Donald Trump names ‘hillbilly’ senator as his vice chairman

Donald Trump last night named his Vice Presidential running mate as Ohio Senator J.D. Vance.

The former President said that Mr Vance, a former venture capitalist, was ‘best suited’ to the role and would ‘fight for our Constitution’.

Mr Vance is known for writing best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy about his working class upbringing in the Midwest which was turned into a film starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.

He is seen as the telegenic face of Trumpism and staunchly defends Mr Trump during his frequent appearances on TV.

Yet the 39-year-old, who was educated at Yale, once proudly called himself a ‘Never Trump guy’. He previously claimed that the former President was an ‘idiot’ and that voters backed him for ‘racist reasons’.

But by the time Mr Trump tapped Mr Vance to be his running mate on Monday, the Ohio native had become one of the former President’s most ardent defenders, standing by his side even when other high-profile Republicans declined to do so. 

Eight years ago, in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, Mr Vance was a bitter critic of Mr Trump, both publicly and privately.

‘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,’ Mr Vance wrote privately to an associate on Facebook in 2016.

When his Hitler comment was first reported, in 2022, a spokesperson did not dispute it, but said it no longer represented Mr Vance’s views.

But Mr Vance did a complete U-turn in 2022 when he ran for a Senate seat in Ohio, his first run for elected office, and after kissing Mr Trump’s ring, he won his support – and won the election. 

At the time the former President said that Mr Vance ‘gets it now, and I have seen that in spades’.

After Mr Trump was shot at a Pennsylvania campaign rally on Saturday, Mr Vance was one of the first to blame the Biden administration for it.

He wrote on social media: ‘Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.

‘That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination’.

Mr Vance last month admitted that he had been ‘wrong about Donald Trump’. He told Fox News’s Bret Baier: ‘I didn’t think he was going to be a good president.

‘He was a great president, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m working so hard to make sure he gets a second term.’

Mr Vance, addressing his reversal on Mr Trump, added: ‘When you are wrong about something – you should change your mind and be honest with people about that fact.’

He also argued that his changed stance on Mr Trump ‘presents a real opportunity to talk to the American people because a lot of people didn’t think Trump was going to be a good president and a lot of people were happy to be proven wrong’.

A spokesperson for Mr Vance declined to provide further comment to MailOnline. 

Mr Vance is married to his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, a lawyer with whom he has three children. Mr Trump had already dismissed a rumour that Mr Vance’s beard would disqualify him – the former president is reportedly averse to facial hair.

On Truth Social Mr Trump wrote: ‘As Vice President, J.D. will continue to fight for our Constitution, stand with our Troops, and will do everything he can to help me MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Congratulations to Senator J.D. Vance, his wife, Usha, who also graduated from Yale Law School, and their three beautiful children’.

The two other men on the shortlist to be Mr Trump’s Vice President had been Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, a wealthy former software executive, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio.

Mr Vance’s transformation – from self-described ‘never Trumper’ to stalwart loyalist – makes him a relatively unusual figure in Trump’s inner circle.

Democrats and even some Republicans have questioned whether Mr Vance, who wrote a bestselling memoir ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ in 2016, is driven more by opportunism than ideology.

Georgia state Senator Josh McLaurin, a Democrat who allegedly went to law school with Mr Vance, was heavily critical of him, calling the VP nominee a ‘sellout’.

‘I’m the guy JD Vance sent the “America’s Hitler” text to in 2016,’ Mr McLaurin tweeted. ‘He was my roommate in law school. Obviously he’s a sellout, but the bigger deal is he’s angry and vindictive. 

‘The perfect fit for Trump’s revenge. JD’s rise is a triumph for angry jerks everywhere.’

But Mr Trump and many of his advisers see Mr Vance’s transformation as genuine.

They point out that Mr Vance’s political beliefs – which mix isolationism with economic populism – dovetail with those of Mr Trump, and put both men at odds with the old guard of the Republican Party, where foreign policy hawks and free market evangelists still hold sway.

Republican Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, whom Mr Vance has described as a mentor, told Reuters that the Vice Presidential nominee shifted his views on Mr Trump because ‘he saw the successes that President Trump as president brought to the country’.

In particular, Mr Vance’s vocal opposition to US aid for Ukraine in its war with Russia has delighted Mr Trump’s most conservative allies, even as it has upset some Senate colleagues.

