The Republican nomination was made official later that day when the party formally nominated Trump and Vance at the start of its four-day national convention. Vance walked onto the convention floor accompanied by his wife, Usha Vance, as the crowd chanted “JD!”
If elected in November, Vance, 39, would be one of the youngest vice presidents in history. A relative newcomer to politics, Vance won his Senate seat in 2022 after making a name for himself as an author of a best-selling memoir. His selection would add a staunch defender of Trump’s cause to the field and Republican observers say it could help Trump solidify his base of white working-class voters, particularly in the upper Midwest.
Trump’s choice of running mate has been one of the most closely watched decisions of his campaign, but it has taken on new meaning following the assassination attempt on Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday.
Even before the shooting, the sentence was expected to come during a tumultuous presidential election. Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in a New York hush-money case in May, making him the first former president to be convicted of a crime. On the Democratic side, Biden’s future as a president is unclear. Biden appeared to lose his train of thought several times during the debate, leading some in his party to call for him to step aside and for another Democrat to challenge Trump. A Washington Post average of polls gives Trump leads in six of the seven battleground states most likely to decide the election.
President Trump parted ways with first-term Vice President Mike Pence over his refusal to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory. The former president, who would serve just one term if he wins in November, has been considering a range of candidates for his running mate in this election, requesting papers from at least eight candidates and holding informal auditions for many of them on the campaign trail.
President Trump kept the suspense going on Monday over who he would choose as his running mate, with news breaking shortly before the announcement that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and North Dakota Governor Burgum would not be running as his running mate.
On Monday, Vance shook hands with delegates at length at the convention, during which his introduction song, Merle Haggard’s “America First,” was played twice before he took his position on stage to be introduced. Some delegates even added Vance’s name to their Trump signs.
Democrats were quick to attack Vance, while many Republicans congratulated him on his selection. The Biden campaign quickly took note of Vance’s support for the false claim that Trump won the 2020 election, and said he would do what Pence refused to do for Trump: reject the legitimate results of the election. “He’s a Trump clone on issues,” Biden said of Vance on Monday. “I don’t see any difference.”
According to a Biden-Harris campaign official, Vice President Harris has reached out to Vance to offer her congratulations. She welcomes him to join the campaign and expressed hope that the two could meet at a debate proposed by CBS News, the official added, speaking on condition of anonymity on the confidential call.
Vance has been one of the former president’s most vocal supporters, voicing his support outside a New York City courthouse during Trump’s criminal trial this year and making frequent cable television appearances to bolster him. His supporters have picked up on Vance’s television interviews on CNN and “Meet the Press,” as well as conservative media, noting that Vance would be the first former Marine to serve as vice president. Vance is also close with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.
Vance sought to highlight his upbringing in fundraising emails he released Monday ahead of the official announcement of his selection.
“I believe many politicians are lost in the system,” he wrote. “They let down their voters, their country, and ultimately themselves. It’s an industry of broken promises and corrupt practices. But I will never stoop to that level. My roots, my family, my hometown have led me to this point, for better or worse.”
Vance grew up in a steel mill town in Ohio in a family plagued by drug addiction and poverty, an experience he chronicled in his book “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis.”
He served four years in the Marines and six months in Iraq, then studied political science and philosophy at Ohio State University and attended Yale Law School, before working for a large corporate law firm and then as a principal at billionaire Peter Thiel’s investment firm in San Francisco.
Vance, a Republican from Ohio, has supported a more populist direction for the Republican Party under Trump, embracing the “America First” policies and derivative policies that the former president and his supporters supported. Vance has been a vocal critic of U.S. aid to Ukraine. He has also addressed culture war issues, introducing a ban on gender-reassignment childcare for minors. He has also praised the “wise decisions” of autocratic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, echoing Trump’s assessment of dictators.
On abortion, another focus of this year’s election, Vance had previously spoken out against exceptions for abortion in cases of rape or incest, but after losing the Ohio abortion bill he acknowledged Republicans were distrustful on the issue and needed to find compromise, softening his stance and aligning with Trump.
Vance repeated Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election and suggested he would have taken a different path than Pence on Jan. 6, 2021.
“If I were vice president, I would have told Pennsylvania, Georgia and many other states that they needed to select multiple electors, and I think the United States Congress should have taken the debate from there,” Vance told ABC News in an interview in February. “Many people, including myself, believe there were many problems with the 2020 election, and that’s the right response.”
Like President Trump, he has not said for certain that he will accept the results of this year’s election, but has said he will do so if they are “free and fair.”
Shortly after Saturday’s assassination attempt, Vance denounced the Biden campaign, writing on X, “Today’s incident is not just an isolated incident. The Biden campaign’s central argument is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. This rhetoric led directly to the assassination attempt on President Trump.”
Vance is now one of Trump’s staunchest supporters, but he has been a critic in the past: In a July 2016 opinion piece for The Atlantic, he wrote that Trump is “cultural heroin” for the masses.
“He makes some people feel better for a time,” he wrote, “but he cannot cure them. And one day they will realize it.”
In August 2016, Vance declared Trump “unfit for the highest office in our nation” in a New York Times op-ed headlined “Why Trump’s Anti-War Message Resonates with White America.” That same year, Vance also messaged his law school roommate, Josh McLaughlin, saying, “Either you think Trump is a cynical bastard like Nixon, but not so bad (and maybe even useful), or you think he’s the American Hitler.” McLaughlin had contacted Vance at the time to write an opinion piece together.
“I never would have dreamed during our exchange in 2016 that just a few years later he would become one of the primary drivers of Trumpism,” said McLaurin, now a Democratic senator from Georgia.
In a now-deleted tweet, Vance wrote that he voted for a third-party candidate in 2016. But when he ran for Senate in 2020, Vance said he regretted criticizing Trump, who ultimately endorsed him and helped pave the way to victory in the primary. Vance said he voted for Trump in 2020.
Democrats are trying to portray Trump’s running mate as a loyal servant who will do Trump’s bidding to the letter, but Vance’s past attacks on Trump could backfire, and some have seen his Senate campaign as weak and frustrating for donors.
Now, his fierce defense of Trump has earned him praise from the former president and others who see Vance as Trump’s intellectual muscle. In May, Donald Trump Jr. appeared on CNN to share and celebrate Vance’s claim that Trump’s conviction in the hush-money case was politically motivated.
“This trial is nothing more than politics masquerading as justice,” Vance told Wolf Blitzer in a video posted by Trump. “I’m going to help Donald Trump in any way I think I can, because if we allow this trial to go ahead, it’s going to be a much bigger problem than Donald Trump.”
Mr. Vance also brings deep-pocketed connections to Silicon Valley, where he worked after the success of his book: He worked with David Sachs to organize a fundraiser for Mr. Trump in San Francisco in June, and Mr. Thiel is financially backing Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Dylan Wells, Tyler Pager and Toruse Olorunnipa in Milwaukee contributed to this report.
