On July 17, JD Vance told a national audience about his hardscrabble upbringing and made the case that his party best gets the problems Americans are having. He did this after being chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate.
The Ohio senator spoke to a packed arena at the Republican National Convention and portrayed himself as a champion of the forgotten working class. He did this by directly appealing to the angry and frustrated Rust Belt voters who helped fuel Mr. Trump’s surprise win in 2016.
People lost their jobs and children were sent to war in small towns across the country, like mine in Ohio, right next door in Pennsylvania, or Michigan.
#Watch | “Trump has given everything he has”: JD Vance, Trump’s Vice President pick, speaks at the Republican National Convention#NDTVWorld pic.twitter.com/eipCpo7pec
— NDTV (@ndtv) July 18, 2024
“I promise this to the people of Middletown, Ohio, and to all the forgotten towns in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and all over the country,” he said. “As vice president, I will always remember where I came from.”
Since he has only been in the Senate for less than two years, the 39-year-old Ohio senator is not well known in politics. In just a few years, he went from being a bitter critic of the former President to an aggressive defender. He is now set to become the next leader of the party and the leader of Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” effort.
Mr. Vance is the first millennial to run for president on a major party ticket. He is running at a time when people are very worried about the ages of the men running, with Mr. Trump at 78 and President Joe Biden at 81. He also joins Mr. Trump after an attempt to kill the former President, during which Mr. Trump was only millimeters away from death or major injury. This shows how important it is to have a possible successor.
Who is J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate?
When he was first elected, the Ohio senator was against Trump, but now he’s on his side.
Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana introduced Mr. Vance at a dinner earlier on July 17. He said that Mr. Trump’s choice of Mr. Vance wasn’t about picking a running mate or the next Vice President.
He said, “Bernie Trump chose a man in J.D. Vance who is the future of the country, the future of the Republican Party, and the future of the America First movement.”
During his speech, Mr. Vance talked about how he grew up poor in Kentucky and Ohio with a mother who was hooked to drugs and a father who wasn’t there. After that, he joined the Marines, graduated from Yale Law School, and rose to the top of U.S. politics. He called this the expression of an American dream that is now in short supply.
JD Vance speaks at the Republican National Convention in his first address since being tapped as Donald Trump’s running mate https://t.co/mxMF7rnMYH
— Bloomberg (@business) July 18, 2024
He said, “I could never have imagined that I’d be standing here tonight.”
After his best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy,” which tells the story of his blue-collar roots, came out in 2016, Mr. Vance became well-known. To understand the cultural forces that helped Trump win the presidency that year, many people had to read the book. Before he changed his mind, Mr. Vance was a Trump hater for years and called the former President names.
Mr. Vance had never been to or spoken at a Republican conference before. He spent most of his speech praising Mr. Trump and criticizing Mr. Biden, using the fact that Mr. Trump is younger than the President (81 years old) to make a point.
In fourth grade, Mr. Vance says, “A career politician named Joe Biden backed NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent a lot of good American manufacturing jobs to Mexico.”
He also said, “Joe Biden has been a politician in Washington, D.C., as long as I’ve been alive.” “For fifty years, he’s supported every policy that would weaken and impoverish the United States.”
The people in the meeting hall were very happy to see Vance. They started chanting “Mamaw!” to honor his grandmother and then “J.D.’s Mom!” when he introduced his mother, who used to be an addict but has been clean for 10 years.
Usha Chilukuri Vance, Mr. Vance’s wife, presented him on July 17 night. She talked about how very different their upbringings were: she was an immigrant from San Diego to the middle class, while he comes from a poor family in Appalachia. He was respectful of her vegetarianism and learned how to cook Indian food for her mother. She called him “a meat and potatoes kind of guy.”
As before, Mr. Trump watched Mr. Vance talk from his family box while wearing a patch over his hurt ear. He was often seen smiling.
Before July 17, most Americans, especially Republicans, didn’t know much about Mr. Vance. A new study from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which was done before Trump chose the freshman senator, says that 60% of Americans don’t know enough about him to have an opinion. 61% of Republicans are in that group.
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Democrats have said bad things about Mr. Vance because he used to back a national abortion ban, spoke out against U.S. involvement in Ukraine, and was quick to blame Democrats for Trump’s attempt on his life. But the young senator didn’t bring up any of these issues in his speech, which wasn’t full of the usual red-meat conservative attacks that people at conventions expect.
In a harsh response, Mr. Biden’s campaign said that Vance was “unprepared, unqualified, and willing to do anything Donald Trump demands.”
“J.D. Vance, the face of Project 2025, was the star of the show tonight.” “But working families and the middle class will suffer if he stays there,” said Michael Tyler, who is in charge of communication for the Biden team.
Organizers of the convention had pushed for unity even before Mr. Trump was almost killed at an event in Pennsylvania on July 13. People in charge said that Mr. Trump’s failure to accept the results of the 2020 election and the attack on the U.S. Capitol that followed would not be talked about.
But that changed when former White House official Peter Navarro got out of prison on Friday to a standing ovation. He had been there for four months because he refused to appear before a congressional committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, by a group of people supporting the former president.
“Be careful if they can come for me or Donald Trump.” “They will come for you,” he said in a fiery speech, linking his legal problems to those of Mr. Trump, who was found guilty of 34 felonies in his hush money trial earlier this year.
Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, who was in charge of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, were also seen on the convention floor. Both were found guilty as part of the investigation into Russia’s interference in that race. Trump let both Manafort and Stone go free.
In addition to Mr. Vance’s prime-time speech, the Republican Party focused on the theme of American power around the world on July 17.
The family members of service members killed during Mr. Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan took the stage holding pictures of their dead loved ones. It was a very moving moment.
Christy Shamblin said that Trump spent six hours with her family in Bedminster, New Jersey, and “spoke to us in a way that made us feel understood.” Her daughter-in-law, Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee, died in the attack.
“Trump carried the weight with me for a few hours.” “I felt like I wasn’t alone in my grief for the first time since Nicole’s death,” she said.
Herman Lopez read out loud the names of all 13 U.S. service members who died in the attack on August 26, 2021. His son, Marine Cpl. Hunter Lopez was one of the people who died.
The parents of Omer Neutra were also there. He is one of eight Americans still being held hostage in Gaza after Hamas attacked on October 7.
When his parents, Ronen and Orna, heard that their son, an Israeli army soldier, had been taken, Mr. Trump called them and offered to help. “Bring them home!” was shouted by the crowd as they spoke.
