Donald Trump has picked as his running mate JD Vance, the young Ohio senator and author of a best-selling memoir about his experience of rural poverty, in a choice aimed at winning blue-collar voters across the swing states of the industrial Midwest.
Trump announced Vance, an ideologue of the former president’s Maga movement, on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, just two days after a gunman attempted to assassinate him.
Hours later Trump and Vance appeared together at the convention in the former president’s first public appearance since the weekend’s shooting. Trump had a gauze bandage on his ear where he was hit by a bullet on Saturday at a campaign rally.
Trump entered the hall to a standing ovation and a live performance of his campaign anthem, “God Bless the USA”. He did not deliver a speech, but he waved and pumped his fist as the crowd shouted “USA” and “fight”.
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. Trump leads US President Joe Biden, his Democratic rival, in most national and swing state polls.
Trump’s decision marks a swift rise for Vance, 39, who was elected to the Senate for the first time just two years ago.
Trump confirmed his choice in a post on his Truth Social platform on Monday afternoon, saying 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,” Vance said. “But President Trump was a great president, and he changed my mind. I think he changed the minds of a lot of Americans.”
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.
Soon after Trump’s announcement, Biden issued a call for donations to his campaign, posting on X: “Here’s the deal about JD Vance. He talks a big game about working people. But now, he and Trump want to raise taxes on middle-class families while pushing more tax cuts for the rich.”
Biden later told reporters Vance was a “clone of Trump on the issues” and that he did not see “any difference” between the former president and his running mate.
A Biden campaign official confirmed that current vice-president Kamala Harris left Vance a message congratulating him on his selection and encouraging him to participate in a vice-presidential debate proposed by CBS News to take place on August 13.
Trump suggested Vance’s background would help him appeal to voters in the industrial Midwest. His running mate would 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”, he said in his social media post.
Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin are seen as critical battleground states for Trump to win if he is to secure another four years as president.
Within minutes of Trump’s post, his campaign published a 60-second advertisement featuring the Ohio senator and the branding “Trump-Vance 2024”.
Vance’s brand of populist politics has earned him plaudits from the Republican base and Trump. But it has also ruffled feathers among more traditional party members who bristle at his isolationist foreign policy views — the senator has long opposed more US aid for Ukraine — and embrace of a higher minimum wage, trade protectionism and more aggressive antitrust enforcement.
Republican consultant Ken Spain said Vance “proudly represents the ascendant blue-collar wing of the [party] that is sceptical of business”, adding: “He’s not a counterweight to Trump aimed at ‘balancing out’ the ticket. He’s a potential heir apparent.”
Vance would be the third-youngest vice-president in US history, a few months older than Richard Nixon when he became vice-president under Dwight Eisenhower.
Trump had delayed making an announcement until the last possible minute, in a drawn-out process that he likened to a “highly sophisticated version of The Apprentice”, his one-time reality television franchise.
Trump fell out with his former vice-president, Mike Pence, after the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol, in which a mob of the then-president’s supporters threatened Pence for his decision to certify Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
