A political newcomer and former Donald Trump critic turned ally, Senator Vance relishes the spotlight and has already shown he can energise donors.
Former President Donald Trump has chosen Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio to be his running mate, wagering that the young senator will bring fresh energy to the Republican ticket and ensure that the movement Trump began nearly a decade ago can live on after him.
Vance, 39, is a political newcomer who entered the Senate only last year, but he has spent that time methodically ascending the conservative firmament. Once an acerbic Trump critic – attacking Trump as “reprehensible” and calling him “cultural heroin” – he won Trump’s backing in his 2022 Senate race by wholly embracing his politics and his lies about a stolen election. The endorsement lifted him above a crowded field, and ultimately to the Senate.
Vance, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who became best known for writing the memoir Hillbilly Elegy, did not forget it. He quickly emerged as a top defender of the former President in the halls of Congress and on television, taking his cues from Trump while frequently bucking the priorities of longtime Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
Trump announced his choice in a post on his social media platform Truth Social on Monday, as the Republican National Convention was getting under way in Milwaukee. He said Vance was “the person best suited” to be his potential Vice President. He highlighted Vance’s time in the Marine Corps and his memoir, saying he believed Vance was a champion for hardworking people, particularly the workers and farmers in a number of key swing states.
Trump’s selection came just days after he survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania, an episode that underlined the significance of his choosing a running mate who might be in line as Trump’s successor.
Vance, an ardent and vocal defender of Trump, went further than many of his allies, directly attributing the shooting to the rhetoric of President Joe Biden and his campaign, even as Trump and his campaign called for unity.
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination,” Vance wrote on the social platform X.
In Vance, Trump has tapped an ambitious ideologue who relishes the spotlight and has shown he can energise donors on behalf of the presumptive nominee. His youth – there are nearly 40 years separating them, and Vance is the first Millennial nominated to a major-party ticket – could prove a boon to the ticket, as voters have expressed concern over both Trump’s and Biden’s ages. And the choice positions Vance, intentionally or not, as the likeliest Republican yet to carry Trump’s ideological legacy beyond a potential second term in the White House.
Vance achieved renown after the publication in 2016 of Hillbilly Elegy, about growing up poor in Ohio and Kentucky. The timing dovetailed with Trump’s political rise, and Vance, then a “Never Trump” conservative, became sought out for his perspective on what fuelled Trump’s popularity among white working-class voters.
At the time, Vance argued that Trump was guiding “the white working class to a very dark place”, particularly over his offensive remarks about immigration and his efforts to blame immigrants for economic woes. He once told a former classmate at Yale that he thought Trump was “America’s Hitler”.
But Vance said his views shifted during the Trump presidency. And by the time he entered the Republican primary for a Senate seat in Ohio in 2021, he had adopted Trump’s hard-right messaging and renounced his previous views about immigration and trade.
Three weeks before the primary, Trump rewarded his conversion with an endorsement that carried Vance to victory in a crowded primary. And in the Senate, Vance’s adherence to Trumpism stood out among his peers.
Yet the two men’s similarities could prove a drawback. Vance has rooted his career in speaking for the working class against elites, but in aligning himself so squarely with Trump, it is unclear whether he can bring voters to the table who are not on board. Vance is in lock step with Trump on nearly every issue, and he may not have much to offer more moderate or independent voters unenthusiastic about Trump’s policies or turned off by his actions leading up to and on January 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters stormed the US Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 election results.
Biden, in a social media post, criticised Vance as only pretending to be a champion for ordinary Americans. “He talks a big game about working people,” Biden wrote. “But now, he and Trump want to raise taxes on middle-class families while pushing more tax cuts for the rich.”
His choice of Vance capped months of feverish running-mate speculation – and followed an intense anti-Vance lobbying effort that tried to get the former president to pick other top contenders such as Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota or Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. Some of those pressuring Trump to not select Vance included major Republican donors and Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire media mogul.
