHO, we must spread out and make Idaho’s land available to the people while simultaneously ensuring that necessary land remains public land for multiple use purposes (under local jurisdiction). Then we can enjoy the fruits of prosperity and land ownership while maintaining our culturally conservative identity.
The current affordable housing crisis is caused by a number of complicated factors, many of which have been caused by the Federal Government. Nevertheless, at its core, this crisis is simply a supply-and-demand issue. To lower prices, we simply need more supply. And to have more supply, we need to take our land back.
“I’m not sure if Ammon Bundy pioneered the idea of seizing public lands to create more sprawl, but he definitely leaned hard into it when he was running for governor of Idaho,” says Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the nonprofit Center for Western Priorities, who has followed Bundy’s career for many years. “Sometimes terrible ideas come back around with a fresh coat of lipstick, but it’s still the same old land-seizure movement.”
“Sometimes terrible ideas come back around with a fresh coat of lipstick, but it’s still the same old land seizure movement.”
Bundy’s proposal made news, but it didn’t do much for his campaign. After losing the GOP primary to the current sitting governor, Brad Little, he ran as an independent in the general election in 2022 and lost again. But Bundy seemed fairly sincere about wanting to build housing on public lands. In interviews, he said his own adult daughter was struggling to afford a house in Boise’s overheated housing market. (He’s also not a Trump supporter. He criticized the former president in 2018 for his hateful anti-migrant rhetoric.)
Trump’s housing plan, however, seems much more like cover for the same old agenda pushed by Republicans from Reagan to George W. Bush. It boils down to a simple premise: giving away public lands to fossil fuel companies and other extractive industries that want to plunder them on the cheap. Indeed, people hoping to shape the next Trump administration’s public lands policy have not demonstrated much interest in housing in the past.
Take William Perry Pendley, who served as the acting BLM director during the Trump administration for more than a year despite never getting confirmed by the Senate; he even ignored a ruling from a judge who said he had to leave the job because he was serving illegally. When Trump tapped him as acting BLM director, Pendley released an extensive recusal list of former clients in the oil, gas, and mining industries.
During the 2014 armed standoff at the Bundy ranch in Nevada, Pendley wrote a column in National Review expressing support for the embattled rancher and his fight with the federal government. “Westerners are tired of having Uncle Sam for a landlord,” he complained. Two years later, Pendley wrote again in National Review, “the Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold.”
More recently, Pendley authored the Interior Department section of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a new Trump administration. It outlines 28 pages of proposals for turning over more public lands to unfettered oil, gas, and mineral development, including in sensitive areas from Alaska to Minnesota. But suddenly, Pendley has become an affordable housing advocate. In July, hewrote an op-ed in the Washington Examiner headlined “Solve the housing crisis by selling government land.”
Strangely enough, using public land for housing is a rare point of agreement between Trump and President Joe Biden—sort of. After all,the Biden administration has already done it. In July, the BLM announced the sale of a small 20-acre parcel in the Las Vegas Valley for the specific purpose of developing affordable housing. The land would be sold cheaply to the Clark County Department of Social Services, with strict requirements about how it can be used. Eighty percent of the housing must be sold to first-time homebuyers with household incomes at or below 80 percent of the Las Vegas area median income, for instance, and the rest will go to first-time buyers at or below 100 percent of the area’s median income.
“The Biden administration just called the bluff of land transfer proponents,” Weiss said in a statement at the time. “The Interior Department is showing how public lands that are already well-suited to development can be part of the housing solution, with appropriate safeguards to make sure the housing is affordable and doesn’t end up as trophy homes for billionaires.”
Bundy doesn’t seem to have weighed in on the Trump “freedom cities” proposal. He’s been a little busy dodging thepayment of a $50 million defamation judgment against him, the result of an armed protest he organized in 2022 against an Idaho hospital he falsely claimed had kidnapped the baby of one of his supporters. (Social workers had taken the baby in for being malnourished.) After the jury verdict last year, Bundy took his family and went into hiding. The hospital seized his house to help pay the judgment. Bundy later resurfaced at an undisclosed location somewhere in Utah.
While he too may need some affordable housing, it’s not clear that he’d be a fan of Trump’s “freedom cities.” After all, Bundy despises cities. “History and human nature demonstrate that if we go down the path we are on now and build up and create dense and congested cities with large populations, traffic, and pollution, we will lose our conservative, traditional values,” he wrote on his campaign website in 2021. “It’s just what happens.”
At the first (and likely only) vice presidential debate, JD Vance was asked if Trump’s pledge to implement the largest mass deportation plan in United States history would involve deporting undocumented parents and separating them from their kids born in the United States. Instead of answering the question, Vance misleadingly claimed that the Department of Homeland Security under the Biden administration had “effectively lost” hundreds of thousands of children.
“Some of them have been sex trafficked, some of them, hopefully, are at home with their families. Some of them have been used as drug trafficking mules,” Vance said on Tuesday night.
Mass deportations would also result in millions of families becoming poor.
Vance seemed to be referring to a report from August from the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, but he got the facts wrong: The report does not say that 320,000 children have been “effectively lost.” What it does say is that between 2019 and 2023—a period that included part of the Trump administration—about 32,000 unaccompanied children missed their immigration court hearings. One possible explanation for minors missing court hearings is that they are very often forced to deal with a convoluted maze of government agencies and subagencies without legal counsel, according to an analysis of the report from the American Immigration Council. The analysis goes on to say that “Immigration enforcement agencies must acknowledge that children need special protections, and Congress should fund legal counsel, to help move them through the maze of government agencies involved. “
The OIG report also says that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had yet to issue notices to about 291,000 minors to appear in court to begin removal proceedings. The 320,000 number Vance is pointing to appears to be a combination of the two numbers—neither of which refers to lost migrant children.
To recap:
There are not 25 million undocumented migrants in the United States.
Vance goes on to say, “The real family separation policy in this country is, unfortunately, Kamala Harris’ wide open southern border.” His attempt to make it sound like the Trump-Vance campaign cares about the safety of migrant children hides the reality that Trump’s mass deportation plan would lead to the inhumane separation of millions of American families and would have devastating effects.
About 20 million Americans are living in households with mixed immigration status where some people are undocumented, and others are citizens or have legal permission to live in the United States. Trump’s mass deportation plan would not only harm those 10.3 million who are undocumented and would be removed from the country but also the 9.7 million who have legal status and would have their family members ripped away. Nearly 3.4 million parents would no longer be able to take care of their children because they would be forced out of a country that, in many cases, they have lived in for decades.
Aside from the mass trauma this would cause in millions of children who would be left without one or more parent, it would also have a huge economic impact. One study found that mass deportations would result in the median income of mixed-status households decreasing by almost half and millions of families becoming poor. And as my colleague Isabela Dias has reported, Trump’s mass deportation plan affects not only those in mixed-status households but the country as a whole, with the United States’ economy projected to shrink by almost 6 percent and over 900,000 fewer jobs being available for citizens.
Vance’s misleading claims not only work to distract from Trump’s inhumane mass deportation plan but, more disgustingly, frame their immigration policies as a supposed attempt to help migrant children. The honest answer from Vance on whether Trump would separate families would have been, “Yes, and it would be terrible.”
At the first (and likely only) vice presidential debate, JD Vance was asked if Trump’s pledge to implement the largest mass deportation plan in United States history would involve deporting undocumented parents and separating them from their kids born in the United States. Instead of answering the question, Vance misleadingly claimed that the Department of Homeland Security under the Biden administration had “effectively lost” hundreds of thousands of children.
“Some of them have been sex trafficked, some of them, hopefully, are at home with their families. Some of them have been used as drug trafficking mules,” Vance said on Tuesday night.
Mass deportations would also result in millions of families becoming poor.
