Donald Trump picks JD Vance as the Republican vice presidential candidate
Donald J Trump, the official Republican nominee for the presidency, picked 39-year old JD Vance, a first-time Senator from Ohio and a critic turned admirer of the former president, as his running mate for the 2024 elections on Monday.
In a post on Truth Social on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Trump said that after “lengthy deliberation and thought”, and considering the talent of others in the party, he had decided that Vance was best suited to become vice president.
Vance’s wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, is of Indian-origin and grew up in San Diego. They met at Yale Law School and have three children. Both walked on to the convention floor on Monday evening and were greeted with cheer and applause.
Vance shot to fame as the author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, widely hailed as among the best books that captured, through an intensely personal chronicle, the story of the poor White working class in middle America who formed the core of Trump’s support base in 2016 and their struggle with social and economic dislocation.
He was then a critic of Trump, but embraced the leader subsequently. Vance also became the most ardent champion and among the effective spokespersons of Trump’s worldview — on trade, immigration and foreign policy — and has now become a mentor and supporter of a younger generation of national conservatives who espouse an “America first” vision.
If elected, Vance will be the third youngest vice president in American history. In 1857, John Breckinridge became VP at the age of 36, and in 1953, Richard Nixon got elected as Dwight Eisenhower when he was 40 years and 11 days old. Vance’s age introduces a new dimension in a race that has been marked by concerns around the age of President Joe Biden who is 81. Trump himself is 78, and if he wins, Vance will become the frontrunner to take on the leadership of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement that is today synonymous with the Republican Party.
In his post, Trump outlined all of Vance’s qualifications – service in the Marine Corps, a graduate from Ohio State University in two years, a Yale Law School Graduate where he was Editor of The Yale Law Journal, and President of the Yale Law Veterans Association, a “successful business career in technology and finance”. Trump also referred to Hillbilly Elegy as a book that championed “the hardworking men and women” of US.
“J.D…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..”, Trump said. He added that as VP, Vance will continue to fight for the Constitution, stand with American troops, and “do everything he can to help me MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN”.
Vance is also particularly close to Trump’s son Donald Trump junior who had consistently advocated for his selection. Trump’s nomination has resulted in one of the most ideologically extreme but cohesive conservative tickets since the Republican Party dropped its older internationalist, free market and free trade orientation and shifted towards a narrower conception of American engagement in the world and prioritised the imperatives of domestic manufacturing and creating jobs.
Kip Christianson, a 33-year old Republican delegate from Minesota at the convention, hailed Trump’s pick. “I feel he is someone who understands me. He told the coastal elites the story of middle America. The book put him on the map. I have spent much of my life with coastal elites. But he has communicated the story of my people to them much better than I could have. People feel that Trump sees and understands us. Vance shares that and will amplify that.”