President Trump announced his choice for Vice President on the first day of the Republican National Convention yesterday, 15 July in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The former POTUS took the stage at the convention just two days after the assassination attempt on his life at his Butler, Pennsylvania rally, with his injured right ear covered in a bandage.
The three-person shortlist was known going into the event, with the finalists for the VP spot being Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, and the eventual pick, Ohio Senator JD Vance. Many people felt Senator Rubio would be a strategic choice for his appeal with Latino voters—however, President Trump decided to go another route.
Senator Vance undoubtedly has an impressive resume.
After graduating high school, he served four years in the United States Marine Corps between 2003 and 2007, rising to the rank of Corporal. After being honourable discharged, he attended Ohio State University where he got a degree in political science and philosophy; then went on to finish law school at Yale University, all with a very high grade point average.
Vance served as the principal for PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s venture capitalist firm Mithril Capital between 2016 and 2017. In 2017, he joined AOL founder Steve Case’s investment firm Revolution LLC. There, he was in charge of an initiative looking to bring tech investment to outside of the usual hubs of Silicon Valley in California and New York City, New York.
Vance is a junior Senator, meaning he is serving his first term in the upper chamber of Congress. He won his first election in the 2022 midterms—a disappointing night for Republicans overall, but not for Vance, who beat Democrat Tim Ryan by 6.12 points.
He is still just 39 years old. If he is elected, he will be 40 at the time of taking office which would make him the third youngest Vice President in US history after John C. Breckinridge, who was 36 when he started serving under President James Buchanan in 1857, and Richard Nixon, who was 39 when he start his VP tenure under President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953.
A Republican victory in November would also make President Trump the tenth POTUS in history to have more than one person serve under him as Vice President. It last happened to President Richard Nixon, whose original VP Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973 due to a tax scandal. He was replaced by Gerald Ford—who ascended to the office of the President after Nixon himself resigned in 1974.
In 2016, Trump picked someone with executive experience, Former Indiana Governor Mike Pence. This time, he went with someone from the legislative branch.
JD Vance’s 2016 autobiography Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis became a bestseller. It was also made into a Netflix film, directed by Ron Howard, in 2020.
In his book, Vance describes how he was raised by his maternal grandparents, who lifted him out of an impoverished and abusive home. He took on the family name of his grandparents as a show of respect: Vance was not his name at birth, it was Bowman. He has this aspect of his life in common with Former President Bill Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III), who took on the name of his stepfather later in life.
JD Vance on Hungary
Vance is definitely of the more isolationist branch of the GOP. He has often talked about wanting the European NATO member states to bear more of the financial burden of the alliance, and criticized the US government’s excessive military aid to Ukraine. In this aspect, and quite a few others in fact, his viewpoints are aligned with the current Hungarian administration.
He has gotten a considerable amount of flack from the left-wing media for this stance. POLITICO, in an article published on 16 July, also highlights a comment he made in a TV interview about Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Senator Vance has said:
‘Why is Viktor Orbán getting closer to China? In part because American leadership is not making smart decisions. We are pushing other nations into the arms of the Chinese, because we don’t make enough stuff, because we pursue a ridiculous foreign policy very often. We have to be more self-reliant’.
He has also spoken appreciatively of Hungarian family policy:
‘In Hungary under Orbán, they offer loans to newly married couples that are forgiven at some point later if those couples have actually stayed together and had kids. Why can’t we do that here? Why can’t we actually promote family formation?’, he said in 2021.
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