Former President Donald Trump has chosen Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his 2024 running mate, Trump announced on Truth Social on Monday—drawing intense focus to the staunch Trump ally and onetime critic.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump and Republican candidate for U.S. Senate JD Vance greet ... [+]
Vance—a 39-year-old veteran of the Iraq War, Yale-educated lawyer and former venture capitalist—was elected to the Senate in 2022 after Trump endorsed him, which helped him beat GOP primary challenger Josh Mandel and Democratic nominee Tim Ryan.
Billionaire PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel was a big supporter of Vance during his Senate run, donating about $15 million—the largest amount ever to boost an individual Senate candidate, according to Politico—to support Vance, who said in March Thiel is “a very fascinating and knowledgeable person” he likes to bounce ideas off of.
A one-time Thiel employee, Vance rose to prominence in 2016 when his memoir chronicling the social, economic and cultural effects of manufacturing’s decline in the Ohio town he grew up in, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was released.
His campaign website lists his priorities as reducing unnecessary spending and inflation, boosting domestic oil and gas production, combating the drug and opioid epidemic, ending abortion, protecting the southern border and changing immigration policy.
Vance is a firebrand known for his sometimes controversial rhetoric: After Trump was shot at on Saturday, Vance suggested in a tweet that President Joe Biden’s campaign strategy “led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination” by suggesting Trump “is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.”
Though Vance hasn’t always supported Trump, he has grown to be a defender of and campaigner for the former president and his ideas—including his views on trade policy and limiting foreign aid—and he has developed a close relationship with Donald Trump, Jr., who is expected to formally introduce Trump’s running mate Monday.
Vance said he didn’t vote for the former president in the 2016 election, and his former roommate said Vance had texted him saying Trump was “cynical” and could be “America’s Hitler,” the Associated Press reported. In October 2016, Vance tweeted Trump was “reprehensible,” saying the then-presidential candidate “makes people I care about afraid’ and criticizing him for his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim policies and rhetoric. But Vance came around in 2021 and said he regretted his past comments about Trump, which secured him the former president’s endorsement. When Trump endorsed Vance in his 2022 race, he acknowledged the candidate's criticisms, saying: “Like some others, J.D. Vance may have said some not-so-great things about me in the past, but he gets it now, and I have seen that in spades.”
“Hillbilly Elegy” gained prominence amid Trump’s political rise, due to its examination of the culture of low-income, white, working class people through Vance’s own experience of growing up in poverty and observing others around him navigating the social welfare system. Early on in the book, he states that he identifies with “the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree” and to whom poverty is “the family tradition,” noting he saw wealthier white people as people to fear. The memoir also had a number of autobiographical details about Vance and his family’s time growing up in Appalachia and the Rust Belt, including that his mother and grandfather struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, respectively, and his grandmother once set fire to his grandfather because he was drinking—though he survived and the couple stayed together. Speaking to NPR in 2016, Vance said the book was about “the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south.” The book was turned into a Netflix movie in 2020.
Vance previously confirmed he was one of the frontrunners for Trump’s vice presidential pick, saying in late June he would feel “a little bit of disappointment” if he didn’t get the job, but recognizing Trump’s team was likely “looking at a lot of other people too.” In addition to Vance, Trump was reportedly considering Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. Trump said in the past he wanted a VP who had experience and a measured demeanor, the New York Times reported. Trump also told Fox News last week his camp was waiting to see how the backlash surrounding Biden’s debate performance would affect the race before announcing his running mate.
If Trump and Vance win the White House, his Senate vacancy could give Democrats an opportunity to flip his seat in the next general election.