MILWAUKEE—Donald Trump has selected Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate, setting up the freshman Republican from Ohio as the future of the party and Trump’s MAGA movement.
“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” Trump posted this afternoon on Truth Social, his social media network. “J.D. honorably served our Country in the Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University in two years, Summa Cum Laude, and is a Yale Law School Graduate, where he was Editor of The Yale Law Journal, and President of the Yale Law Veterans Association. J.D.’s book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” became a Major Best Seller and Movie, as it championed the hardworking men and women of our Country. J.D. has had a very successful business career in Technology and Finance, and now, during the Campaign, will 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….”
A person familiar with Vance’s selection told Dispatch Politics the senator received the offer from Trump just 20 minutes before the Republican nominee announced his choice publicly. Vance, who turns 40 in August, will officially receive the nomination later Monday during a roll call vote of the Republican National Convention, following Trump’s own formal nomination.
Trump’s choice of Vance stands in stark contrast to his renewed desire to dial back heated political rhetoric and promote unity in the wake of the attempt on his life over the weekend. Following that Saturday shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, Vance tweeted that the assassination attempt was “not just some isolated incident.”
“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. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
In a statement this afternoon, Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon responded to Vance’s selection. “Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people,” she said.
Speaking on ABC News’ This Week in February, Vance told anchor George Stephanopoulos he would not have certified the 2020 election results like former Vice President Mike Pence did. “If I had been vice president, I would have told the states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” he said.
First elected to the Senate in 2022 after receiving Trump’s endorsement in a crowded Republican primary, Vance first came on to the national stage in 2016 as the author of his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Thin on legislative and political experience, Vance is a former Trump critic who, in his telling, came to embrace the 45th president after watching him govern and seeing how people he grew up with responded to him. Our colleague John McCormack recently wrote for The Dispatch about how Vance became the leader in the veepstakes:
“Never be like these f—ing losers who think the deck is stacked against them,” J.D. Vance’s grandmother often told him when he was a child. “You can do anything you want to do.”
To read Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy in 2016 was to admire Mamaw, Vance’s strong-willed and charmingly vulgar grandmother who gave him the much-needed stability he didn’t get from a drug-addicted mother who cycled through several husbands and live-in boyfriends. To read Hillbilly Elegy again in 2024 is to sit in awe and wonder at the unrelenting ambition of J.D. Vance himself.
By the time Vance graduated from high school, he writes in his memoir, he had aced the SAT but didn’t think he had the discipline to succeed in college, so he enlisted in the Marines instead. After completing his service, which included a deployment to Iraq as a public-affairs specialist, Vance breezed through Ohio State University in a little less than two years, graduating summa cum laude. Then Vance became a Yale Law School graduate, D.C. lawyer, freelance policy wonk, venture capitalist, and New York Times best-selling author.
Vance climbed the ladder of success not just by his own grit and talent, but by learning to adapt to a foreign culture. “[S]ocial mobility isn’t just about money and economics; it’s about a lifestyle change,” he wrote. “The wealthy and powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores.”
Vance’s ability to adapt has served him well in his two post-Hillbilly Elegy political campaigns—both of which were aimed at earning the vote of one man.
In 2022, Vance won the Ohio GOP Senate nomination by securing the decisive endorsement of Donald Trump, and two years later the 39-year-old senator is the odds-on favorite to be selected as Trump’s running mate. If Trump picks Vance and wins in November, Vice President Vance would become the prohibitive favorite for the GOP presidential nomination in 2028. And he would have a non-trivial chance of becoming president before then. (Trump turns 82 in 2028.)
Winning over the former president was no small feat for Vance, who called Trump “noxious,” “reprehensible,” an “idiot,” and “cultural heroin” during the 2016 campaign. “What percentage of the American population has @RealDonaldTrump sexually assaulted?” Vance asked in one 2016 tweet that has been deleted. “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” Vance wrote in a text message to a friend at the time.
But when Vance launched his Senate campaign in 2021, he begged Trump and Republican voters for forgiveness. “I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy,” Vance told Fox News viewers that July. “I think he was a good president.” Trump is “the leader of this movement,” Vance told Time magazine, “and if I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him.” A Vance spokesman declined an interview request with the senator for this article.
Be sure to read the whole article here, and stay tuned for more reporting on Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate in tomorrow’s Morning Dispatch.
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