President Trump had lost the first presidential debate. Democrats wanted the final weeks of the campaign to focus on the Republican nominee’s weaknesses. Mike Pence’s task was defending Trump, making a Democratic victory sound like a nightmare and disputing the Democrats’ central premise: that a Trump presidency would weaken and divide the country.
“If Donald Trump had said all of the things that you’ve said he said in the way you said he said them, he still wouldn’t have a fraction of the insults that Hillary Clinton leveled when she said that half of our supporters were a basket of deplorables,” Pence told Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Clinton's running mate. “She said they were irredeemable, they were not American.” That went further than Clinton — she had said racists were “thankfully” not representative of America. But Pence landed the blow, and Kaine didn't respond.
