Here’s what you could have had: I kept thinking that throughout the entire vice presidential debate. The head-to-head race between Tim Walz and JD Vance was a vision of what American politics could look like without the distorting gravitational field of Donald Trump – a political interlude beamed to you from Planet Normal.

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

More on that later, but for now let’s enjoy the climate on Planet Normal. On stage in New York were two people with regular attention spans and an above-average ability to remember names and details. Vance, the Republican, gave skillful, coherent and thankfully short answers to the CBS anchors’ questions. (The bulwark Tim Walz, the Democrat, started out nervously and quickly discovered that it’s difficult to be folksy in an empty room — although he certainly didn’t go down in Dan Quayle-style flames. The debate was cordial — too cordial for many Democrats, who wondered why Walz didn’t deliver the smackdowns they wanted.

Both candidates committed political sins that were within expected limits: Vance blatantly ignored the first question about Iran and instead summarized his appealing backstory for any viewers unfamiliar with it Hillbilly Elegy. Walz dodged and skirted around a question about his inflated biography before finally admitting that he had “misspoken” when he claimed to have been in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. The two men also managed to have several substantive conversations about politics, arguing about what we can learn from Finland’s approach to gun crime and the extent to which mental health issues interact with mass shootings. All of this was reminiscent of what American political debates were like in the distant past, oh, the early 2010s.

Pundits largely called this debate for Vance, who successfully downplayed his unpopular positions on abortion and health care and used multiple opportunities to advance his central ideological theme of protectionism. America needs to become more independent, not just in heavy industry, he said, because “the medicines we put into our children’s bodies are made by nations that hate us.” That statement sounded less paranoid than before, after the former British prime minister Boris Johnson revealed last week that he had flirted with sending a commando team to recover vaccines held by the European Union at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

However, the audience surveys were closer. Walz recovered from his shaky start and delivered several powerful lines. On the subject of gun violence, he shared that his own teenage son witnessed a shooting, prompting an empathetic response from Vance. He also recounted meeting the parents of the students killed at Sandy Hook – realizing that there was a picture of his own child on his office wall, while the people before him had lost their own children. When asked why he changed his mind and now supports a ban on assault weapons, Walz said simply, “I sat in that office with those Sandy Hook parents.”

Everything was very polite, sensible, normal. Very reserved. However, from time to time, an alternate reality began to invade the CBS studio. Or rather –our Reality began to sink in. The one where Donald Trump is the Republican nominee. The clearest signal was Vance’s frequent tic when referring to his vice president: Donald Trump’s energy policy, Donald Trump’s border policy, Donald Trump’s wisdom and courage. In contrast, Walz mentioned Kamala Harris less often.

You and I both know why Vance dropped his name with the enthusiasm of an out-of-work actor. Trump is the kind of person who picks up political memoirs and looks up the index to see how often he’s mentioned. Over the last eight years, the entire Republican Party has regrouped around his enormous ego, consisting of many men much smarter than Trump – men like JD Vance, even – who believe they can manipulate him through flattery. The former president probably didn’t care about the finer details of Finnish politics, instead focusing on his name. Throughout the debate, the Trump campaign’s rapid response team fired off “fact checks,” but the candidate’s Truth Social feed rambled on about his usual obsessions: the CBS anchors’ low ratings; Praises for his own greatness and wisdom—“America was great when I was president,” “I saved our country from the China virus,” “EVERYONE KNOWS I WOULD NOT SUPPORT A FEDERAL BAN ON ABORTION”—and praise for “a great defense of…”I” by Vance.

The great mystery of this moment in American politics is that Trump’s flaws — his self-obsession, his lack of self-control, his casual lies — are so obvious. And yet all attempts to replace it with a lab-grown alternative that eliminates these deficiencies have failed. (If Vance had run in the Republican primary, he probably would have done as well as Ron DeSantis.) The Republican base loves the chaos, drama, and darkness that Trump offers, and resists any attempts to replace those qualities with bland competence substitute .

Throughout, Vance seemed genuinely in trouble as he had to defend Trump’s behavior and his own transition from critic to sycophant. He offered an outrageous—but superficially convincing—explanation of how he went from believing Trump was “America’s Hitler” to being his last and only hope. “I was mostly wrong because I believed some of the media reports that turned out to be dishonest falsifications of his story,” he said. Likewise, the only real glimpse of the unsympathetic “childless cat lady” version of Vance — which I recognized from fancy podcasts and cozy Fox News interviews — came when he had to defend Trump’s lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio . When the moderators noted that the Haitians in question were in America legally, Vance responded, “The rules were you wouldn’t fact-check.” Not Exactly the answer of a man who is convinced that he is telling the truth.

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

Walz found a new gear. The folksy Midwestern father wasn’t angry now, but rather disappointed at his wayward son, who had returned long after curfew and smelled suspiciously of weed. Vance, Walz’s behavior suggested, had let himself down. “I enjoyed the debate tonight and think there was a lot of common ground here,” he began, before launching a scathing attack on Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021. “He lost this election and he said he didn’t do it.” One hundred and forty police officers were beaten at the Capitol that day, some with the American flag. Several died later.” When Walz talked about being a football coach and told his team that playing fair was more important than winning at all costs, Vance reflexively began to nod slightly.

In his response, Vance tried his best to point out that Hillary Clinton had raised the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 election. But Walz countered: “January 6 was not a Facebook ad.” (We might also note that, whatever concerns she had about the election, Clinton was present at Trump’s inauguration and explicitly acknowledged the peaceful transfer of power to an opponent . By contrast, Trump didn’t stay in Washington, D.C. to watch Joe Biden be sworn in as president, but instead flew to Florida in anger.)

Walz then asked Vance directly whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Again, the Republican could only offer an excuse — “Tim, I’m focused on the future” — and a return to Big Tech censorship that allowed Walz to go all out. “This is not a debate,” he said. “This is nowhere different than in Donald Trump’s world, because when Mike Pence made the decision to certify the election, that’s why Mike Pence is not on this stage.”

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

Vance did not repeat that language, nor did he repeat his earlier suggestion that he had not done what Pence did in January 2021, namely certify the results. On the most fundamental question of this year’s contest – whether America is still a functioning democracy with free and fair elections – Republican voices are not entirely consistent.

Well, I’m more than surprised that Vance wouldn’t tell the truth. But I’m fascinated that, given the biggest platform of his career to date, he couldn’t bring himself to lie either. After so many humiliating concessions, Vance now decided to adapt poet EE Cummings’ famous line: “There’s some shit I won’t eat.” He switched to his talking points about misinformation so deftly that much of the subject matter experts overlooked his dexterity .

Why doesn’t he agree with his boss about what happened in 2020? The inevitable conclusion must be that JD Vance – smart, ambitious and only 40 years old – is already thinking about the post-Trump future. If the former president is no longer in the picture, what point will there be in expressing personal bitterness over the rejection by the American people? The voters of 2028 or 2032 will undoubtedly care more about gas prices and housing costs than an old man’s complaints. They might as well keep doing Trump’s crazy stuff about sharks and Hannibal Lecter.

Anyway, Vance did pretty well last night. But I wonder if Trump has realized that, for all the name-dropping and flattery, his vice president is “focused on the future” — a future that doesn’t include him.