Two days after he survived an assassination attempt, former President Donald Trump kicked off this week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee by tapping 39-year-old first-term Sen. JD Vance of Ohio to be his running mate, concluding a process that he had likened to “a highly sophisticated version of ‘The Apprentice’.”
Vance, who won out over other GOP contenders, including Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, may be half Trump’s age, but he’s more closely aligned with Trump’s America First ideology, including support for tariffs, concerns about immigration and opposition to U.S. funding for Ukraine in its war against Russia. Vance is also an election denier who has said that if he had been in Vice President Mike Pence’s position, he would have rejected electoral votes contested by Trump in 2020.
“He is a younger and more articulate version of Trump,” Republican pollster Frank Luntz told Bloomberg.
Vance’s background is much different than Trump’s, though. Vance served as a Marine in the Iraq War before earning a Yale Law degree and becoming a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. He rose to prominence as the author of the bestselling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” He has been in the Senate for less than two years, with his meteoric political rise fueled by a shift from fierce Trump critic (he had called Trump and “idiot” and “unfit for our nation’s highest office”) to loyal MAGA ally — or, as The New York Times put it, “an ambitious ideologue who relishes the spotlight and has already shown he can energize donors on behalf of the presumptive nominee.”
In his statement announcing the pick, Trump said Vance “will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond….”
President Joe Biden knocked Trump’s pick in a fundraising pitch on social media: “Here’s the deal about J.D. Vance. He talks a big game about working people. But now, he and Trump want to raise taxes on middle-class families while pushing more tax cuts for the rich.”