Vance seemed to be referring to a report from August from the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, but he got the facts wrong: The report does not say that 320,000 children have been “effectively lost.” What it does say is that between 2019 and 2023—a period that included part of the Trump administration—about 32,000 unaccompanied children missed their immigration court hearings. One possible explanation for minors missing court hearings is that they are very often forced to deal with a convoluted maze of government agencies and subagencies without legal counsel, according to an analysis of the report from the American Immigration Council. The analysis goes on to say that “Immigration enforcement agencies must acknowledge that children need special protections, and Congress should fund legal counsel, to help move them through the maze of government agencies involved. “
The OIG report also says that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had yet to issue notices to about 291,000 minors to appear in court to begin removal proceedings. The 320,000 number Vance is pointing to appears to be a combination of the two numbers—neither of which refers to lost migrant children.
To recap:
There are not 25 million undocumented migrants in the United States.
Vance goes on to say, “The real family separation policy in this country is, unfortunately, Kamala Harris’ wide open southern border.” His attempt to make it sound like the Trump-Vance campaign cares about the safety of migrant children hides the reality that Trump’s mass deportation plan would lead to the inhumane separation of millions of American families and would have devastating effects.
About 20 million Americans are living in households with mixed immigration status where some people are undocumented, and others are citizens or have legal permission to live in the United States. Trump’s mass deportation plan would not only harm those 10.3 million who are undocumented and would be removed from the country but also the 9.7 million who have legal status and would have their family members ripped away. Nearly 3.4 million parents would no longer be able to take care of their children because they would be forced out of a country that, in many cases, they have lived in for decades.
Aside from the mass trauma this would cause in millions of children who would be left without one or more parent, it would also have a huge economic impact. One study found that mass deportations would result in the median income of mixed-status households decreasing by almost half and millions of families becoming poor. And as my colleague Isabela Dias has reported, Trump’s mass deportation plan affects not only those in mixed-status households but the country as a whole, with the United States’ economy projected to shrink by almost 6 percent and over 900,000 fewer jobs being available for citizens.
Vance’s misleading claims not only work to distract from Trump’s inhumane mass deportation plan but, more disgustingly, frame their immigration policies as a supposed attempt to help migrant children. The honest answer from Vance on whether Trump would separate families would have been, “Yes, and it would be terrible.”
That’s essentially what he said when he faced off against MinnesotaGov. Tim Walz at the vice presidential debate Tuesday night when moderator Norah O’Donnell asked if he would create a federal pregnancy monitoring agency. Vance said he would not create such an agency, but then continued: “The proper way to handle this, as messy as democracy sometimes is, is to let voters make these decisions, let the individual states make their abortion policy.”
In a way, Vance has a point. In every state that has put the question of abortion rights to voters since 2022, when the Supreme Court overturnedRoe v. Wade, the measure has passed with flying colors. And that includes Vance’s home state of Ohio, as my colleague Madison Pauly previously reported.
But there’s a problem. The GOP keeps trying to sabotage abortion rights ballot measuresbefore they even get to voters. They did so in Ohio last year, by instituting a special election in August to try to raise the threshold to amend the state constitution, as we wrote at the time:
Republicans in the Ohio statehouse tried to change the rules before their constituents get a chance to vote for abortion rights. In May, they passed a resolution forcing a statewide vote on whether to make it harder to pass any future amendments. They claimed their effort, which was largely funded by far-right Illinois billionaire Richard Uihlein, was intended to block interference from “out-of-state special interests.” But they specifically made sure the vote on their proposal took place before the abortion-rights vote in November. To that end, they approved a bill this spring reinstating August special elections—which they had just eliminated on the theory that summer elections were too low turnout to be worth the cost. (“These unnecessary ‘off-cycle’ elections aren’t good for taxpayers, election officials or the civic health of our state. It’s time for them to go!” LaRose, who is running for Senate, had previously argued.)
The effort—which Vance backed—was not successful. A surprisingnumber of Ohioans turned out and defeated the attempt to stymie the abortion rights ballot measure, which ultimately went before voters in November andpassed with a wide margin. Now, abortion access is protected in Ohio until the point of fetal viability—usually around the time of 24-weeks gestation. The law also allows for later-term abortions to protect the pregnant person’s life and health.
The Ohio GOP is not alone in its efforts to undermine ballot measures. As Madison wrote, Missouri Republicans have been unsuccessfully trying to do the same thing to their state’s forthcoming abortion ballot measure, as have the Republicans of South Dakota. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his cronies have recently tried to tank their state’s upcoming abortion rights vote, including by potentially breaking the law and reportedly sending police to abortion rights supporters’ homes. As I recently reported:
The state’s health department debuted a webpage spreading misinformation about Amendment 4, a ballot measure appearing in November seeking to override the state’s six-week abortion ban that the Florida Supreme Court approved in April. If it receives the required 60 percent of votes to pass, the amendment would guarantee the right to abortion before the point of so-called fetal viability, which is generally understood to be around 24 weeks gestation. But the state’s new webpage—which DeSantis has since defended as a “public service announcement”—attacks the initiative with a litany of false claims, including that it “threatens women’s safety,” would “eliminate parental consent” for minors seeking abortions, and could “lead to unregulated and unsafe abortions” by allowing people without healthcare expertise to perform the procedure.
Meanwhile, in Kansas, where voters have enshrined abortion rights just two months after Dobbs, Republicans have continually tried to ban the procedure—including by overruling Gov. Laura Kelly’s vetoes of four anti-abortion measures.
If, as Vance suggests, abortion policy should be determined by a democratic process, it would be legal nationwide, which pollingshows is the preference of the majority of Americans. But short of that, as Vance says, reproductive rights will be left to the states. And the GOP in those states shows no interest in letting voters have their say without a fight.
I’m rubber, you’re glue. That’s the Trump campaign’s strategy when it comes to the cruelest part of former President Donald Trump’s record—and the serious concern that he intends to repeat it. During the vice presidential debate on Tuesday, Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen.JD Vance, refused to say whether Trump’s mass deportation plan would separate parents and children, including children who are citizens.
Instead, Vance repeatedly claimed that it was Vice President Kamala Harris who had engaged in family separation. “The real family separation policy in this country,” Vance said, “is unfortunately Kamala Harris’ wide open southern border.”
During his presidency, Trump engaged in a cruel plot to deter immigration by forcibly separating children and their parents. Some were never reunited, and the policy was condemned by Republicans and Democrats, pediatricians and pastors. Trump’s immigrationplan for a second term, which is anticipated to be more draconian, would likely create another catastrophe by separating families.
Donald Trump has a plan to deport 11 million immigrants from the United States. He talks about it all the time. It would have devastating consequences for immigrants, for Americans, for communities, and for the national economy.The plan is to use the National Guard and massive detention camps. As my colleague Isabela Dias reported, it would also likely separate parents and children:
Children would almost certainly be hurt again. More than 3.4 million unauthorized immigrants have a US-born minor child. Eighty percent of unauthorized immigrants entered the country before 2010, and almost 10 million citizens or lawful residents live in mixed-status homes. One study found a mass deportation program would slash the median income of mixed-status households by almost half, plunging millions of families into poverty
This isn’t the first time Vance has left the door open to restarting a family separation policy. In August, he refused to rule out the policy when asked repeatedly if Trump would separate parents and children.
The Trump campaign touts its massive deportation plan as a housing policy, forcibly uprooting families so others can move in. But Vance would not own up to the ugly consequences of their proposal, even as the CBSmoderators on Tuesday pressed him on this subject. It was Harris, he claimed, who was separating families—not the man who has literally already done it.
That’s essentially what he said when he faced off against MinnesotaGov. Tim Walz at the vice presidential debate Tuesday night when moderator Norah O’Donnell asked if he would create a federal pregnancy monitoring agency. Vance said he would not create such an agency, but then continued: “The proper way to handle this, as messy as democracy sometimes is, is to let voters make these decisions, let the individual states make their abortion policy.”
In a way, Vance has a point. In every state that has put the question of abortion rights to voters since 2022, when the Supreme Court overturnedRoe v. Wade, the measure has passed with flying colors. And that includes Vance’s home state of Ohio, as my colleague Madison Pauly previously reported.