‘He understands what Trump is running on and, unlike the rest of the Republican Party in Washington, agrees with it,’ conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, a vocal Mr Vance supporter, has said.

Mr Vance was born into an impoverished home in southern Ohio. His pick may help boost the Trump campaign’s Rust Belt bona fides in a race that will be determined by voters in a handful of battleground states, including nearby Pennsylvania and Michigan, though his conservative views may be a turn-off for moderate voters.

‘To the extent that he can do anything for the ticket, it would be to recapture being the voice of the American dream,’ said David Niven, an associate professor of politics at the University of Cincinnati who has worked as a speechwriter for two Democratic governors, referring to Mr Vance’s rise from poverty to US senator and vice presidential candidate.

After serving in the Marine Corps, attending Yale Law School and working as a venture capitalist in San Francisco, Mr Vance rose to national prominence thanks to his 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy.

In that memoir, he explored the socioeconomic problems confronting his hometown and attempted to explain Mr Trump’s popularity among impoverished white Americans to readers.

By 2022, Mr Vance’s demonstrations of loyalty – which included downplaying the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol – were sufficient to score the former president’s coveted endorsement. Trump’s support helped put him over the top in a competitive primary.

In media interviews, the Ohio senator has said there was no ‘Eureka’ moment that changed his views on Mr Trump. Rather, he gradually realized that his opposition to the former president was rooted in style rather than substance.

For instance, he agreed with Mr Trump’s contentions that free trade had hollowed out middle America by crushing domestic manufacturing and that the nation’s leaders were too quick to get involved in foreign wars.

‘I allowed myself to focus so much on the stylistic element of Trump that I completely ignored the way in which he substantively was offering something very different on foreign policy, on trade, on immigration,’ Vance told the New York Times in June.

In the same interview, Mr Vance said that he met Trump in 2021 and that the two grew closer during his Senate campaign.

The Ohio senator’s detractors see his shift in views as a cynical ploy to ascend the ranks of Republican politics.

‘What you see is some really profound opportunism,’ said Mr Niven, the politics professor.

One issue where his position appears to have converged with Trump is abortion.

Mr Vance implied in a 2021 interview that victims of rape and incest should be required to carry pregnancies to term, and in November he described a vote by Ohioans to add the right to abortion care to the state’s constitution as a ‘gut punch’.

This year, he said he supports access to the abortion pill mifepristone, a view that Trump shares.

Before Mr Vance developed a relationship with the former president, he grew close with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, according to several people familiar with their relationship. 

Mr Vance first caught Mr Trump Jr’s eye when he opposed aid to Ukraine during the Ohio Senate primary in 2022, according to one of those people, a position that put him at odds with the other Republicans in the race.

Mr Vance’s personal relationship with Mr Trump developed for the most part during the Republican presidential primary earlier this year, that person said. 

His decision to endorse Mr Trump in January 2023, well before some other vice-presidential hopefuls, served as an important demonstration of loyalty, that person added.

In February 2023, Mr Trump and Mr Vance visited East Palestine, Ohio, the site of a toxic train derailment, a trip that raised Mr Vance’s national profile. 

They portrayed Democratic President Joe Biden’s decision at the time not to visit the working-class community as a betrayal of middle America.

The White House noted at the time that federal agents were on the scene almost immediately after the derailment, and that visiting a disaster site can distract from local recovery efforts. Mr Biden eventually visited East Palestine roughly a year later, in February 2024.

Behind the scenes, Mr Vance has helped campaign for Mr Trump, according to two people with knowledge of the former president’s fundraising operations. 

Mr Vance, for instance, helped put together a Bay Area fundraiser in June hosted by venture capitalists David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya, one of those people said.

Off the campaign trail, some of Mr Trump’s highest-profile allies – including Mr Trump Jr, Mr Carlson, and Steve Bannon – have been delighted by Mr Vance’s brief tenure on Capitol Hill. All of those individuals have legions of conservative followers, and their approval may help drive Republicans to the polls.

Mr Vance’s skepticism of corporate America, support for tariffs, weariness of foreign entanglements and his youth make him a leading voice of a new Republican Party that is more focused on the working class than big business in the eyes of supporters.

‘I think that in terms of bringing to the ticket, he can articulate the pain that American families are feeling better than almost anybody else,’ said Mr Barrasso.

Mr Vance has been criticized for just copying Mr Trump.

‘Vance is an echo to Trump,’ said Mr Niven, ‘not a new voice.’