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Donald Trump Jr clashed with Kaitlan Collins about his father previously being compared to Adolf Hitler – before the CNN journalist reminded him that JD Vance once did the very same thing.
On Tuesday night, the Ohio senator and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz faced off for their first – and likely only – debate ahead of the election, broadcast live from CBS News’s New York City studio.
As the candidates exchanged barbs, Trump’s eldest son Don Jr waited in the wings in the spin room.
While Vance and Walz were relatively well-mannered on stage, the 46-year-old appeared riled up and quickly turned his attention away from the debate itself as he lashed out at Collins and blamed the media for the assassination attempts on his father.
“The media has radicalized the people that are trying to kill my father,” the businessman told Collins, addressing the two recent attempts on his father’s life at a Butler, Pennsylvania, rally in July and then at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf resort last month.
“No one wants the threats against his life to happen,” Collins said.
“You can’t blame the media for those threats, there’s been no evidence that that’s what drove those.”
Don Jr retorted: “When someone calls – and allows people to have a platform to call someone literally Hitler every day for nine years, it creates it, whether you want to believe it or not.”
Collins, however, quickly pointed out that the very man Don Jr had been cheering on that night had previously drawn the same comparisons between Trump and the Nazi dictator.
“But as you know, JD Vance once likened your dad to Hitler as well. He questioned if he was America’s Hitler,” she shut him down.
Back in 2016, Vance was a staunch critic of Trump and in a private message to a friend denounced the former president as “America’s Hitler,” a “moral disaster” and akin to “cultural heroin”.
During the debate, the Ohio senator tried to walk back those comments saying he “was wrong about Donald Trump” and had a skewed perspective of the former president due to “media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record”.
Despite the tense atmosphere in the spin room, the vice presidential debate maintained a largely cordial affair, as Vance and Walz took turns answering questions surrounding key election issues ranging from abortion to the conflict in the Middle East.
A CBS News snap poll in the aftermath found 42 percent of viewers thought Vance emerged as the debate winner. Walz garnered only marginally less support, with 41 percent believing that the Minnesota governor “won” the debate.
Unlike Donald Trump’s rampant attack lines and volatile untruths in the presidential debate against Kamala Harris on September 10, 88 percent of the survey respondents found that the tone of the VP debate was “generally positive.”