But there’s a problem. The GOP keeps trying to sabotage abortion rights ballot measuresbefore they even get to voters. They did so in Ohio last year, by instituting a special election in August to try to raise the threshold to amend the state constitution, as we wrote at the time:
Republicans in the Ohio statehouse tried to change the rules before their constituents get a chance to vote for abortion rights. In May, they passed a resolution forcing a statewide vote on whether to make it harder to pass any future amendments. They claimed their effort, which was largely funded by far-right Illinois billionaire Richard Uihlein, was intended to block interference from “out-of-state special interests.” But they specifically made sure the vote on their proposal took place before the abortion-rights vote in November. To that end, they approved a bill this spring reinstating August special elections—which they had just eliminated on the theory that summer elections were too low turnout to be worth the cost. (“These unnecessary ‘off-cycle’ elections aren’t good for taxpayers, election officials or the civic health of our state. It’s time for them to go!” LaRose, who is running for Senate, had previously argued.)
The effort—which Vance backed—was not successful. A surprisingnumber of Ohioans turned out and defeated the attempt to stymie the abortion rights ballot measure, which ultimately went before voters in November andpassed with a wide margin. Now, abortion access is protected in Ohio until the point of fetal viability—usually around the time of 24-weeks gestation. The law also allows for later-term abortions to protect the pregnant person’s life and health.
The Ohio GOP is not alone in its efforts to undermine ballot measures. As Madison wrote, Missouri Republicans have been unsuccessfully trying to do the same thing to their state’s forthcoming abortion ballot measure, as have the Republicans of South Dakota. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his cronies have recently tried to tank their state’s upcoming abortion rights vote, including by potentially breaking the law and reportedly sending police to abortion rights supporters’ homes. As I recently reported:
The state’s health department debuted a webpage spreading misinformation about Amendment 4, a ballot measure appearing in November seeking to override the state’s six-week abortion ban that the Florida Supreme Court approved in April. If it receives the required 60 percent of votes to pass, the amendment would guarantee the right to abortion before the point of so-called fetal viability, which is generally understood to be around 24 weeks gestation. But the state’s new webpage—which DeSantis has since defended as a “public service announcement”—attacks the initiative with a litany of false claims, including that it “threatens women’s safety,” would “eliminate parental consent” for minors seeking abortions, and could “lead to unregulated and unsafe abortions” by allowing people without healthcare expertise to perform the procedure.
Meanwhile, in Kansas, where voters have enshrined abortion rights just two months after Dobbs, Republicans have continually tried to ban the procedure—including by overruling Gov. Laura Kelly’s vetoes of four anti-abortion measures.
If, as Vance suggests, abortion policy should be determined by a democratic process, it would be legal nationwide, which pollingshows is the preference of the majority of Americans. But short of that, as Vance says, reproductive rights will be left to the states. And the GOP in those states shows no interest in letting voters have their say without a fight.
I’m rubber, you’re glue. That’s the Trump campaign’s strategy when it comes to the cruelest part of former President Donald Trump’s record—and the serious concern that he intends to repeat it. During the vice presidential debate on Tuesday, Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen.JD Vance, refused to say whether Trump’s mass deportation plan would separate parents and children, including children who are citizens.
Instead, Vance repeatedly claimed that it was Vice President Kamala Harris who had engaged in family separation. “The real family separation policy in this country,” Vance said, “is unfortunately Kamala Harris’ wide open southern border.”
During his presidency, Trump engaged in a cruel plot to deter immigration by forcibly separating children and their parents. Some were never reunited, and the policy was condemned by Republicans and Democrats, pediatricians and pastors. Trump’s immigrationplan for a second term, which is anticipated to be more draconian, would likely create another catastrophe by separating families.
Donald Trump has a plan to deport 11 million immigrants from the United States. He talks about it all the time. It would have devastating consequences for immigrants, for Americans, for communities, and for the national economy.The plan is to use the National Guard and massive detention camps. As my colleague Isabela Dias reported, it would also likely separate parents and children:
Children would almost certainly be hurt again. More than 3.4 million unauthorized immigrants have a US-born minor child. Eighty percent of unauthorized immigrants entered the country before 2010, and almost 10 million citizens or lawful residents live in mixed-status homes. One study found a mass deportation program would slash the median income of mixed-status households by almost half, plunging millions of families into poverty
This isn’t the first time Vance has left the door open to restarting a family separation policy. In August, he refused to rule out the policy when asked repeatedly if Trump would separate parents and children.
The Trump campaign touts its massive deportation plan as a housing policy, forcibly uprooting families so others can move in. But Vance would not own up to the ugly consequences of their proposal, even as the CBSmoderators on Tuesday pressed him on this subject. It was Harris, he claimed, who was separating families—not the man who has literally already done it.
One in every 10 pregnancies in the US ends in a miscarriage, a common medical event for which there are safe and effective treatments should there be complications. But over the past two years, having a miscarriage in many states has become far more dangerous, thanks in part to the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade.
Thirteen states have passed total abortion bans. Three others ban abortion after six weeks—a de facto ban. These laws have resulted in a rash of horror stories—not about the anticipated illegal backroom abortion deaths, but about ordinary women having ordinary but occasionally life-threatening pregnancy complications, while hospitals and doctors refuse to treat them for fear of being prosecuted.
Reporters and lawyers have chronicled stories of miscarrying women nearly dying from blood loss and infection, suffering debilitating injuries, and future infertility because of delayed care. One Texas hospital, the AP reported, even left a woman to miscarry in the ER restroom because the staff refused to treat her. Her husband had to call 911 from the ER for help.
Among the legion of GOP anti-abortion politicians in the US who’ve helped create this carnage, there is one you might expect to have some sympathy for the suffering of these women: Vice presidential candidate and Ohio Sen. JD Vance. On the surface, the politician who denigrated Democrats as the party of “childless cat ladies” and suggested that “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female, in theory,” was to take care of children, would not be an obvious softie for the victims of policies that have left women bleeding out in hospital restrooms. And yet, he might understand the situation better than many of his Republican colleagues.
Vance owes much of his fame and political career to his bestselling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, a coming-of-age story about his triumph over family dysfunction, addiction, absent fathers, and cycles of abuse.
The memoir’s beating heart is Bonnie Blanton Vance, or “Mamaw,” the maternal grandmother Vance called his “guardian angel” in his July acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Blanton helped raise the future Yale Law School grad when his drug-addicted mother could not, saving him from becoming just another entry in a long family history of shiftless angry men.
In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance holds Blanton up as the force of nature behind his successes. But the book also suggests she may be an unintended case study of something quite different: the importance of reproductive health care for everyone. In his memoir, Vance says that his beloved grandmother suffered eight miscarriages over 10 years, plus four pregnancies that came to term. Today, many of the women suffering from denied miscarriages and abortion care “have similar life stories to his grandmother,” says Debra Stulberg, a professor of family medicine at the University of Chicago who studies miscarriage care.
The word “abortion” never appears in Hillbilly Elegy, and Vance doesn’t seem to have ever spoken publicly about the particular chapter of his grandmother’s difficult life. (A spokesperson for Vance did not respond to questions for this story by publication.) But his grandmother’s story, which helped make him famous, seems to underly Vance’s intense opposition to abortion—onethat’s even more extreme than the man he shares the GOP ticket with.
In 2023, Vance signed on to a letter to the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, along with 29 other Republican lawmakers, urging the agency to reverse a new rule that bars law enforcement officers from accessing patients’ reproductive healthcare records, particularly those trying to prosecute women for crossing state lines for abortion care. “Abortion is not health care,” the letter said. “It is a brutal act that destroys the life of an unborn child and hurts women.”
Vance supports a national abortion ban, and he doesn’t believe in exceptions for rape and incest. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” he said in an interview during his 2022 Ohio Senate campaign. “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.”
“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.”
Vance’s position is a curious one for someone whose origin story begins with the pregnancy of a 13-year-old girl.
