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Trump's going to walk this election and I don't doubt he will stand again in 2028 if he's able to - but if he isn't (and it isn't one of the Trump dynasty that does) then Vance will possibly be the man that does.
Worth while the getting to know him a little then.
Anthony Zurcher
Senior North America correspondent
@awzurcher
Published
18 July 2024, 05:28 BST
Updated 8 hours ago
JD Vance took the stage on Wednesday night at the Republican national convention and introduced himself to an American public that frankly knows little about him.
The 39-year-old also set the parameters for what could become a more clear and forceful ideological foundation to the populist conservative movement that Donald Trump brought to the White House, sometimes haltingly, in 2016.
The Ohio senator, first elected to public office just two years ago, began by recounting Donald Trump’s brush with death by an assassin’s bullet on Saturday.
He then turned to his own personal story - of a "hillbilly" childhood growing up in a family of limited means while his mother struggled with addiction.
He recounted his service in the US Marines after 9/11, which then helped pay his college tuition.
Some of his speech was lighthearted. As a graduate of the Ohio State University, he exchanged good natured barbs with the delegation from Ohio’s college sport arch-rival, Michigan.
He spoke about his grandmother, whom he called "Mawmaw" – which he noted was a term of endearment in the Appalachian community he hails from. He touted her toughness - recalling that the family had found "19 loaded handguns" in her home after she died - and said she had once warned that she would drive over a drug-dealing youth he was known to spend time with.
Then he pivoted to politics, and Mr Vance’s speech took on a harder edge. He outlined ideas he has spoken about before, but this time, put them in front of a national audience.
He railed against what he described as an out-of-touch elite. He blamed Joe Biden for supporting free trade deals and voting for the Iraq War (both of which were also backed by many Republicans).
“We need a leader who's not in the pocket of big business but answers to the working man,” he said.
The former venture capitalist criticised multinational corporations and described a growing wealth gap between “the few with power and comfort” and “the rest of us”.
It’s the kind of rhetoric that might find a comfortable home in the progressive left of the Democratic Party – and has made some business leaders in his own party wary of their new vice-presidential nominee.
Then Mr Vance moved on to a topic that keeps the Trump brand of politics distinct from the populist left.
He warned of the dangers of immigration, saying that undocumented migrants worsened the plight of working-class Americans by competing with them for jobs and limited housing.
He went on to a full-throated defence of American nationalism. He said that America was more than just a good idea, it was a “group of people with a shared history and a common future”.
“It is, in short, a nation,” he said
Mr Vance, married to the daughter of Indian immigrants, quickly pointed out that the US welcomed “newcomers” – but with a key caveat.
“We allow them on our terms,” he said.
The newly minted vice-presidential running mate concluded with an extended description of his family burial plot on a mountainside in eastern Kentucky, where seven generations of his ancestors are interred.
He said that this kind of generational connection was the embodiment of a homeland that people would fight and die for – and it represented more than an abstraction.
“People don't go and fight and die for abstractions,” he said. “But they will fight for their home.”
Time and time again in his speech, Mr Vance noted his Appalachian ties – through ancestry and history – and how many from the region migrated to work in factories in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Those are the key electoral battlegrounds that could decide the forthcoming presidential election – and part of the reason Trump picked him as his running mate.
But Mr Vance’s selection was also a re-emphasis of the core tenets of Trump’s political movement – on immigration, on trade and on energy policy.
When Donald Trump was president, his biggest wins involved corporate tax cuts and government deregulation. With JD Vance in his White House, however, it means that the next time around – if there is one – his policies could move in a decidedly more populist direction.
At the very least, on Wednesday night, Mr Vance set out just such a path ahead.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd16xnnnx10o
JD Vance was once 'never Trump'. Now he's his running mate
Mike Wendling
BBC News
Reporting from
the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Published
15 July 2024
Updated 16 July 2024
“I’m a ‘never Trump’ guy. I never liked him.”
“My god what an idiot.”
“I find him reprehensible.”
