July 16, (THEWILL) – Republican Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, has picked JD Vance, the young Ohio senator, as his running mate for the November presidential election in the United States.
Trump announced Vance on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, just two days after a gunman attempted to assassinate him.
His announcement of Vance as running mate ended months of speculation and completed the Republican party’s 2024 ticket with less than four months to go until November’s election.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he had chosen Vance “after lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others”.
Vance, who once described Trump as an “idiot” and said he was a “never-Trump guy”, has been among the former president’s most ardent supporters in recent years and one of his most fluent and pugnacious proponents on the campaign trail.
In a post on X after Saturday’s shooting, Vance said the “central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs”, adding: “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
In an interview with Fox News on Monday night, Vance defended his previous comments criticising Trump, saying he had made a “mistake” and been “wrong”.
“I was certainly sceptical of Donald Trump in 2016. But President Trump was a great president, and he changed my mind. I think he changed the minds of a lot of Americans”, he said.
An author of a best-selling memoir about his experience of rural poverty, Vance first came to national prominence in 2016 with the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir about growing up in white, working-class America surrounded by substance abuse.
The US Marine Corps veteran and Yale Law School graduate, worked in venture capital before turning to politics.
Vance, who will turn 40 in August, offers a youthful contrast to Trump, 78, and President Joe Biden, 81. If elected in November, Vance would be one of the youngest vice presidents in history. 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).
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