In his memoir, Vance writes that his grandfather, Jim Vance, and his grandmother’s best friend, Bonnie Smith, were lovers. At some point, he writes, 16-year-old Jim cheated on Bonnie Smith with 13-year-old Bonnie Blanton. The “affair” resulted in a pregnancy that prompted the couple to flee Appalachian Kentucky for Dayton, Ohio, to escape Blanton’s murderously protective brothers.
Today, Blanton’s first pregnancy would be considered the result of statutory rape in many states, and a felony carrying prison time. The pregnancy was also exceedingly dangerous. “Teen pregnancies, especially 15 and under, are by definition high risk,” says Stulberg. Perhaps no surprise, then, that Blanton’s baby died a week after she was born.
It seems clear from Hillbilly Elegy that Blanton’s unplanned pregnancy at 13 was a singular catastrophic event that trapped her in a violent marriage for decades. “Mamaw never spent a day in high school,” Vance writes. “She’d given birth to and buried a child before she could legally drive a car.” Her husband was an abusive alcoholic; Blanton famously once tried to set him on fire when he had passed out drunk on the couch.
Yet Vance seems to view Mamaw’s adolescent pregnancy not as a catastrophe but as the catalyst that launched his family out of Hatfield and McCoy territory and into suburban Ohio, where there were more opportunities. “Mamaw’s entire life—and the trajectory of our family—may have changed for a baby who lived only six days,” he writes. Blanton died in 2005, at the age of 72, when Vance was only 20 and still in the Marines. As a result, “We don’t get to hear her take on this story,” Stulberg says. “That could be very different from his.”
Having a baby at 13 may have set in motion Vance’s path to the vice president’s office. But it also may have set up Blanton for the years of fertility issues Vance describes in his memoir. According to him, she had eight miscarriages in the decade between the live birth of an uncle in 1951 and the birth of his mother in 1961. But in his book, Vance displays a striking lack of curiosity about the details of those miscarriages, other than to speculate that they may have been triggered by the stress of being married to an abusive alcoholic.
Without Blanton around to fill in the details, such as how far along in her pregnancies she was when she miscarried, we can only speculate. But experts I spoke with found it highly unlikely that a woman who’d had eight miscarriages, plus four pregnancies, the first at 13, would not at some point have needed either a therapeutic abortion or the sort of miscarriage treatment that Vance’s preferred reproductive health policies now make difficult to obtain in many states.
Having a history of multiple pregnancies itself is a risk factor, Stulberg notes. “The risks of preterm labor and postpartum hemorrhage are higher,” she says. Preterm labor is a common reason for miscarriage management, including what is essentially the abortion of a nonviable fetus.
“Politicians may say very easily that there’s no reason why miscarriage should be affected by these [abortion bans],” says Daniel Grossman, an OB-GYN at the University of California, San Francisco, and head of a research program that has been tracking the state of reproductive health care since the overturning of Roe. “But in fact, the treatments that are done for miscarriage are almost identical to the treatments for abortion, including the abortion pill.”
“The treatments that are done for miscarriage are almost identical to the treatments for abortion, including the abortion pill.”
Grossman recently co-authored a study that compiled accounts from dozens of clinicians who had observed the horrific treatment of pregnant women in need of medical care that they were either denied or forced to obtain at great expense because of strict state abortion bans, often with great trauma.
Consider this account from a clinician in a state with an abortion ban, describing what happened to a woman who was 19 to 20 weeks pregnant. When she arrived at the ER, doctors found that the amniotic sac was protruding through her cervix—evidence of a doomed pregnancy. But they sent her home. The next day, she showed up at the ER in the immense pain of advanced labor.
Anesthesiologists refused to provide her an epidural for pain because they believed it “could be considered [a crime] under the new law,” the clinician reported. Instead, they gave her some IV morphine as she labored for several more hours to deliver a dead fetus. “I overheard the primary provider say to a nurse that so much as offering a helping hand to a patient getting onto the gurney while in the throes of a miscarriage could be construed as ‘aiding and abetting an abortion,’” the horrified clinician reported. “Best not to so much as touch the patient who is miscarrying.”
Even before Roe v. Wade, doctors didn’t treat pregnant patients like this, says Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California Davis who studies the history of abortion care in the United States. Back then, doctors were given more deference to decide when a woman’s life was in danger. She says even in 1946, when Blanton first got pregnant, a family doctor would likely have been able to quietly perform an abortion on a 13-year-old without running afoul of the authorities. Indeed, it was exactly these sorts of child pregnancies that led to legal reforms that created exceptions to anti-abortion laws in the first place, she says.
Today, however, 10 states now have abortion bans with no exceptions for rape or incest, and six have no exceptions for the health of patients, even if they’re children. Politicians like Vance “don’t see exceptions [to abortion bans] as being necessary to address tragedies,” Ziegler says. “They see them as loopholes.”
For Stulberg, Vance may be misreading his grandmother’s story. She says research shows that women who want abortions but can’t get them fare much more poorly than women who do. But they also manage to survive, as Vance’s grandmother did. “It’s almost like women’s resilience protects society from seeing the harm,” she says. “To be that educated,” Stulberg says of Vance, and to have his life experience, and “then choose to support these policies is not caring that women are going to die.”
Women just like his grandmother.
Update, October 1: After this story published, Taylor Van Kirk, a spokeswoman for Vance, sent this comment: “Throughout his campaign for U.S. Senate and during his time in office, Senator Vance has consistently made clear that he supports reasonable exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother. Senator Vance has also stated repeatedly that he agrees with President Trump on abortion policy being set at the state level, not the federal level, and like President Trump, he agrees that we need to find common ground on this issue. As a senator, he has not supported any legislation which would impose a federal abortion ban.”
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.
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 affirmedTrump would.
…but he’s come a long way: Now, Vance is helping Trumpspread the false claim that Democrats are responsible for the two recent attemptedassassinations 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.
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.
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 affirmedTrump would.
…but he’s come a long way: Now, Vance is helping Trumpspread the false claim that Democrats are responsible for the two recent attemptedassassinations 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.
Editor’s note: Eight years ago, on the eve of the 2016 election, Mother Jones published a story by Arlie Russell Hochschild, a renowned sociologist who had spent five years interviewing a group of white Southern conservatives to understand what drives the way they see America, politics, and Donald Trump.
Trump was not the focus of Hochschild’s research, but she soon discovered that he was there in the background, tapping into the “deep story” her interviewees told about themselves and their community. They saw themselves, she wrote, as waiting patiently in line for their shot at the American Dream—but others, whom they saw as undeserving and who were often Black or immigrants, were cutting in line. “The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving,” they believed. “It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.”
It didn’t matter if that story was factually true (Hochschild documented that it was not): It drove how people felt and how they would ultimately vote. It gave them an explanation for why the success they had been told was their birthright seemed elusive, why their families might even need benefits like food stamps or disability income that they had been told only the weak would accept.
“Trump solves a white male problem of pride,” Hochschild wrote. “Benefits? If you need them, okay. He masculinizes it. You can be ‘high energy’ macho—and yet may need to apply for a government benefit. As one auto mechanic told me, ‘Why not? Trump’s for that. If you use food stamps because you’re working a low-wage job, you don’t want someone looking down their nose at you.’”
Trump would not, of course, deliver on these voters’ economic needs. But he would deliver on their need for pride. And it’s that issue that Hochschild returns to in her new book, Stolen Pride, set in the heart of what Trump calls the forgotten America—the town of Pikeville, Kentucky.
In 2017, when Hochschild’s research for this book began, Pikeville was the site of a neo-Nazi march that became a prelude for the deadly rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The march was a focal point for Hochschild’s interviews with everyone from an imprisoned white supremacist gang member to a self-described “trailer trash” TikTok creator. In Pikeville, the deep story was all about what Hochschild came to call the pride economy.