That was from JD Vance in interviews and on Twitter in 2016, when the publication of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy catapulted him to fame.
In the same year, he wrote privately on Facebook to Josh McLaurin, his former law school roommate, now a state Senator in Georgia: "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole... or that he's America's Hitler".
'To go from those texts... to being Trump's biggest cheerleader, it's just kind of unbelievable," Mr McLaurin, who is a member of the Democratic Party, told BBC Newshour.
A few short years later, Mr Vance transformed himself into one of Trump’s steadfast allies.
The first-term senator from Ohio is now by Trump’s side as vice-presidential running mate – and, by extension, an early frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028 – with a reliably conservative voting record and Midwestern roots that Republicans hope will boost support at the ballot box.
In fact, Mr Vance has made something of a habit of transformation. How did he emerge from a tough upbringing to reach the highest levels of American politics?
Mr McLaurin told BBC Newshour that his former roommate previously felt like the Republican party needed to give working people hope as well as economic opportunities. If unsuccessful in doing so, Mr Vance believed a "demagogue" would fill that vacancy, he said.
According to Mr McLaurin, Mr Vance saw Trump as the demagogue.
When asked why Mr Vance has changed his stance on Trump, Mr McLaurin said he thinks it has to do with a "deep-seated anger".
"There’s this joke that men would rather run for office than go to therapy and I think that’s probably especially true in his case," he said.
Memoir makes him famous
Mr Vance was born James Donald Bowman in Middletown, Ohio, to a mother who struggled with addiction and a father who left the family when JD was a toddler.
He was raised by his grandparents, “Mamaw” and “Papaw”, whom he sympathetically portrayed in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy.
Mr Vance was adopted by his stepfather when he was six years old. He dropped his middle and last names - changing Donald, his biological father's name, to David, which preserved his nickname of JD. His last name changed from Bowman to Hamel, his stepfather's last name.
His mother split from his then-stepfather a few years later.
When he married after graduating law school, the couple took the last name of Vance to honour his maternal grandparents family name - leading to his current name: James David Vance.
Although Middletown is located in rust-belt Ohio, Mr Vance identified closely with his family’s roots slightly to the south in Appalachia, the vast mountainous inland region that stretches from the Deep South to the fringes of the industrial Midwest. It includes some of the country’s poorest areas.
Mr Vance painted an honest portrait of the trials, travails and bad decisions of his family members and friends. And his book also took a decidedly conservative view – describing them as chronic spendthrifts, dependent on welfare payments and mostly failing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
He wrote that he saw Appalachians “reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible” and that they were products of “a culture that encourages social decay instead of counteracting it”.
“The truth is hard,” he wrote, “and the hardest truths for hill people are the ones they must tell about themselves.”
While he poured scorn on "elites" and exclusive society, he painted himself as a counterpoint to the chronic failure of those he grew up with.
By the time the book came out, Mr Vance’s own bootstrap tugging had slung him far away from Middletown: first to the US Marines and a tour of duty in Iraq, and later to Ohio State University, Yale Law School and a job as a venture capitalist in California.
Hillbilly Elegy made him not only into a bestselling author, but a sought-after commentator who was frequently called upon to explain Donald Trump’s appeal to white, working-class voters.
He rarely missed an opportunity to criticise the then-Republican nominee.
“I think this election is really having a negative effect especially on the white working class," he told an interviewer in October 2016.
"What it’s doing is giving people an excuse to point the finger at someone else, point the finger at Mexican immigrants, or Chinese trade or the Democratic elites or whatever else.”
From venture capital to politics
In 2017 Mr Vance returned to Ohio and continued to work in venture capital. He and his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, whom he met at Yale, have three children - Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel.
As the child of Indian immigrants who grew up in San Diego, Usha Vance has a very different background from her husband. She also attended Yale as an undergraduate and received a masters degree from University of Cambridge. She served as a clerk to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after law school and is currently a litigator.
Mr Vance's name was long whispered about as a political candidate, and he saw an opportunity when Ohio’s Republican senator Rob Portman decided not to run for re-election in 2022.
