Trump Picks Senator JD Vance as Running Mate
JD Vance, Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons
After much speculation and plenty of breadcrumbs he was the favorite, US Senator JD Vance (R-OH) will be former President Donald Trump’s selection for the Republican vice president nomination.
Donald Trump has chosen Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio as his running mate, selecting a rising star in the Republican Party and previously outspoken Trump critic who in recent years has closely aligned himself with the former president.
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Trump announced his pick Monday afternoon on Truth Social. “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 wrote. He praised Vance’s education credentials and business experience.The GOP ticket was official later in the day when Republicans officially nominated Trump and Vance at the start of their four-day national convention here. Vance walked onto the convention floor with his wife, Usha Vance, by his side. The crowd chanted “J.D.!”
If elected in November, Vance, 39, would be one of the youngest vice presidents in history. He is a relative political newcomer, winning his Senate seat in 2022 after rising to prominence as an author who wrote a best-selling memoir. His selection adds a staunch defender of Trump’s movement to the ticket and, some Republican observers said, it could help Trump solidify his base of White working-class voters, particularly in the Upper Midwest.
Trump’s choice for a running mate was among the most closely watched decisions of his campaign and has taken on new significance in the wake of an attempted assassination against Trump at a campaign rally on Saturday in Butler, Pa.
President Biden and Donald Trump faced off in the first presidential debate of 2024, where Biden stumbled and Trump spread falsehoods. Here are takeaways and fact checks from the debate.
Even before the shooting, the decision was expected to arrive at a moment of upheaval in the presidential race. Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts in a New York hush money case in May, becoming the first former president ever convicted of a crime. On the Democratic side, President Biden’s future has been thrown into uncertainty after a disastrous debate performance where he appeared to repeatedly lose his train of thought, leading to calls from some in his party for him to step aside and let another Democrat challenge Trump. The Washington Post’s polling average has Trump leading in six of the seven battleground states that are most likely to determine the outcome of the election.
Trump broke with his first-term vice president, Mike Pence, over Pence’s unwillingness to try to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. The ex-president, who would be limited to one term if he wins in November, weighed a variety of candidates for his running mate this cycle, requesting documents from at least eight hopefuls and holding unofficial auditions for many of them at campaign events.
Biden is already going all out on Vance’s authoritarianism. I don’t think this is a choice a secure candidate makes. This is a shore up your base choice.Report
This makes official what has been obvious for years now, that even if Trump were to die tomorrow, Trumpism will still carry on.Report
The question is whether anyone has the special sauce to make Trumpism carry on. Vance is a Trumpist in belief to the core but he lacks Trump’s carney barker energyReport
So… what does this buy Trump?
Um, I’m pretty sure that Ohio was already sewn up. To a lesser extent, “the Midwest” can say “hey! a guy from the Midwest!” but I don’t know that that will swing as much as a full percentage point. (I remember, as a young Michigander, thinking Ohio was less cool than Michigan… I imagine that Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, as different as they are from Michigan, are somewhat aligned on this one particular point.)
Hillbilly Elegy was a best-seller… and a book club best-seller at that. So he’s a VP that probably has had more outreach to more people than any VP in recent history just based on the fact that he was a best-seller for a few months in the middle of 2016 and then, again, in January 2017 probably based on the whole “whyever did flyover not vote for Clinton?” momentum and Vance’s book had a somewhat ready answer to that question that came from a vaguely non-partisan place.
I don’t know how many people read it and agreed with it (or thought it made reasonable points) then and, now, are going to turn on it like it was written by JK Rowling. A non-zero number, I’m sure.
But does the book having been read by many in 2017 buy the ticket anything that it didn’t already have?
I’m not sure that I know what Vance actually buys Trump.
Maybe Vance is, instead, plugging leaks. That could be. We’ll see what happens at the convention this week.Report
You’re overthinking it. Trump needs someone who can read the briefings to him. And he has the best guy in history for the job. A guy so good he can not only read a book, once he even wrote one.Report
Vance isn’t dumb, then? I suppose that’s a plus. I saw an opinion that he had earlier on AI… specifically that it needs to be open source. I mean, plenty of dummies have opinions on AI but this is an opinion that seems to know what “open source” means?
Worse: I think I agree with that? Unironically?Report
As I have put on social media over the last few months in predicting Vance would be the VP, you have to look at is as Trump does, which is to say none of the usual political reasons for a running mate. He want total loyalty, someone really good on camera who fights and pushes the envelope, and he wants the Theil-Tech Bro money networks Vance is tapped into. We’ve basically had it confirmed it was Vance for weeks now but everyone sat on it cause confirmation doesn’t work with Trump, he could wake up this morning and change his mind. But especially the last 3 weeks there was no doubt it was Vance.Report
Total loyalty? Vance has, erm, a history of, shall we say, questioning Trump.
Eh, maybe that’ll work in Trump’s favor. Vance can argue “Hey, I was a skeptic too. I changed my mind. Here’s why.”
And, in the future, we have something that the Republicans haven’t had since Jeb: an heir.Report
Hillbilly Elegy has already had a lot of criticism for being, well, kinda wrong.
