Former President Donald Trump has chosen Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, as his vice presidential running mate, taking a once-strident critic and elevating him as the leading heir to his political legacy.
Vance, who will turn 40 in August, offers a youthful contrast to Trump, 78, and President Joe Biden, 81.
He would be the third-youngest vice president in history — behind John Breckinridge (36 years old upon taking office in 1857) and Richard Nixon (40 years and 11 days in 1953). And Vance’s selection comes just days after Trump survived an assassination attempt Saturday, underlining the gravity of the vice presidential selection in stark terms.
“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 on Truth Social Monday afternoon.
As a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War, Vance also brings to the ticket military experience, as well as right-wing populist views that mesh with Trump’s “America First” sloganeering and the “Make America Great Again” movement. Vance, for example, has opposed U.S. aid to Ukraine and pushed to stall confirmation of Biden’s judicial nominees in a protest over Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts in a New York state case in May.
Trump selected Vance after a search that started with at least a dozen possible running mates. In the final weeks, the list of prospects narrowed, with Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida among the other finalists.
Some of the leading young voices on the right, including Donald Trump Jr. and prominent pro-Trump activist Charlie Kirk, had advocated for Vance.
“I think it’s a phenomenal pick. I think it’s exactly the right pick,” Trump Jr. said in an interview minutes after his father announced he was selecting Vance.
Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon criticized Vance and Trump in a statement. “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.
A meteoric rise
Trump’s decision continues a meteoric rise for Vance, who eight years ago captured the political zeitgeist with his bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
In the book, Vance shared vivid memories about his mother’s battle with drug addiction, a rotating cast of father figures and the other socioeconomic challenges that his family faced after migrating from eastern Kentucky to southwestern Ohio. The book’s publication coincided with Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, inadvertently anticipating his rise as a political figure and becoming a Rorschach test for those trying to make sense of Trump’s appeal among white working-class voters.
“I find the existence of the book you hold in your hands somewhat absurd,” Vance wrote in the book’s introduction. “It says right there on the cover that it’s a memoir, but I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve accomplished nothing great in my life, certainly nothing that would justify a complete stranger paying money to read about it.”
Vance, who has a law degree from Yale and worked in venture capital before entering politics, was not initially among Trump’s admirers as he promoted the book. Vance described him as “cultural heroin” in a July 2016 guest column for The Atlantic. During a PBS interview two months later, he contended that there was “definitely an element of Donald Trump’s support that has its basis in racism or xenophobia.”
That November, Vance voted for independent Evan McMullin for president. And in December 2016, after he returned to his native Ohio and began pondering a political career, Vance told the Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com that “the message of Trump’s campaign was obviously not super-appealing to Latino Americans, Black Americans and so forth.”
“That really bothered me,” Vance added.
After leaving behind a trail of Trump criticism that Biden and his allies can now repurpose in their case against the new GOP ticket, Vance came to heel. In recent years, he has worked to tie his political identity closely to Trump’s, raising money for him recently in Silicon Valley and signaling that he would have handled the 2020 election results differently than Trump’s last vice president.
Since entering the Senate, Vance has balanced his reputation as a culture warrior with bipartisan relationships that have advanced his populist ideals. He has worked with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., on legislation that would claw back pay from executives at failed banks, and with Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., on a bill to ensure that more products invented with the help of federal funds are made in the U.S. He is also known for his visibility and responsiveness during local disasters, like the toxic train derailment last year in East Palestine, Ohio.
Vance, born James Donald Bowman in 1984, was named after his father, Donald Bowman, who left Vance’s mother “around the time I started walking,” he wrote in his memoir. His mother later renamed him James David Hamel, using an uncle’s name along with the surname of his adopted father. When he married his wife, Usha, both took Vance as their last name — a nod to the grandparents who largely raised him and shaped his values in Middletown, Ohio.
Mamaw and Papaw Vance were among the most memorable characters in “Hillbilly Elegy” — rough-edged and sharp-tongued, but well-meaning, heads of a family often in crisis. Glenn Close earned an Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of Mamaw in the film adaptation.
“Mamaw and Papaw ensured that I knew the basic rules of fighting,” Vance wrote in the book. “You never start a fight; you always end the fight if someone else starts it; and even though you never start a fight, it’s maybe okay to start one if a man insults your family.”
Elsewhere in the book, Vance recalled that his grandmother “felt disloyalty acutely. She loathed anything that smacked of a lack of complete devotion to family.”
Those early lessons in loyalty shine a light on Vance’s journey from Trump skeptic to unshakable ally. Encouraged by establishment Republicans, Vance considered a Senate bid in 2018 but passed. As the GOP calcified into Trump’s party, Vance’s attacks gave way to compliments. By the time he launched his 2022 campaign, he was fully on board with and devoted to Trump — deleting old social media posts and apologizing for his past criticism while also holding them up as a strength.
“My intuition with Trump, it’s interesting, I think that he gets a certain kick out of people kissing his a–,” Vance said in an interview with NBC News shortly after launching his Senate candidacy that year. “But I also think he thinks that people who kiss his a– all the time are pretty weak.”
Vance at the time was one of the least-known candidates in a crowded GOP primary and entered the race as a long shot. Opponents weaponized his past comments about Trump in hopes of turning the Trump-loving base against him in a state the former president had twice won by sizable margins. But Vance had cultivated a relationship with Trump Jr., whose father eventually responded approvingly to Vance’s zeal of the convert and endorsed him. Trump’s backing helped lift Vance out of the primary and overcome a scare from a well-funded Democrat.
The relationships with both Trumps blossomed over time. Trump Jr. became one of his most ardent boosters for the VP slot.
“I really want to see, like, the JD Vance-Kamala Harris vice presidential debate,” Trump Jr. said while interviewing Vance on his podcast in May. “There’s some other nice people that could be vice president, I guess.”
