Donald Trump announced this Monday, the day the Republican convention began in Milwaukee, the vice-presidential candidate who will accompany him in the November presidential elections: JD Vance, a 39-year-old senator from the state of Ohio.
On his social media account “Truth Social Network,” cited by the AP, Trump wrote that after “long deliberation,” and taking into account the “tremendous talents” of many other candidates, he has decided that the best person to assume the position of vice president “is Senator J.D. Vance of the great state of Ohio.”
Trump had revealed that he had narrowed his list of vice presidential candidates to three: Vance of Ohio, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.
Vance will be, according to the AP, the one who is ideologically most aligned with the Republican candidate: at 39 years old, he could provide Trump with a millennial voter base, but he has been in the Senate for less than two years.
The announcement of the vice president’s name came shortly before Trump received enough votes at the Republican convention to be named the party’s official nominee.
Vance has embraced Trump’s populist agenda after years of criticizing the tycoon. In the Senate, he has been a staunch defender of the former US president and votes in line with Trump’s positions, including by opposing a bill blocked in the House of Representatives that would have provided more aid to Ukraine.
He is close to Donald Trump Jr., a venture capitalist, and was elected to the Senate in 2022 after receiving Trump’s own endorsement.
JD Vance is also the author of the memoir “Hillbilly Elegy”, published in 2016 and which became a bestseller, having been adapted into a film by Ron Howard under the name “Lament of an America in Ruins”. The film premiered on Netflix in 2020, with Amy Adams and Glenn Close in the main roles.
“I’m a Trump man — I never, ever liked him,” Vance said in a 2016 interview, calling him a “terrible candidate” for president. But he has since shifted sharply and supported some of Trump’s more authoritarian impulses, even suggesting that the Republican should “purge” government officials if he were re-elected.
On Saturday, Vance responded on X to Trump’s assassination attempt: “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” he wrote. “This rhetoric led directly to the assassination attempt,” he added, implicitly linking Trump’s assassination attempt to Biden’s statements.
2024-07-15 21:34:12