JD Vance played a surprising trump card in his debate with Tim Walz

Ever since he was announced as Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance has earned his “weird” credentials.

From furthering baseless rumours about the eating habits of migrants in Springfield, Ohio, to leading painfully awkward encounters in donut shops, the Republican senator has left eyebrows in a near-permanent state of elevation.

And yet, Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate presented a surprising new side to Trump’s 40-year-old sidekick.

He was… nice.

And – guess what? – it paid off.

By all accounts, Vance’s hotly anticipated head-to-head with his Democratic rival Tim Walz was a largely civilised affair, with both parties showing respect and restraint towards each other.

The BBC’s North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher described the Hillbilly Elegy author as having taken the opportunity to put a “polite, humble face” on the bones of Trump’s conservative populism, while Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of the Washington DC-based National Interest, praised his “relaxed, reasonable [and] reassuring” demeanour.

There were even moments where the two men openly agreed with one another on key issues.

“There’s a lot of commonality here,” Walz admitted towards the end of the more than 90-minute discussion, hosted by CBS News.

Vance and Walz, accompanied by their wives, shook hands warmly onstage following the head-to-head(Getty Images)

Indeed, when the whole thing wrapped up, a smiling Vance strode over to shake Walz cordially by the hand. This led The Times’ New York correspondent Will Pavia to describe the pair, flanked by their wives, as looking as though “they had just arrived at his place for dinner”.

The pair seemed to have, at least temporarily, put their personal beef to one side, less than two months after Vance branded Kamala Harris’s right hand man a “schoolyard bully”.

Lest we forget, Walz is behind the buzzword that Trump and his running mate have been furiously and fruitlessly trying to shake since July.

The 60-year-old Democrat coined it during an interview with MSNBC, when he dismissed the two Republicans as “just weird”.

The following month, Vance made it clear that he didn’t appreciate this new nickname, accusing Walz and Harris of using it “to distract from their own policy failures.”

“I mean, look, this is fundamentally schoolyard bully stuff,” he said, before going on to parrot Walz’s own “weird” insult against him.

Suffice it to say, both parties struck a very different note in Tuesday’s one-on-one, keeping things predominantly even-tempered.

But while Walz had already established himself as the cuddly ideal of a Midwestern dad, Vance stunned viewers with his new persona as a “nice guy”.

It was this which served as the ultimate trump (or Trump) card and, in the eyes of many, made him the surprise winner of the debate.

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