US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday announced his pick as a running mate on November’s ticket: Ohio senator JD Vance, a staunch ally of the former president and a confirmed isolationist who has fought against US aid for Ukraine for years.
“I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” Vance said in an episode of Steve Bannon's War Room.
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Vance has also called for territorial concessions from Ukraine in exchange for Russia halting its ongoing invasion.
“Any peace settlement is going to require some significant territorial concessions from Ukraine, and you're gonna have a peace deal, because that's the only way out of the conflict,” Vance told Politico in February.
Even some in the Republican party have already spoken out against Vance and his position on Ukraine.
“They are celebrating in Moscow tonight,” former Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger said, speaking on the The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
The 39-year-old Marine Corps veteran and Yale law school graduate worked as a venture capitalist before running for the Ohio senate seat in 2022, backed by deep Silicon Valley pockets. It is the first time he has held public office.
Aside from his railing against US foreign aid at every opportunity, Vance is perhaps best known for his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” which chronicled his youth in the poverty-stricken Appalachian Mountains.
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He is against a woman’s right to choose an abortion, a big proponent of Trump’s crusade to build a wall on the US southern border to keep out immigrants, a climate-change denier and he says he believes that the 2020 elections, which Trump lost, were rigged.
The right-wing community, including the other potential picks for vice president, loudly applauded the decision.
Perhaps the US vice president’s most important role is to represent a tie-breaking vote in the 100-member Senate, a body currently evenly divided between Democrats and the Independents who caucus with them, and the Republicans.
The other very significant, role, of course, is that he or she is the next in line for the presidency should the president be unable to serve. That possibility is front and center of American attention after Trump narrowly avoided an assassination attempt over the weekend at a rally in Pennsylvania.
While Ohio is firmly Republican territory, neighboring Pennsylvania, Biden’s home state, has been up for grabs in recent elections. And that is the other major role of a vice president, at least as a candidate: to bring in the votes.
Rather than reach out to a potential candidate from a swing state, or to a woman or minority to build numbers on those margins, the selection of Vance, a white male from a safely red state, can be seen as a way for Trump to firm up his right-wing base, instead.
A significant segment of the Republican party, including Vance, had distanced themselves from Trump in recent years, as his election-denying and legal troubles gained steam.
In recent months, however, Vance appears to have worked back into the former leader’s good graces, even after Trump was convicted of 34 campaign finance and banking-related felonies and found liable for $454 million related to sexual assault charges the former president was found to have committed in a civil trial, among many other legal troubles he still faces.
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