Once a harsh critic of the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — even calling him “America’s Hitler” and a “moral disaster” — his running mate and Ohio senator JD Vance will be further elevating the former president’s populist agenda.
“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 JD Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform.
With Vance being named the running mate, his profile will be further elevated despite his pointed criticism of Trump for years. Shortly after he was selected at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, delegates celebrating the party’s ticket were writing Vance’s name onto Trump signs using markers.
According to CNN, the senator’s appeal to working-class voters was viewed as essential when it comes to winning the key battleground states in November. Sources said his upbringing in a poor Rust Belt town in Ohio and his wife Usha Chilukuri — the child of Indian immigrants — could appeal to minority voters.
Foe-turned-ally
Vance, 39, is a venture capitalist and the author of the best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy. He was elected to the Senate in 2022 after receiving a boost from Trump in a contentious Republican primary.
But, flashback to six years ago, he was a key voice in the ‘Never Trump’ movement during the 2016 election and was liking social media posts that harshly criticised Trump, presenting a well-documented history of opposing him privately as well as publicly.
In public, he has agreed with those calling Trump a “total fraud” and said he was “reprehensible”. In private, he once told a friend: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”
In 2016 and 2017, Vance called him “cultural heroin” and “just another opioid” for Middle America. “Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologise for this man. Lord help us,” he said in a social media post after the Access Hollywood tape was published in 2016.
Cut to 2022, however, Trump began to see Vance as an ally after concerted efforts to endorsing ‘Make America Great Again’. The senator also displayed his loyalty by standing at Trump’s side at a New York courthouse during his criminal hush money trial.
Vance is a vocal opponent of foreign aid, opposing legislation to send more aid from the US to Ukraine amid Russia’s war. He also brings ties to traditionally liberal-leaning Silicon Valley.
National celebrity, ‘Voice of the Rust Belt’
It does not hurt that Vance is already a national celebrity because of his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which he first thought of while studying at Yale Law School. Published in 2016, the book is about his roots in rural Kentucky and blue-collar Ohio. That year, it became a cultural talking point after Trump’s stunning victory in the election.
He will be the youngest vice-president since Richard Nixon, who served two terms under Dwight Eisenhower, starting in 1953. In his memoir, Vance reflects on the transformation of Appalachia from reliably Democratic to reliably Republican, sharing stories about his chaotic family life and about communities that had declined and seemed to lose hope.
“I was very bugged by this question of why there weren’t more kids like me at places like Yale… why isn’t there more upward mobility in the United States?” Vance told The Associated Press in 2016.
Sales for Hillbilly Elegy now come up to at least 1.6 million copies. It was also adapted onto the silver screen by Ron Howard in 2020, earning Glenn Close an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. Within hours of Trump’s announcement, it was right on top on Amazon.com from 220 earlier in the day.
“I felt that if I wrote a very forthright, and sometimes painful, book, that it would open people’s eyes to the very real matrix of these problem,” Vance had said in 2016. “If I wrote a more abstract or esoteric essay… then not as many people would pay attention to it because they would assume I was just another academic spouting off, and not someone who’s looked at these problems in a very personal way.”
Subtitled ‘A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis’, the book was initially praised by conservatives for its criticisms of welfare and what Vance saw as “too many young men immune to hard work”. Reviewing Hillbilly Elegy in The American Conservative, Rod Dreher praised Vance’s contention that public policy does little to “affect the cultural habits that keep people poor”.
After Trump’s election, however, the book became an unofficial guide for liberals baffled by Trump’s rise and by his bond with some of the country’s poorest residents. The Washington Post dubbed Vance, “The Voice of the Rust Belt”.
(With agency inputs)
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