Photo courtesy of Arlie Russell Hochschild
“We live in both a material economy and a pride economy, and while we pay close attention to shifts in the material economy, we often neglect or underestimate the importance of the pride economy. Just as the fortunes of Appalachian Kentucky have risen and fallen with the fate of coal, so has its standing in the pride economy…
“And our place in the material economy is often linked to that in the pride economy. If we become poor, we have two problems. First, we are poor (a material matter), and second, we are made to feel ashamed of being poor (a matter of pride). If we lose our job, we are jobless (a material loss) and then ashamed of being jobless (an emotional loss). Many also feel shame at receiving government help to compensate that loss. If we live in a once-proud region that has fallen on hard times, we first suffer loss, then shame at the loss—and, as we shall see, often anger at the real or imagined shamers.”
In places like rural Kentucky, that sense of shame and lost pride is connected to what Hochschild identifies as the paradox of the American Dream: A self-sufficient, middle-class life has become harder to attain in many rural, conservative communities—but people in those communities are more likely to blame themselves for this.
“From roughly 1970 on, the United States gradually divided into two economies—the winners and losers of globalization. Rising in opportunity have been cities and regions with diversified economies, often the site of newer, less vulnerable industries, which typically hired college-educated workers in service and tech fields. Declining in opportunity have been rural and semi-rural areas, offering blue-collar jobs in older manufacturing industries more vulnerable to offshoring and automation. These also include regions where jobs are based on extracting oil, coal, and other minerals, the demand for which fluctuates with world demand.
“The urban middle class, which leans Democratic, has become a so-called mobility incubator, while many rural blue-collar areas, now leaning Republican, have become mobility traps. Between 2008 and 2017, one study found, the nation’s Democratic congressional districts saw median household income rise from $54,000 to $61,000, while incomes in Republican districts fell from $55,000 to $53,000…The second part of the paradox lies in core ideas about hard work and individual responsibility for one’s economic fate.
Coal is mined from a mountainside strip mine operation near Pikeville, Kentucky, in August 2019.Scott Olson/Getty
“When asked in a national survey why it is that a person ends up being poor, 31 percent of Republicans (party members or those who lean that way) say it is due to ‘circumstances beyond their control,’ in contrast to 69 percent of Democrats. Similarly, 71 percent of Republicans but only 22 percent of Democrats think ‘people are rich because they work hard.’…Thus, people growing up in the two kinds of economy experience different degrees of moral pinch between the cultural terms set for earning pride and the economic opportunity to do so.”
It’s this moral pinch—being caught in a declining regional economy while being told you have yourself to blame for your economic struggles—that the people Hochschild interviews describe from a variety of angles. For some, it fuels hate; for many, resentment; for all, a kind of bewilderment.
Like Hochschild’s 2016 book, these stories are even more timely now than they were when she conducted the interviews, in part because of Trump’s running mate selection of JD Vance, whose fame began with his book, Hillbilly Elegy.But where Vance concludes that the fix for places like Appalachia is to exclude others from the economy—both the material and the pride kind—Hochschild’s interviewees offer more nuanced views. All but one reject the white supremacists marching through their town. But many also are drawn to the way Trump and Vance make them feel seen. She talks with TikTok creator David Maynard, born literally yards away from Vance’s ancestral hometown of Jackson, Kentucky, and his wife, Shea, who show her the places where they grew up, fell in love, and built a life together. It’s a “reverse Hillbilly Elegy,” Hochschild writes, a story of wrestling with the paradox of the American Dream.
“If I’m a Moore’s Trailer Park white trash person, the only narrative I have tells me that I’m white, so I’m privileged,” Maynard tells Hochschild. “That’s the something I have and that must put me ahead. But what if it doesn’t put me ahead? I’m left with nothing because I’m lazy and stupid. There’s no excuse. If you’re white and poor, people think, ‘What’s wrong with you that you’re stuck at the bottom?’”
Another of Hochschild’s interviewees, Tommy Ratliff, digs deeper into that sentiment: “I could have become a white nationalist,” he tells her. Why that’s so, and how he didn’t, is the subject of the chapter excerpted below. —Monika Bauerlein
“In college,” Tommy Ratliff told me, “we had a guest speaker who gave us a lecture on the American Dream. He told us all we had to do was to work real hard, stick to a plan, and open a bank account. We should save a little money each month for our kids’ future education. At the time, I was earning $9.50 an hour behind the counter at a hobby shop and had to repay a loan I took out to pay for college and child support. Part of me just felt like telling the guy, ‘Shut up.’”
A tall man with long, wavy brown hair fanned across broad shoulders, gentle and direct in manner, Tommy was wearing his favorite black T-shirt, which said, “Not perfect, just forgiven.”
“Maybe I could earn my way to the American Dream if nothing else went wrong. That’s if I don’t get sick, if I don’t need a new heat pump, if my electric bill weren’t $400 a month, if my ex-wife didn’t get hooked on drugs, if my parents weren’t alcoholics, if my disturbed brother didn’t move in with me and raid my refrigerator while I was at work. Sure, the American Dream is all yours if nothing goes wrong. But things go wrong.”
Tommy explained what that meant as we walked through maple, redbud, and pines around his natal family’s quietly sheltered valley enclave. We walked by the home of his Uncle Roy, now widowed and seldom home. Roy had gotten Tommy out of scrapes, bought him a car, lent him money. Roy’s wife, Tommy’s aunt, became the “one I was closest to” when words became slurred and voices were raised in his own home next door.
We passed a shed used by Tommy’s paternal grandfather, now deceased, a former miner and World War II vet who had been at Iwo Jima as American GIs raised the flag. He had been decorated with a Purple Heart, long proudly kept like a holy icon in a glass cabinet in his grandfather’s hallway. A nearby shed held his grandfather’s beekeeping equipment and a wooden cane he had made in his retirement, together with a long wooden chain miraculously carved from a single piece of wood.
Visiting the small hillside cemetery near the end of a logging road where Tommy’s ancestors were laid to rest, we ran into Tommy’s Aunt Loretta washing family gravestones and restaking the VFW flag by his grandfather’s grave. A retired nurse, Loretta enjoyed Civil War reenactments but was uninterested in Pikeville’s upcoming white nationalist march. “Those guys come and go. I don’t pay them mind,” she said.
“The very idea that I had a place on a class ladder came to me slowly,” Tommy mused. “First, I thought of my family as middle class, and I was proud of that. As a kid, class was a matter of the kinds of toys I got at Christmas. Don’t get me wrong. I was happy to get what I got—GoBots, Action Max, Conan the Barbarian, Turok, the Warlord. But the kids at school had better-made versions of the toys I got. So, in toys, I felt somewhere below the middle.” Then when Tommy’s mother’s Texan relatives came to visit, he said, “I could see they looked around and thought my mom had married down and felt sorry for us. One cousin asked me, ‘What do you think a redneck is?’ and I wondered why she asked me that. Did she think I was one?”
We walked along a dirt path to a gurgling stream in back of Uncle Roy’s and Aunt Loretta’s homes—a wondrous wooded childhood haunt, filled with pine, poplars, birch, and pawpaw trees, that Tommy had long ago christened “Fairyland,” a term he still used with reverence.
“After 14 or 15, I used to spend a lot of time in this forest,” Tommy recalled, looking around at the trees as if at the faces of dear friends. “George [a childhood pal] and I would fight monsters and trolls and orcs and talking animals, like we saw in films about Narnia. We wore rounded strips of tree bark as body armor and used sticks as swords. I’d catch salamanders, frogs, and crawdads from the stream and let them go. We didn’t fish or hunt; we thought everything should be left the way it is. If you listened really close to the crickets and frogs sing to each other at night, first a song would come from one bank of the stream, then we’d hear an answer from the other. In the winter, we’d walk up the frozen streambed on the ice, then slide all the way down.” Listening to Tommy, I was reminded of a passage in Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow: “Aunt Beulah could hear the dust motes collide in a sunbeam.”
