Vance claims Trump “saved” Obamacare. Trump tried to kill it and failed.

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance claimed Tuesday night — contradicting history — that his candidate, former President Donald Trump, saved “Obamacare,” the health insurance program that Trump sought to destroy.

During the vice presidential debate on CBS against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vance, a senator from Ohio, echoed Trump's own recent revisionism. But the claim also reminded voters that Democrats ultimately won the years-long political battle to expand access to health insurance: Republicans no longer want to repeal the 2010 law.

Trump “actually implemented some of these regulations when he was president of the United States,” Vance said Tuesday evening. “And I think you can make a really good argument that it saved Obamacare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along. I think that’s an important point about President Trump.”

“When Obamacare collapsed under the weight of its own regulatory burden and health care costs, Donald Trump could have destroyed the program,” Vance added. “Instead, he worked across party lines to ensure Americans had access to affordable health care.”

But when Trump was president, repeal was central to his agenda. In a dramatic vote in the Senate in 2017, Democrats and a handful of Republicans rejected his plan to repeal Obamacare. Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, cast the deciding vote by lowering his thumbs down in a theatrical gesture. As a critic of Obamacare, McCain nevertheless concluded that “lean repeal” would leave people worse off than if Obamacare remained in place.

Walz noted this episode Tuesday evening.

Trump “would have repealed [Obamacare] “If it hadn’t been for the courage of John McCain,” Walz said.

It was Trump who first tried to play his own role in calling for repeal. In an ABC News debate this month, Trump said he “saved” Obamacare.

“Obamacare was lousy health care. It's always been like that. “It’s not very good today,” he said last month. “When I was president, I had to make a decision: should I save it and make it the best it can be? It will never be great. Or do I let it rot? And I felt like I had an obligation, even though it would have been politically good, to just let it rot and let it go.”

But after six years of Republicans calling for a repeal of the law, Trump promised during the 2016 campaign that he would repeal the law “very, very quickly.” When he won the White House, he tried and failed.