Donald Trump named JD Vance, the Ohio senator who has aligned himself with the populist right, as his running mate at the Republican national convention on Monday.
“After long deliberation and reflection, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the best suited person to assume the office of Vice President of the United States is Senator JD Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” Trump wrote on Twitter . Social Truth.
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When Trump first ran for office, Vance’s eventual nomination to run alongside him would have seemed implausible. Vance, a venture capitalist who rose to prominence with his 2016 memoir-turned-Netflix film Hillbilly Elegy, was once among Trump’s conservative critics.
“I’m never a Trump guy, I never liked him,” Vance said during an October 2016 interview with Charlie Rose. Trump was, in Vance’s assessment at the time, a “terrible candidate.”
He even wondered out loud, in texting an ex-roommatewhether Trump was more “a cynical idiot like Nixon”, or worse, “America’s Hitler”.
Since then, Vance has made a dramatic transformation into a Maga power figure and close ally of the former president who has supported some of Trump’s more authoritarian impulses, such as questioning the results of the 2020 election and, in a 2021 podcast interview, suggesting that Trump should purge federal government employees if he is 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. “This rhetoric led directly to the attempted assassination of President Trump.”
Vance has already vied for Trump’s blessing once, while campaigning for a seat representing Ohio in the U.S. Senate. During the primaries, Vance presented himself as a Trump-style right-wing populist. He railed against “elites,” fired off dismissive tweets about crime in New York City, promoted the racist and anti-Semitic “Great Replacement” theory on Tucker Carlson’s show, and grew 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 deceit.
Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who had previously backed Vance’s venture capital startup, invested record sums of money in the race, and Trump endorsed Vance — ushering in his primary victory. When he defeated former Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan in the November 2022 general election, it cemented his place on the Maga right.
“I think we need more people like him in politics, who are energetic and dynamic and clear about their ideology,” Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotechnology entrepreneur who ran for president during the Republican Party primaries, said of Vance. “The only downside to this — if there’s a downside to be made — is that he’s probably one of the best we have in the U.S. Senate and he’s a principled fighter.”
In office, Vance consistently aligned himself with the populist right, questioning the U.S. role in foreign conflicts and supporting right-wing domestic legislation. In 2023, for example, he introduced a bill that would make English the official language of the USA.
In a fundraising email, Trump speculated that the media “will say that MAGA-Patriots like YOU will not vote for me with JD Vance on the ticket. NOW IS THE TIME TO PROVE THEM WRONG!”