“Growing up, my world was real small—Elkhorn, Dorton, Belcher, Millard, Lick Creek, places around our holler. I didn’t know what was going on outside my family and neighbors and these places,” Tommy said. “Elkhorn only had one red light, but it was a city compared to Dorton, nothing there except the school and a pizza place. Dorton was tough. In a lot of hollers, people only come out once a month [to shop or visit] and don’t like outsiders. Nearly everyone in my world—my parents, my two brothers, my best friend George, my neighbors and schoolmates, and the action figures we played with—were all white.”
When, after finishing high school and working a few jobs, Tommy enrolled at Clinch Valley College in Wise, Virginia, he made his world smaller still. “Dad never liked me or my brothers to talk. If we were at dinner, he told us, ‘Don’t talk.’ If we were in the car, it was ‘Don’t talk.’ If we had company, ‘Don’t talk.’” So at Clinch Valley, Tommy sat in the back of a large classroom, was assigned to no discussion group or advisor, feared going to his professor’s office hours, and never talked. At the end of the first semester, Tommy flunked out, imagining that he, not the college, had failed.
“I’m not sure if I wasn’t paying attention or if it wasn’t taught. But before college, honestly, I wasn’t very sure how Blacks got to America,” Tommy told me. “I learned about slavery from seeing Amistad [a film about a slave ship rebellion in 1839] and 12 Years a Slave [about a free Black man kidnapped and sold into slavery], and about the Holocaust from Schindler’s List.”
Tommy also learned about Black life through television: “For a while, we didn’t own a TV. Dad would rent one in his name and when the bill got too high, Mom would put it in her name. I watched The Cosby Show and thought those kids were a whole lot better off than I was. They got an allowance, and all they had to do was save it. Their parents didn’t yell or drink. They lived in a nice house, and the dad was fine with them talking.”
Yet in one program about Black family life, Tommy suddenly recognized his own. “I watched and loved every episode of Good Times,” a 1970s sitcom about a Black family in Chicago that struggled with such things as job losses, a car breakdown, and an eviction notice. “In one scene,” Tommy recalled, “the wife, Florida, is talking to her girlfriend, who confides, ‘I can always tell when it’s Saturday morning because I wake up with a black eye.’”
“What got me wasn’t the story. It was that people laughed at it. Florida’s friend laughed. Florida laughed. On the TV soundtrack, the audience laughed. As a kid, I remember wondering: Why did they all laugh? At night, I’d crawl into bed with my older brother. I could hear my dad downstairs drunk, yelling and cursing at Mom, hitting her, shoving her against the wall, and shouting, ‘That didn’t hurt!’ Mom was yelling at Dad, ‘Stop it!’ I was scared. I wanted to cry.”
As Tommy grew up, his parents’ lives spiraled. “In the 1980s, when I was in high school, Dad lost his job guarding a mine and got a job as a supervisor in a lumberyard. When the lumberyard closed, Dad worked for my Uncle Roy’s road crew cutting grass along public roads with a dozer at minimum wage. That’s when we fell behind in taxes. When my father fell off the dozer and injured his back, his doctor discovered he had cancer.” As funds ran down, Tommy said, “we went from three cars to one, which we could barely keep running. We applied for food stamps, which bothered my dad terribly. I wondered: Had we become that class of family? We felt ashamed.”
Then Tommy’s parents began to drink themselves farther downward. “Dad drank Early Times whiskey with Tab and Mom drank vodka with Sprite—all day long. By 6:00 p.m., I’d try to leave. They argued. Mom would cry. Dad would get mad at her crying. That’s when I heard him shout, ‘That doesn’t hurt.’”
The family house fell into disrepair and his parents moved out of it into a trailer, then asked to move in with one troubled son after another until, one by one, they died.
In the wake of his parents’ decline, Tommy’s own ordeal unfolded. An acquaintance asked him if she could move into his trailer to save on rent. The two became involved, she became pregnant, and at 19, Tommy married and briefly imagined he was glimpsing a life of satisfaction and pride. “I got baptized at the Free Will Baptist Church in a creek one midnight in December, total immersion. One man held my back, another my head. It was cold and I got sick. When I got better, I got a union job at Kellogg’s biscuit factory. We moved near her folks in Jenkins, and I thought, ‘For my American Dream, this is good enough,’ and it would have been if she’d been the right woman.”
But she was not. The baby was too much for her. The house was left in disarray. Tommy’s addicted brother moved into a spare room. Returning late from his job at Kellogg’s, Tommy had a head-on collision. When, after his medical leave, he tried to return to his job, Kellogg’s fired him.
Jobless, with a wife and child to support, with $225 due monthly for rent and $100 for power, Tommy began scavenging aluminum cans out of ditches to recycle, $25 per bunch. Other luckless neighbors competed for the good cans. “I knew people looked down on me because I knew how I looked at other people scrounging cans. But part of me still thought, ‘I’m not that kind of person.’ I’d spend a few hours visiting with Uncle Roy before I got around to asking to borrow money. He’d know why I came, which was embarrassing. I’d borrow his car if mine broke down or I was driving mine with dead tags. I looked for work, but you had to pass the drug tests first, and for a while, I was trying muscle relaxants, Valium, Ativan. Then it got to half a case of beer, then more.” After Tommy’s marriage dissolved, his loving and nondrinking in-laws took in Tommy’s son. Now, with Tommy on his own, his heavy drinking grew worse, from occasionally to every day, from with someone else to alone, to alone and a lot.
Drinking had its own pride system, Tommy discovered. “At the top were guys who could hold a lot without getting sloppy drunk, pay for the drinks, and share the high. In the middle ranks were angry drunks. There was a rule to never talk politics, so angry drunks would be mad at ‘the man keepin’ us down.’ At the very bottom of the hierarchy were the crying drunks. I was a crying drunk.”
Our walk through Fairyland was taking us to a cluster of branches, a long-ago-collapsed teepee Tommy and his pal George had once built as boys in a moment of childhood triumph, and Tommy began to relate the hardest moment of his life. “We all have different bottoms,” he reflected softly. “I reached my bottom when I overheard my dad—whom I’d always assumed was my real dad—call me his stepson. I was shocked; I’m not his real, biological son? Maybe that’s why he never liked me, seemed prejudiced against me. I’m the wrong blood and can’t do a thing about it.
“The world went dark. I gave up. All I saw was a wall of night. I had failed. That was my bottom. I was drinking alone, a quart of whiskey a day. I dreamt of driving fast into oncoming traffic. I had an appointment with a doctor to check on the beginning stage of cirrhosis of my liver. I was heading toward my own death.”
One of Tommy’s favorite musical artists was Jelly Roll, a white, Tennessee-born rapper who put Tommy’s feelings into words:
All my friends are losers. All of us are users, There are no excuses, the game is so ruthless. The truth is the bottom is where we belong.
In Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Anne Case and Angus Deaton report a surprising finding: Although the United States had long been among the world leaders in extending its citizens’ life spans, since the turn of the 21st century, there has been an unexpected rise in premature deaths of white people in the prime of life, ages 45 to 54. The main causes are death by drug overdose, suicide, or alcoholic liver disease, which together claimed the lives of 600,000 people between 1999 and 2017. Especially hard hit have been white, blue-collar men without a bachelor’s degree.
Such men were not dying in heroic wars, battling fierce storms at sea, or toiling in coal mines. One by one, they were—and are—dying in solitary shame. In the obituary section of the Appalachian News-Express, I began to notice death notices showing young faces, sometimes listing young ages, but nearly always omitting the cause of death.
Tommy could name a number of local suicides. “The younger brother of a fifth-grade friend of mine shot another and then himself in the head. One guy drove drunk into a tree. My own brother Scott drove drunk off the road, and I believe that was a suicide. At one point, you could have almost counted me.”
Tommy remembers reading Christian Picciolini’s White American Youth: My Descent Into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement—And How I Got Out, the autobiography of a boy who was converted by a neo-Nazi. Picciolini was 14, smoking pot with a pal in a Chicago back alley, he writes, when a man in a muscle car drove up, stopped, and got out. The friend fled, but the man confronted the young Picciolini, took the joint out of his mouth, and said, “Don’t you know that’s exactly what the communists and Jews want you to do, so they can keep you docile?” By 16, now clean of drugs and with a purpose, Picciolini had become the leader of a group of Chicago-area skinheads, which he then merged with the yet more violent white supremacist Hammerskins.
