Amid the ongoing 2024 Republican National Convention, former President Donald Trump has nominated Senator James David Vance as his vice-presidential running mate for the upcoming November 5, 2024, presidential election.
The announcement came shortly after Trump was officially nominated as the Republican Party’s candidate on Monday.
Vance, 39, has been serving as the junior United States senator from Ohio since 2023 and first gained national attention with his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
Trump’s selection of Vance as his running mate is surprising given their complicated relationship.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Vance was an outspoken critic of Trump, famously referring to him as “America’s Hitler” in a private Facebook message. He also called Trump “reprehensible” on Twitter and described himself as a “never-Trump guy.”
However, Vance’s stance on Trump began to shift in 2018. By the 2020 election, he had become a supporter of the former president. In 2021, as he prepared to launch his Senate campaign, Vance publicly apologized for his past criticisms and deleted his anti-Trump tweets from 2016.
Vance’s political career has been rising since then. He won the Republican nomination for Ohio’s Senate seat in 2021 after receiving Trump’s endorsement, and went on to defeat Democratic nominee Tim Ryan in the general election.
In recent years, Vance has become a staunch defender of Trump and reportedly backed Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the assassination attempt on him over the weekend, Trump scrapped plans to criticize the current U.S. administration at the Republican National Convention.
“I had all prepared an extremely tough speech about the corrupt and horrible administration, but I threw it away,” he told the New York Post in an interview published late Sunday.
Trump said he now wants to speak at the convention in favor of overcoming the political divide in the country.
“I want to try to unite our country, but I don’t know if that’s possible. People are much divided,” Trump said ahead of the four-day convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he will be officially nominated on Thursday as the Republican presidential nominee.
An assassination attempt on Saturday was reported to have left Trump with an injured ear.