All the politicians considered in the top tier of candidates for Trump’s running mate had competed against him in Republican presidential primaries: Rubio ran against him in 2016, and Burgum and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, another name long in the mix, both ran in the primary this year.
Compared with other possible selections, Vance has relatively little governing experience should he ascend to the presidency. But he has never directly competed against Trump, and his political career exemplifies how devotion to Trump has practically become a precondition in Republican politics.
Embracing Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud in 2020, similarly, proved a key loyalty litmus test for any candidate angling for the vice-presidential slot. More than any other top contender for a spot on the ticket, Vance has endorsed and promoted Trump’s lies that the election was stolen. Unlike Rubio or Scott, who both voted to certify Biden’s victory after police had managed to clear the Capitol of rioters on January 6, Vance was not in the Senate then and did not have to put his position on the record.
Vance is part of a group of roughly a dozen Republican senators who have tried to push the Senate toward Trump’s Make America Great Again ideology, particularly with isolationist views on foreign policy. He unsuccessfully clashed with McConnell to block a foreign aid package that provided US$61 billion ($100b) to Ukraine and repeatedly opposed efforts to avert a government shutdown.
During his frequent television interviews this year, and as he has hit the campaign trail for Trump, Vance has echoed the former President’s hard-line views on immigration and his stance on trade.
In addition to his news media appearances defending Trump, which The New York Times has reported played a role in the selection process, Vance also notably joined Trump’s entourage during his criminal trial in New York City in May. Outside the courthouse, he held a news conference attacking the prosecution’s star witness, Michael Cohen, while Trump was bound by a gag order that prohibited him from doing so.
Raised largely by his maternal grandparents, Vance, whose mother battled drug addiction, grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a steel mill town that saw its fortunes decline as blue-collar jobs disappeared. After enlisting in the Marines and doing public affairs work in Iraq, Vance graduated summa cum laude from Ohio State University, then went on to Yale Law School.
Vance met his wife, Usha Vance, at Yale, and the two have three children. After time working in corporate law, Vance went to San Francisco, where he worked as a venture capitalist for Peter Thiel, a well-known conservative donor who influenced Vance’s politics and who helped support his Senate race.
Democrats are likely to attack Vance over previous comments on abortion, one of the few places where he and Trump have diverged. Vance, during his Senate run, suggested he did not believe in exceptions to abortion restrictions in cases of rape or incest and said he would support a 15-week federal abortion ban that had been proposed by Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
Vance has more recently taken a softer stance, echoing Trump’s belief that abortion decisions must be left to the states, and that Republicans must soften their demands for abortion restrictions in order to win elections.
And though Vance’s fealty to Trump may have been an asset in the race for running mate – loyalty is a quality Trump values above most others – it could pose a political threat in November. Biden and his campaign have been attacking Trump as a threat to democracy and are eager to remind voters about his 2020 election lies and his role in spurring supporters to storm the Capitol to overturn the election.
In news media appearances, Vance has echoed Trump’s widely debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen. In an interview with ABC News this year, he backed schemes to create alternative slates of electors in key battleground states that Trump lost, saying, “We needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there.”
More recently, Vance has maintained that Trump had legitimate grievances over how the election was conducted, even as most of Trump’s claims of voter fraud have been debunked. And he has said that if he had been Vice President on January 6, 2021, he would have encouraged Congress to consider false slates of pro-Trump electors before certifying the election.
Trump’s Vice President at the time, Mike Pence, bucked Trump’s calls to reject Biden’s victory in 2020. After Trump publicly criticised his Vice President’s refusal as disloyal, some Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol chanted threats to hang Pence, who was forced to flee the mob, which had come within 12 metres of him.
But Vance told CNN this year that he was “extremely sceptical that Mike Pence’s life was ever in danger.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Michael Gold
Photographs by: Maddie McGarvey, Haiyun Jiang and Doug Mills
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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