MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski called out J.D. Vance for blaring a "firehose of falsehoods" throughout his debate against Tim Walz.
The vice presidential candidates faced off Tuesday night in their only scheduled debate, and former White House press secretary Jen Psaki told "Morning Joe" that Vance misrepresented and distorted both his and Donald Trump's record on numerous issues, which put Walz at a disadvantage in a format where moderators rarely stepped in to fact check his false claims.
"J.D. Vance was campaigning like he was running with a different running mate," Psaki said. "That briefing book that he was using was not full of Trump positions or facts, either one, and that was who Tim Walz was standing on that debate stage with, so that is a challenge. I do think people want serious discussions and debates about policy, but it's hard to be the guy explaining the intricacies of policy when the guy standing next to you is lying in everything that comes out of his mouth and reconstructing history of the guy who is his running mate. It's a challenge."
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Walz has drawn low marks for his answer when confronted on a long-ago claim that he’d visited Hong Kong in spring 1989 during protests in China’s Tiananmen Square, when he actually had traveled there weeks later, but host Joe Scarborough said that fumble paled in comparison to what Vance offered to viewers.
"I'm asking people, really, if you can sort of look through all the fog and all the lies and all the disinformation, compare that with another guy on stage, the Ivy League guy who was lying about what's going on in his own state, how he's making his own constituents' lives more dangerous, more disruptive, how he's damaging the economy," Scarborough said. "Yeah, Tim Walz exaggerated about things in the past, J.D. Vance is lying in a way that not only hurts Americans' lives today, but makes his own constituents less safe, less productive, less well off."
Co-host Mika Brzezinski added that Walz seemed unprepared to explain his past claims about his travel to China, where he and his wife worked with the nonprofit WorldTeach program, but she agreed that Vance's lies went unchecked throughout the debate.
"What happens in these debates, and we've seen it in town halls where moderators have the same issue as well, you get overwhelmed by the other side, whether it's Trump or Vance now, who have the firehose of falsehoods coming at you, and you can see Tim Walz trying to keep up with them, because there were so many," Brzezinski said. "I'm not joking. I mean, it's very hard to compete against somebody who doesn't play by the rules, and you would think in politics and in news coverage that that would be the baseline, that we're arguing over facts. But it doesn't happen in these debates, not with the Trump-Vance ticket."
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