LAST UPDATE | 16 Jul 2024

JD VANCE WAS once a fierce critic of Donald Trump, but he has now been named as the former president’s running mate.

Trump, 78, announced his pick on the first day of the Republican Party convention in Milwaukee, an extravaganza turbocharged by the attempted assassination of the former president.

Posting on X, Vance responded to his selection saying he was “just overwhelmed with gratitude”.

“What an honour it is to run alongside President Donald J. Trump. He delivered peace and prosperity once, and with your help, he’ll do it again. Onward to victory!”

Vance made his name with the 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” a best-selling account of his Appalachian family and modest upbringing, which gave a voice to a rural, working-class resentment in what is viewed by many as a left-behind America.

A year after the release of Vance’s memoir, Ron Howard signed on to direct a film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy, which was released on Netflix in 2020.

Vance’s pre-Washington life story – from humble beginnings in a fatherless Rust Belt home to military service, an Ivy League education and a Silicon Valley career – is the kind of rags-to-riches parable that delights conservatives.

Just overwhelmed with gratitude.

What an honor it is to run alongside President Donald J. Trump. He delivered peace and prosperity once, and with your help, he'll do it again.

Onward to victory!

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) July 16, 2024

Born James Donald Bowman on August 2, 1984, in the steel-manufacturing hub of Middletown, Ohio, Vance worked as a clerk to a federal judge after graduating from prestigious Yale Law School.

In 2014, he married Usha Chilukuri, a law school classmate and daughter of Indian immigrants. They have three children.

In November 2022, Vance won an election to become the next Ohio Senator and he assumed office in January 2023.

Given that Vance has been a Senator for less than 18 months, he is one of the least experienced Vice-Presidential picks in modern history.

In 2016, Vance claimed he was a “Never Trump guy” and labelled the former president an “idiot,” “noxious” and “reprehensible”.

Vance also suggested that Trump was “America’s Hitler.”

However, Vance reinvented himself as a Trump supporter in recent years and ultimately won the ex-president’s key endorsement in the 2022 Ohio Senate race.

He has gone on to become one of Trump’s most loyal supporters in Congress.

“The Biden administration wants Trump to die in jail and they want to bankrupt his family. It is the biggest assault on democracy we’ve ever seen,” Vance said in a March post on X.

“If you’re too cowardly to call it out, you’re not ready for this moment in American politics.”

Vance is now seen as the standard-bearer for a new kind of populism that has come to the fore under Trump.

The 39-year-old Ohio Senator embraces Trump’s isolationist, anti-immigration “America First” movement.

He is also further to the right than Trump on many issues, including abortion, and has indicated that he may support a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks. 

“JD Vance, like Donald Trump, is an us versus them politician. And the us versus them is those people who will support Donald Trump and JD Vance and anyone who does not. And anyone who does not becomes an enemy,” Scott Lucas of the UCD Clinton Institute told The Journal.

Lucas said that Vance’s change of tack came about “not because he has had a conversion on the road to Washington, but because he sees an opportunity in putting himself (across) this way”.

“Because what really cemented JD Vance as the vice president is not just that Trump gets along with him, it’s that JD Vance worked the media. He worked the hard right media in the US, not just Fox News, other outlets out there like Newsmax.”

For Lucas, Trump’s picking Vance over a less hard-right option is a sign that “they don’t care about balancing the ticket”.

“They want the drumbeat to come from the vice president as well as the president.”

Joe Biden’s campaign labelled Vance a “far-right MAGA extremist.”

“Vance is a 2020 election denier, supports a national abortion ban, and voted against IVF access,” Biden’s team said.

Biden said Vance “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.”

Trump could have dropped his big reveal at any point in the days before Milwaukee, but all his pre-convention plans were upended when a gunman made an attempt on his life at a rally in Pennsylvania Saturday.

Leading in multiple polls, despite being convicted at his hush-money criminal case in New York, Trump is exuding confidence.

Biden, 81, meanwhile is facing calls from his own side to quit the race over concerns around his age.

Trump scored another victory as a judge dismissed the criminal case against him over accusations he endangered national security by holding on to top secret documents after leaving the White House.

Message of unity

Trump immediately took to Truth Social to call for the dismissal of all legal cases against him, insisting again that he was being targeted for political reasons.

Trump told the New York Post he had “prepared an extremely tough speech” about Biden’s “horrible administration” to deliver when he becomes the official Republican nominee on Thursday.

As some Republicans – including Vance – sought to blame Democrats’ anti-Trump rhetoric for the attack, Trump also said he hopes to “unite our country.”

Still, that would see him have to rein in the instinct to settle scores – demonstrated by his cry for supporters to “fight” in the seconds after Saturday’s attack.

The Milwaukee gathering is largely designed in Trump’s image, with digital banners beaming out a message in the cavernous convention arena: “Make America Great Once Again.”

-With additional reporting from David Mac Redmond © AFP 2024