Donald Trump has picked as his running mate JD Vance, the young Ohio senator and author of a best-selling memoir about his experience of rural poverty, in a choice aimed at winning blue-collar voters across the swing states of the industrial Midwest.
Trump announced Vance, an ideologue of the former president’s Maga movement, as his vice-presidential pick on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, and just two days after a gunman attempted to assassinate him.
Trump confirmed his pick in a post on his Truth Social platform on Monday afternoon, saying “after lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others”, he had decided Vance was the “person best suited to assume the position of vice-president”.
Vance, who once described Trump as an “idiot” and said he was a “never Trump guy”, has been among the former president’s most ardent supporters in recent years and one of his most fluent and pugnacious surrogates on the campaign trail.
In a post to X after Saturday’s shooting, Vance said the “central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” adding: “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
In an interview with Fox News on Monday night, Vance defended his previous comments criticising Trump, saying he had made a “mistake” and been “wrong”.
“I was certainly sceptical of Donald Trump in 2016,” Vance said. “But President Trump was a great president, and he changed my mind. I think he changed the minds of a lot of Americans.”
Hours earlier, Vance greeted supporters on the floor of the Republican convention in Milwaukee with his wife, Usha Vance, a corporate litigator who earlier in her career clerked for two current Supreme Court justices, John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh.
Trump’s announcement ended months of speculation and completed the Republican party’s 2024 ticket with less than four months to go until November’s election. Trump leads US President Joe Biden, his Democratic rival, in most national and swing state polls.
Trump’s decision marks a meteoric rise for Vance, who was elected to the Senate for the first time just two years ago. If Trump, 78, wins another term, Vance, 39, will be just a heartbeat away from the presidency. The vice-president is the first person in the presidential line of succession.
Vance first came to national prominence in 2016 with the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir about growing up in white, working-class America surrounded by substance abuse. The US Marine Corps veteran and Yale Law School graduate worked in venture capital before turning to politics.
Soon after Trump’s announcement, Biden issued a call for donations to his campaign, posting on X: “Here’s the deal about JD 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.”
Biden later told reporters Vance was a “clone of Trump on the issues” and he did not see “any difference” between the former president and his running mate.
A Biden campaign official confirmed Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice-president, left Vance a message on Monday congratulating him on his selection and encouraging him to participate in a vice-presidential debate proposed by CBS News to take place on August 13.
Trump suggested on Monday that Vance’s background would help him appeal to voters in the industrial Midwest. He said in his social media post that his running mate would 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”.
Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin are seen as critical battleground states for Trump to win if he is to secure another four years as president.
Within minutes of Trump’s post, his campaign published a 60-second advertisement featuring the Ohio senator and the branding “Trump-Vance 2024 “.
Vance’s brand of populist politics has earned him plaudits from the Republican base and Trump. But it has also ruffled feathers among more traditional Republicans who bristle at his isolationist foreign policy views — the senator has long opposed more US aid for Ukraine — and embrace of a higher minimum wage, trade protectionism and more aggressive antitrust enforcement.
“Wall Street will be begging for the return of Lina Khan after two months of the Trump-Vance administration,” said one New York dealmaker, reacting to the news.
GOP consultant Ken Spain said Vance “proudly represents the ascendant blue-collar wing of the GOP that is sceptical of business”, adding: “He’s not a counterweight to Trump aimed at ‘balancing out’ the ticket. He’s a potential heir apparent.”
If Trump defeats Biden in November, Vance will be the third-youngest vice-president in US history, only a few months older than Richard Nixon when he became vice-president under Dwight Eisenhower.
Trump had delayed making an announcement until the last possible minute, in a drawn-out process that he likened to a “highly sophisticated version of The Apprentice”, his one-time reality television franchise. As recently as last week, he had said he was still weighing “four or five” possible running mates.
Trump famously fell out with his former vice-president, Mike Pence, after the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol, when a mob of the then-president’s supporters threatened Pence for his decision to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election, confirming Biden’s victory.
Pence has not endorsed Trump’s latest bid for the White House, but at the weekend said he was praying for his former boss’s “full recovery” after the shooting at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
Additional reporting by James Fontanella-Khan in New York and Alex Rogers in Washington
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