Well, not wrong, it’s a memoir, it happened to him, and he seems to have been mostly accurate about that and even mostly got what happened correct, but he, and everyone else, over generalized it over…a frankly huge part of America that many many different problems. I don’t even know that’s what he was intending, it’s just that the book arrived at exactly the right time, as you said. And since then, he sorta just went with it, eventually convincing himself he was right.
But it’s basically Oversimplification, the book, and manages to ignore huge chunks of everything.
It also frames the failure of Appalachia as a moral individual failing, which…is not true. Unless by ‘moral failing’ you mean ‘weird cultural hangups that makes people reject any sort of help’, but that _not_ what Vance means. (Or he wouldn’t have joined the political party that helps reinforce that.)
Or, here, just read this: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/hillbilly-elegy-doesnt-reflect-the-appalachia-i-know/617228/
And again, _as a memoir_, this is fine. People understand and present their history in different ways, and it’s fine for Vance to have written a memoir like that. Hell, a lot of people just sorta make things up for their memoirs, so the fact he didn’t, that his seems mostly truthful, is commendable. But…everyone decided that this book Explained Everything, but it doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just some guy talking about his past.Report
Eh, I don’t want to read what The Atlantic thinks is wrong with Vance’s book. Certainly not a 2020 take.
What about the swings?Report
Do the swings even know anything about it, or anything about Vance at all?
Although really my first question is always ‘Why are we pretending the swing voters exist and make decisions based in rationality?’
I am having trouble seeing anything that Vance brings to the ticket, and I don’t really see how a 7-year-old book and a 4-year-old movie that only political wonks cared about are going to fix that.
What is the process that book becomes relevant? Is he supposed to be presented as someone who is uniquely understanding of the struggles of poor rural communities?
Because there’s a kind of fundamental problem in the way of that, and that’s Trump. Trump isn’t going to let anyone else be the expert in things.Report
Do the swings even know anything about it, or anything about Vance at all?
This is why I bring up that Hillbilly Elegy was a book club book. Maribou has explained to me that her book club is a bit of an outlier because people actually read the books and discuss them rather than, you know, drink wine but I’m willing to assume that a book club book has a much better shot of getting read than one that isn’t like that.
Heck, they even made a movie about the book.
So when you ask “do the swings even know anything about it?”, I’d say “some of them do, yeah”.
What is the process that book becomes relevant? Is he supposed to be presented as someone who is uniquely understanding of the struggles of poor rural communities?
I don’t know how it becomes “relevant” as much as he’s the guy who wrote the book that a bunch of people in the book clubs have actually read. Assuming that it was a read-the-book book club.
I assume that it was compelling enough to become one for a reason.
As for “uniquely understanding of the struggles of poor rural communities”, it’s kind of a “compared to who?” sitch.
Compared to Trump? Yeah, I think he’s got a shot.
Compared to Kamala? Yeah, I think he’s got a shot.
Compared to Biden? Maybe. The Corn Pop thing was real, of course. That was urban. Maybe that’s what it hinges on. “Poor rural”.Report
Caveat: I have not read the book.
My understanding is that it has more of a Kevin Williamson (who I did periodically read with interest) message, i.e. that in many respects the rural (particularly white) poor are responsible for their own condition. The implication then was that Trump was the latest false prophet and vehicle for blaming everything under the sun but themselves. I believe he has now, at minimum, softened on that line.Report
“This is why I bring up that Hillbilly Elegy was a book club book.”
It’s also important to remember that despite people now talking about how it’s crapping on rural right-wingers, it was seen as extremely pro right-wing when it came out, mostly because of its thesis that the solution to people’s problems was for those people to Shut Up And Shape Up.Report
The point of Hillbilly Elegy wasn’t to highlight rural problems or right-wing politics
The point of Hillbilly Elegy was to highlight how awesome JD Vance was to the right kinds of people (cause without the heliography of that book he’s just another Ivy League law school grad and VC bro) for having overcome rural problems and right-wing politics, which is even more craven now that once he got into politics, he massages right-wing politics with one hand while seeking power with the other.Report
Tracing woodgrains wrote a quick essay about Vance.
I’d like to hear your take on it:
Report
Tweeted this earlier but it applies to this as well and overlaps:
Fascist is the wrong word, & meaningless term in current environment where that nomenclatures been beat to death twice over
Getting your VP selection is declaration of faction power. The edgelord-techbro oligarchy Vance represents sees their opening to ride Trumps wake to power
Quote
Bill Kristol
No surprise. The most self-consciously and unapologetically fascist-adjacent figures in Trump’s orbit–Carlson, Musk, Sacks, and Thiel–were for Vance.Report
I have fewer hard feelings for the edgelord-techbro oligarchy than most.
For one thing, they’re thinking about the future rather than the past.
Good info. Thanks.Report
I dunno. I don’t recall the book being all that much about I’m So Great Because I’m Great, it was more of a bootstraps narrative. But he wasn’t writing about me personally, so it probably doesn’t land the same for me.Report
That’s pretty much Vance’s theme in all his public statements that I’ve seen, that he despises most of America and wants us to Shut Up and Shape Up.Report
Vance once described Trump as “America’s Hitler”. I suppose that means Vance wants to be America’s Hindenburg.Report
The person or the blimp?
I would have said Blondi.Report
Adenauer?Report
Adenauer may have come after Hitler, but he wasn’t his successor.Report
My point is maybe he wants to be the guy who normalizes things afterwards.Report