POLITICO Screen grab Clinton camp tries to nail Pence on low-energy defense of Trump

Mike Pence may have been the winner of Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, but his low-energy defense of Donald Trump’s past remarks is already paying dividends for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The former secretary of state’s campaign released a scathing video Wednesday morning, juxtaposing the Indiana governor’s statements at the vice presidential debate with campaign trail clips from Trump himself. Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine spent much of Tuesday night in attack-dog mode, trying to pin Pence down on the Manhattan billionaire’s past statements.


And while Pence mostly dodged Kaine’s attacks on the debate stage, the video released by Clinton’s team highlights six separate issues on which Pence simply denied that Trump had ever made the statements Kaine correctly accused him of making.

“At the VP debate, Mike Pence seemed to discover he was Donald Trump’s running mate,” the video declares as it begins. “He had a hard time with the news.”

The video features Kaine attacking both members of the GOP ticket for praising Russian President Vladimir Putin, something Pence denied on stage, followed by clips from both Trump and the Indiana governor doing just that. That is followed by Kaine’s statement that Trump did not know Russia had invaded Crimea (a claim Pence derided as “nonsense”) and a clip from ABC’s “This Week” in which the Republican nominee said of Putin “He’s not going to go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down.”

Clinton’s team also spotlighted Pence’s statement that “Donald Trump and I would never support legislation that punished women” for having an abortion, pairing it with an MSNBC interview in which Trump said “there has to be some form of punishment” for a woman who has the procedure performed on her.

Pence also argued that Trump “never said” that more nations should have nuclear weapons, a claim that the video backs up against footage of the Manhattan billionaire suggesting that Japan and Saudi Arabia should possess those weapons. The Indiana governor said it was “absolutely false” that Trump has supported a ban on Muslims entering the U.S., a much-covered policy that Trump proposed at a press conference during the Republican primary and has since walked back.

The video closes with a quote from Kaine, that Pence is “asking everybody to vote for somebody that he cannot defend.

“It’s okay mike,” words across the screen read as an image of Pence shaking his head plays. “We’d have a hard time defending him, too.”



At the #VPDebate, Mike Pence tried really, really hard to deny pretty much everything Donald Trump has said and done. Let's replay the tape: pic.twitter.com/5XNKyFX6az — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 5, 2016