Although his campaign was initially slow to get going, he got a kick-start via a $10m (£7.7m) donation by his former boss, Silicon Valley power broker Peter Thiel. But the real hurdle stopping him from getting elected in increasingly Republican Ohio was his past criticism of Trump.
He apologised for his previous remarks and managed to mend fences and earn Trump’s endorsement, pushing him to the top of the Republican field and eventually into the Senate.
In the process, Mr Vance has become an increasingly important player in the world of Make America Great Again politics – and has signed up almost completely to Trump’s agenda.
Where does he stand on the issues?
In the Senate he has been a reliable conservative vote, backing populist economic policies and emerging as one of the biggest congressional sceptics of aid to Ukraine.
Given his short tenure in the Democrat-led chamber, the bills he has sponsored have rarely moved forward, and have more often been about sending messages than changing policy.
In recent months, Mr Vance introduced bills to withhold federal funds for colleges where there are encampments or protests against Israel's war in Gaza, and to colleges that employ undocumented immigrants.
Mr Vance also sponsored legislation in March that would cut the Chinese government off from US capital markets if it does not follow international trade law.
He hit all of these themes at a recent speech at the National Conservatism Conference, where he declared: "The real threat to American democracy is that American voters keep on voting for less immigration and our politicians keep on rewarding us with more."
He said the idea of the American Dream – "This very basic idea that you should be able to build a good life for yourself and your family in the country you call home" - was "under siege by the left".
And he said that American involvement in Ukraine had "no obvious conclusion or even objective that we’re close to getting accomplished".
Also at the conference, he said the UK was "not doing so good" because of immigration and claimed that under a Labour government, the country had become the “first truly Islamist country” with a nuclear bomb.
Mr Vance, who was baptised as a Catholic in 2019, has expressed support in the past for a nationwide abortion ban after 15 weeks. But he recently backed Trump's view that the matter was for states to decide.
When his Hitler comment was first reported, in 2022, a spokesperson did not dispute it, but said it no longer represented his views.
How did Republicans - and others - react?
Mr Vance received waves of loud applause when he entered the convention arena in Milwaukee on Monday. He walked over to the Ohio contingent and, looking somewhat in awe of the scene, took selfies with delegates as he was being introduced.
"He's from humble beginnings and he's young," said delegate Amanda Suffecool, the party's chair in Portage County, in north-east Ohio. "A lot of people are going to think he looks like him."
Mr Vance was also one of the first top Republicans to point the finger at Democrat campaign rhetoric in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally on Saturday.
"The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs," he posted on X hours after the shooting. "That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination."
In comments on Monday, President Biden called Mr Vance a "clone of Trump" - indicating how Democrats will attempt to portray him for the rest of the campaign.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn07dv4mrg2o
And this next bit I suggest is highly relevant!
Who is Usha Vance, lawyer and wife of Trump's VP pick?
While she does not seek out the political spotlight, Mrs Vance, 38, wields considerable influence over her husband’s career, Mr Vance has said before.
Mrs Vance - née Chilukuri, the child of Indian immigrants - was born and raised in the suburbs of San Diego, California.
The two met as students at Yale Law School in 2013, when they joined a discussion group on “social decline in white America”, according to the New York Times.
The content influenced Mr Vance's best-selling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, about his childhood in the white working-class Rust Belt, which became a 2020 movie directed by Ron Howard.
Whilst her husband regularly rails about "woke" ideas he says are pushed by Democrats, Mrs Vance was formerly a registered Democrat and is now a corporate litigator at a San Francisco law firm which proudly touts its reputation for being “radically progressive”.
Mrs Vance previously graduated with a BA in history from Yale University and was also a Gates Scholar at Cambridge University, where she came away with an MPhil in early modern history, according to her LinkedIn profile.
She once clerked for Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court justice, on the District of Columbia court of appeals. Then she clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Both men are part of the highest court's conservative majority.
And it is this stellar CV that leaves Mr Vance feeling “humbled” he has said.
