Donald Trump has named JD Vance, the Ohio senator aligned with the populist right, as his running mate at the Republican National Convention on Monday.
“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator JD Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” wrote Trump on Truth Social.
When Trump first ran for office, Vance’s eventual nomination as his running mate would have seemed implausible. Vance, a venture capitalist who rocketed into the public eye with his 2016 memoir turned Netflix movie Hillbilly Elegy, was once among Trump’s conservative critics. “I’m a never-Trump guy, I never liked him,” Vance said during an October 2016 interview with Charlie Rose. Trump was, by Vance’s estimation at the time, a “terrible candidate.” He even wondered aloud, in texts to a former roommate, whether Trump was more of “a cynical asshole like Nixon,” or worse, “America’s Hitler.”
Since then, Vance has undergone a dramatic transformation into a MAGA power figure and close ally of the former president, supporting some of Trump’s more authoritarian impulses, such as questioning the results of the 2020 election and suggesting in a 2021 podcast interview that Trump should purge civil servants from the federal government if re-elected.
Vance’s response to the assassination attempt at a Trump rally on Saturday was also notable. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance wrote on X. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Vance had already vied for Trump’s blessing once before, while campaigning for a seat representing Ohio in the US Senate. During the primary, Vance pitched himself as a Trump-style rightwing populist, criticizing “elites,” tweeting contemptuously about crime in New York City, promoting the racist and antisemitic “great replacement” theory on Tucker Carlson’s show, and growing a beard. He faced a storm of negative ads from the conservative, free-market-oriented Club for Growth, which pointed to his past identity as a “never Trumper” as proof of his phoniness.
The tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who had previously backed Vance’s venture capital startup, poured record-breaking sums of money into the race, and Trump endorsed Vance, ushering in his victory in the primary. When he beat former Democratic congressman Tim Ryan in the November 2022 general election, it cemented his place in the MAGA right.
“I think we need more people like him in politics, who are energetic, dynamic, clear-headed about their ideology,” said Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur who ran for president during the Republican party primaries. “The only negative of it—if there is a negative to point out—is he’s probably one of the best we have in the US Senate, and he’s a principled fighter.”
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., celebrated the announcement on the convention floor. “I watched JD go into sort of—let’s call it enemy territory, from a media perspective, doing the most liberal TV shows, and prosecute the case for my father and against the Democrat lunacy that we’ve seen,” he said.
Outside the floor of the convention in Milwaukee, news spread slowly on Monday that Trump had picked Vance. “I think it’s a great choice. I like that he’s young. I like that he’s from Ohio. There’s a lot of positives about him. Future of the party,” said Nick D’Alessandro, an alternate delegate from New York.
Larry Johnson, a convention attendee from West Virginia, thought Vance could bring more attention to Appalachia: “I think for a long time that area has been kind of overlooked.”
Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor and one of Trump’s most outspoken critics within the Republican party, said Vance was a “strategic” choice.
In an early response from the Democratic party, Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison wrote that the “Trump-Vance ticket would undermine our democracy, our freedoms, and our future.”
In office, Vance has consistently aligned with the populist right, questioning the US’s role in foreign conflicts and backing rightwing domestic legislation. In 2023, he introduced a bill that would make English the official language of the US.
In a fundraising email, Trump speculated that media outlets “will say MAGA-Patriots like YOU won’t vote for me with JD Vance on the ticket. NOW’S THE TIME FOR US TO PROVE THEM WRONG!”
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/15/trump-vp-jd-vance-election
Image Source: https://nevadacurrent.com/2024/07/15/former-president-trump-taps-ohio-u-s-sen-j-d-vance-as-running-mate-in-2024/