“If I had been 14 and smoking in an alley and a man showed interest in me,” Tommy mused, “what if he dressed in camo, wore his ball cap back to front, and took me in? What if I began spending time at his house to get out of mine? And if my dad was beating me hard, and my parents were drinking, and I felt like they didn’t really know me or care? I ask myself: What would have happened? I could have felt the guy in the muscle car really cared about me.
“And what if that guy told me, ‘Your dad lost his job at the lumber mill because immigrants were coming in, or because a Jew closed it down’? I might have said, ‘Oh yeah,’” Tommy continued. “Or when I was going out with Missy [a mixed-race girl whom he invited to senior prom], what if he’d said, ‘Missy dumped you for that other guy. Black girls do that’? I might have said, ‘Oh yeah.’ Or when I flunked out of Clinch Valley community college and I couldn’t go home—my stepdad had converted my bedroom into his hobby room to make fishing lures—the man could have said, ‘Colleges are run by commies.’ I might have said, ‘Oh yeah.’”
In these ways, Tommy speculated, an extremist might offer recruits a raft of imagined villains onto whom to project blame and relieve the pain of shame. David Maynard had focused on a missing national narrative that might protect poor whites from the shame of failing to achieve the American Dream. Tommy was focused on something else: the shamed person’s vulnerability to those offering to blame a world of “outside” enemies.
On the third day of Tommy’s detox, he walked outside and seated himself on a patio chair, miserable. “My head was hung low, and I was staring at the ground between my legs. Then I suddenly noticed a trail of ants. Each ant was carrying a tiny load—a crumb, a bit of leaf, a piece of dirt. Then I saw it: One ant was carrying another ant as big as he was. That dead ant was useless, not doing its part, being a load instead of carrying a load. I thought, ‘See that dead ant? That’s me, right there. I could be that carrier ant. I do not want to be that dead, carried ant.’ That was one of the greatest moments in my life. That carrier ant brought me back.”
The Latin term prode, “to be of use,” is the origin of the word pride. Tommy’s grandfather had been honored for his bravery in the mines and on the battlefront. He was a carrier ant. For Tommy, it would be through helping others out of drink and drugs that he was to carry a load himself.
Tommy had hit bottom: shame. But he had rejected the temptation to shift blame to all the racial targets offered up to him and had come to see how blame, placed like a covering over disappointing life events, might falsely seem to relieve his pain. He was to find his way forward to creative repair. By the time I was walking with Tommy through Fairyland, he had happily remarried to a medical researcher and earned a bachelor’s degree, graduating on the dean’s list. He’d also taken a job at the Southgate Rehabilitation Program, where he counseled recovering addicts.
Imagining the leader of the upcoming march, Tommy reflected, “That guy’s selling white nationalism as a quick fix to make a guy who’s down on himself feel like he’s strong and going places. With racism, that guy would just be handing anyone like I was another drink.”
In 1996, Purdue Pharma had 318 sales representatives. Four years later, the number had risen to 671. It dispatched 78 sales representatives to Kentucky alone. In 2000, Kentucky had only 1 percent of the US population, but it had a higher than usual proportion of coal miners who had suffered injuries and needed pain relief, and it was one of the regulation-averse states Purdue focused on. For each drug purchase, such states called for only two receipts documenting the purchase—one for the pharmacist, a second for Purdue. More closely regulated states, mostly blue states, called for three copies—the third going to a state medical official monitoring the prescribing of controlled substances.
The requirement of that third copy had an astonishing effect. As later research would reveal, distribution of Purdue’s opioid pain medication OxyContin was 50 percent higher in the loosely regulated states (requiring two copies per drug purchase), such as Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia, than it was in more tightly regulated states (requiring three copies per purchase), such as New York, California, and Illinois.
Within these “freer” states, Purdue targeted doctors who were already prescribing large amounts of opioids and the pharmacists from whom those high-prescribing doctors ordered drugs. Health care professionals were given OxyContin fishing hats, stuffed plush toys, and music CDs (Get in the Swing with OxyContin). Purdue offered free, limited-time prescriptions for a seven- to 30-day supply of OxyContin—a drug that, it was found later, produced similar withdrawal cravings and symptoms as heroin. Crucially, Purdue offered its salespeople large bonuses for increasing OxyContin sales. In addition to the average sales representative’s annual 2001 salary of $55,000, annual bonuses ranged from $15,000 to nearly $240,000.
In 1996, when the company first introduced OxyContin, sales were $48 million. By 2000, sales had hit $1.1 billion.
In 2021, the rate of deaths from drugs in the United States was 32 per 100,000. In Pike County, the rate was 91 per 100,000. Between 2016 and 2018, Kentucky had the nation’s highest rate of children living with relatives other than their parents—9 percent. Another 5 percent were in foster care.
Through Tommy Ratliff, I met one of the men he counseled, James Browning, and I asked James how drugs had affected his sense of pride. He answered with a clarity he credited to his recovery. “I felt shame about some things that happened to me when I was a kid. To hide from my shame, I turned to drugs. Then I was ashamed of being on drugs. So I was part of a shame cycle. I took drugs to suppress shame, then felt shame for taking drugs. I disappointed my mom. I destroyed my marriage. I hurt my kids. But with Tom Ratliff’s help, for the first time in my life, I recovered from my fear of shame.”
Looking back at his descent into drugs, James observed how he had slipped down a hidden status hierarchy among fellow users, parallel to that Tommy Ratliff had discovered among the inebriated. “At the top of the hierarchy was the guy who can manage his drug habit and not get caught, and at first, I was that guy. I thought drugs were an adventure. I tried marijuana at 14, moved to pain pills in high school, and said to myself, ‘I’m just doing pills.’ Then when I was a husband and father and could hold down a job, I was proud of managing my habit. Then I was a divorced father. When my ex-wife wanted to move eight hours’ drive away to live near her sister, I moved into a drug house with five buddies and began my homelessness.
“We worked out our own way of judging ourselves and other addicts,” James commented. “When I was snorting oxycodone and hydrocodone, I told myself, ‘I’m just snorting. I’m holding down a job. I’m not a junkie.’ And that worked for a while. But then I got dopesick and I wasn’t holding down a job. And a guy came around, obviously a heroin pusher, and said, ‘Hey, I can make you feel better.’ But we looked down on heroin, and my buddies and I told him we were broke and ran the guy off. But in a few weeks, I was dopesick again and the pusher came back saying, ‘I’ll give it to you free.’ We took some heroin and felt better for a while.
“Then I told myself, ‘I’m snorting heroin, not shooting it.’ I snorted heroin for four or five years telling myself, ‘If you snort, you’re okay, but if you shoot up, you’re a junkie.’ But then I found the effect was stronger if it was shot into me. I didn’t like needles, so I asked a girl to shoot it into me, and I wasn’t shooting it myself, so that was better. But then two years later, the day came when I shot myself up. I became a junkie.”
Shortly after James had arrived at an emergency room unconscious from his fourth heroin overdose, the phone rang in the apartment of his sister, Ashley, a graduate student at the University of Tennessee. “I’d received emergency calls three times before, and every time my phone rang,” she would tell me later, “I dreaded it would be the call: ‘James is dead.’”
This time, the medics had found James without a pulse. But they had done CPR and revived him. “I just sobbed,” Ashley recalled. “I took a breath, got online, and spoke to James: ‘James, are you ready this time?’ He said, ‘I’m so sorry, Ashley; yes, I’m ready.’” In treatment, James recalls, “Tom told us about how he hit his own bottom and saw the line of ants, each carrying its tiny burden, one live ant carrying a dead ant. I understood. Tom Ratliff became the carrier ant willing to carry the dead—or nearly dead—ant. Me.”
This article is adapted from Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right (New Press), by Arlie Russell Hochschild.
