Tim Kaine Just Mercilessly Mocked Donald Trump

Tim Kaine Just Mercilessly Mocked Donald Trump

At the Democratic convention, Hillary Clinton's running mate took on the Donald.

Patrick Caldwell
Jul. 27, 2016 11:23 PM

Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine accepted the Democratic vice presidential nomination Wednesday in Philadelphia. He used his speech to appease the progressive wing the party, while also taking aim at Donald Trump. And early on, Kaine reminded viewers that his son Nat, a Marine, deployed this week to Europe—to "defend the very NATO allies that Donald Trump now says he would abandon."

Kaine started off by recycling much of his well-received speech from the previous Saturday in Miami, where Hillary Clinton introduced him as her running mate. Since he was a largely unknown figure nationally before being named to the Democratic ticket, the early portion of his Wednesday address focused on filling in some basic biographic details: child of the Midwest with a sense of morality rooted in the social justice causes of Catholicism; missionary work in Honduras, where he became fluent in Spanish; and a pre-political career as a litigator in Richmond focused on civil rights causes—primarily fair housing. And he made sure to pepper in a few lines of Spanish throughout his speech, which elicited loud rounds of applause from the convention crowd.

Kaine looked a little shaky on his feet at the start, clearly nervous. There was a smattering of voiced opposition from a small number of Bernie Sanders diehards, who chanted "Feel the Bern" and spoke out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. But he picked up steam as he went along, even ad-libbing a line to appeal to the Bernie crowd when he mentioned working in Washington with the Vermont senator. "We should all want to Feel the Bern, and not get burned by the other guy," he said.

By the time he pivoted to the second half of his speech, focused on criticizing Trump's record, Kaine was going strong. He ticked through a range of attacks against Trump. Again and again, he delivered a mocking impression of the Trump's habit of saying "believe me" to back up outlandish ideas, such as the real estate mogul's plan to make Mexico pay for a border wall.

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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/07/tim-kaine-vice-president-dnc-speech