At Tuesday’s vice presidential debate between Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), something will be missing: on-air fact-checking.
The Associated Press reports that moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan of CBS will not point out the candidates’ inaccuracies during the 90-minute debate, scheduled to take place in New York City at 9 p.m. Eastern. Instead, the network says the candidates can fact-check each other and that its misinformation unit, consisting of about 20 people, will provide real-time fact-checking during the debate in an online live blog and on-air afterwards.
The network’s plan garnered extensive, immediatecriticism from reporters and press watchers alike. Some journalistsaccused CBS of failing to live up to its mission, while others charged that they were bowing to Trump’s camp, which attacked ABC News moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir for pointing out Trump’smanylies in his debate earlier this month against Kamala Harris. Trump falsely claimed, for example, that Democrats execute babies after they’re born and that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating peoples’ house pets. Following the debate, CNN reported that Harris lied once, about the historical significance of the unemployment rate under Trump, while Trump lied more than 30 times.
There are a few questions to consider before judging the significance of CBS’s move: Can on-air, live fact-checking actually shape viewers’ opinions about a candidate’s trustworthiness, or has it indeed become part of the culture wars? Also, how many debate viewers will actually visit the CBS website or tune in to watch the post-debate fact-check?
Particularly in these times, journalists have to do more than give the candidates a pair of microphones and let them have at it.
But even without these answers, critics of CBS have a point, considering that Vance also has an extensive record of flat-out lying. Recall, for example, that Vance unleashed the lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, leading to Trump repeating it on the debate stage to tens of millions of viewers. And before Trump named Vance his running mate, the Hillbilly Elegy author was one of the many Republicans who went on television to question the 2020 election results—despite the fact that more than 60 lawsuits the Trump campaign filed questioning the integrity of the election were found to be without merit.
Particularly in these times—when the Republican candidate for the presidency is a convicted felon who tried to subvert the 2020 election and still refuses to admit his loss—journalists have to do more than give the candidates a pair of microphones and let them have at it. As Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein wrote in 2019, “Journalists can’t just dispassionately chronicle two equally valid ‘sides.’ A free press needs (and is needed by) lowercase-d democracy. We can’t exist without it.”
At Tuesday’s vice presidential debate between Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), something will be missing: on-air fact-checking.
The Associated Press reports that moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan of CBS will not point out the candidates’ inaccuracies during the 90-minute debate, scheduled to take place in New York City at 9 p.m. Eastern. Instead, the network says the candidates can fact-check each other and that its misinformation unit, consisting of about 20 people, will provide real-time fact-checking during the debate in an online live blog and on-air afterwards.
The network’s plan garnered extensive, immediatecriticism from reporters and press watchers alike. Some journalistsaccused CBS of failing to live up to its mission, while others charged that they were bowing to Trump’s camp, which attacked ABC News moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir for pointing out Trump’smanylies in his debate earlier this month against Kamala Harris. Trump falsely claimed, for example, that Democrats execute babies after they’re born and that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating peoples’ house pets. Following the debate, CNN reported that Harris lied once, about the historical significance of the unemployment rate under Trump, while Trump lied more than 30 times.
There are a few questions to consider before judging the significance of CBS’s move: Can on-air, live fact-checking actually shape viewers’ opinions about a candidate’s trustworthiness, or has it indeed become part of the culture wars? Also, how many debate viewers will actually visit the CBS website or tune in to watch the post-debate fact-check?
Particularly in these times, journalists have to do more than give the candidates a pair of microphones and let them have at it.
But even without these answers, critics of CBS have a point, considering that Vance also has an extensive record of flat-out lying. Recall, for example, that Vance unleashed the lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, leading to Trump repeating it on the debate stage to tens of millions of viewers. And before Trump named Vance his running mate, the Hillbilly Elegy author was one of the many Republicans who went on television to question the 2020 election results—despite the fact that more than 60 lawsuits the Trump campaign filed questioning the integrity of the election were found to be without merit.
Particularly in these times—when the Republican candidate for the presidency is a convicted felon who tried to subvert the 2020 election and still refuses to admit his loss—journalists have to do more than give the candidates a pair of microphones and let them have at it. As Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein wrote in 2019, “Journalists can’t just dispassionately chronicle two equally valid ‘sides.’ A free press needs (and is needed by) lowercase-d democracy. We can’t exist without it.”
Surprise, surprise. JD Vance’s self-proclaimed seamless journey from a “Never Trump” conservative in 2016—who called the former president potentially “America’s Hitler”—to a fervent supporter of the man in 2020 may not be the complete story.
According to a Friday report from the Washington Post, in February 2020, Vance condemned Trump’s choices during his first term in office in private messages on X. “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),” the VP choice reportedly wrote to a source that has remained anonymous due to worries over a vitriolic response.
In another DM sent in June 2020, Vance predicted that his future running mate would lose to Joe Biden in the presidential election. When Trump was actually defeated, Vance asserted that Democrats stole the election.
William Martin, a spokesperson for Vance, told the Post that Vance’s remarks about Trump’s poor execution of his promises for the economy were not targeting the former president but “establishment Republicans who thwarted much of Trump’s populist economic agenda to increase tariffs and boost domestic manufacturing in Congress.”
“Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),” the VP choice reportedly wrote.
“Fortunately, Sen. Vance believes that Republicans in Congress are much more aligned with President Trump’s agenda today than they were back then, so he is confident that they won’t run into those same issues within the party,” Martin added.
In other messages, Vance appeared receptive to government-led health care, saying Medicare for All “is a net positive, maybe not (details matter).”
This brings into question when and why Vance underwent a change of heart on Trump. When asked about this, Martin did not respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment.
We previously noted how Vance’s transformation to a champion of the former president may be genuine—he’s clearly studied the influences of the newly-established right with references to Nazi Germany and seizing the administrative state for themselves. But even if Vance makes his reasoning clear, he serves as an example of how elites can justify in their own minds that they can vote for Trump—because when they do so, they tell themselves they helping the working class (or, actually, the white working class), despite all the evidence to the contrary.
As Vance said at the Republican National Convention in July: “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.”
Or, in other words, it has a shared history and common future for a certain kind of people.
Surprise, surprise. JD Vance’s self-proclaimed seamless journey from a “Never Trump” conservative in 2016—who called the former president potentially “America’s Hitler”—to a fervent supporter of the man in 2020 may not be the complete story.
According to a Friday report from the Washington Post, in February 2020, Vance condemned Trump’s choices during his first term in office in private messages on X. “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),” the VP choice reportedly wrote to a source that has remained anonymous due to worries over a vitriolic response.
In another DM sent in June 2020, Vance predicted that his future running mate would lose to Joe Biden in the presidential election. When Trump was actually defeated, Vance asserted that Democrats stole the election.
William Martin, a spokesperson for Vance, told the Post that Vance’s remarks about Trump’s poor execution of his promises for the economy were not targeting the former president but “establishment Republicans who thwarted much of Trump’s populist economic agenda to increase tariffs and boost domestic manufacturing in Congress.”
“Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),” the VP choice reportedly wrote.
“Fortunately, Sen. Vance believes that Republicans in Congress are much more aligned with President Trump’s agenda today than they were back then, so he is confident that they won’t run into those same issues within the party,” Martin added.
In other messages, Vance appeared receptive to government-led health care, saying Medicare for All “is a net positive, maybe not (details matter).”
This brings into question when and why Vance underwent a change of heart on Trump. When asked about this, Martin did not respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment.
We previously noted how Vance’s transformation to a champion of the former president may be genuine—he’s clearly studied the influences of the newly-established right with references to Nazi Germany and seizing the administrative state for themselves. But even if Vance makes his reasoning clear, he serves as an example of how elites can justify in their own minds that they can vote for Trump—because when they do so, they tell themselves they helping the working class (or, actually, the white working class), despite all the evidence to the contrary.
As Vance said at the Republican National Convention in July: “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.”
Or, in other words, it has a shared history and common future for a certain kind of people.
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