Full article here...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c897483zpyeo
Worth while the getting to know him a little then.
Anthony Zurcher
Senior North America correspondent
@awzurcher
Published
18 July 2024, 05:28 BST
Updated 8 hours ago
JD Vance took the stage on Wednesday night at the Republican national convention and introduced himself to an American public that frankly knows little about him.
The 39-year-old also set the parameters for what could become a more clear and forceful ideological foundation to the populist conservative movement that Donald Trump brought to the White House, sometimes haltingly, in 2016.
The Ohio senator, first elected to public office just two years ago, began by recounting Donald Trump’s brush with death by an assassin’s bullet on Saturday.
He then turned to his own personal story - of a "hillbilly" childhood growing up in a family of limited means while his mother struggled with addiction.
He recounted his service in the US Marines after 9/11, which then helped pay his college tuition.
Some of his speech was lighthearted. As a graduate of the Ohio State University, he exchanged good natured barbs with the delegation from Ohio’s college sport arch-rival, Michigan.
He spoke about his grandmother, whom he called "Mawmaw" – which he noted was a term of endearment in the Appalachian community he hails from. He touted her toughness - recalling that the family had found "19 loaded handguns" in her home after she died - and said she had once warned that she would drive over a drug-dealing youth he was known to spend time with.
Then he pivoted to politics, and Mr Vance’s speech took on a harder edge. He outlined ideas he has spoken about before, but this time, put them in front of a national audience.
He railed against what he described as an out-of-touch elite. He blamed Joe Biden for supporting free trade deals and voting for the Iraq War (both of which were also backed by many Republicans).
“We need a leader who's not in the pocket of big business but answers to the working man,” he said.
The former venture capitalist criticised multinational corporations and described a growing wealth gap between “the few with power and comfort” and “the rest of us”.
It’s the kind of rhetoric that might find a comfortable home in the progressive left of the Democratic Party – and has made some business leaders in his own party wary of their new vice-presidential nominee.
Then Mr Vance moved on to a topic that keeps the Trump brand of politics distinct from the populist left.
He warned of the dangers of immigration, saying that undocumented migrants worsened the plight of working-class Americans by competing with them for jobs and limited housing.
He went on to a full-throated defence of American nationalism. He said that America was more than just a good idea, it was a “group of people with a shared history and a common future”.
“It is, in short, a nation,” he said
Mr Vance, married to the daughter of Indian immigrants, quickly pointed out that the US welcomed “newcomers” – but with a key caveat.
“We allow them on our terms,” he said.
The newly minted vice-presidential running mate concluded with an extended description of his family burial plot on a mountainside in eastern Kentucky, where seven generations of his ancestors are interred.
He said that this kind of generational connection was the embodiment of a homeland that people would fight and die for – and it represented more than an abstraction.
“People don't go and fight and die for abstractions,” he said. “But they will fight for their home.”
Time and time again in his speech, Mr Vance noted his Appalachian ties – through ancestry and history – and how many from the region migrated to work in factories in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Those are the key electoral battlegrounds that could decide the forthcoming presidential election – and part of the reason Trump picked him as his running mate.
But Mr Vance’s selection was also a re-emphasis of the core tenets of Trump’s political movement – on immigration, on trade and on energy policy.
When Donald Trump was president, his biggest wins involved corporate tax cuts and government deregulation. With JD Vance in his White House, however, it means that the next time around – if there is one – his policies could move in a decidedly more populist direction.
At the very least, on Wednesday night, Mr Vance set out just such a path ahead.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd16xnnnx10o
JD Vance was once 'never Trump'. Now he's his running mate
Mike Wendling
BBC News
Reporting from
the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Published
15 July 2024
Updated 16 July 2024
“I’m a ‘never Trump’ guy. I never liked him.”
“My god what an idiot.”
“I find him reprehensible.”
That was from JD Vance in interviews and on Twitter in 2016, when the publication of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy catapulted him to fame.
In the same year, he wrote privately on Facebook to Josh McLaurin, his former law school roommate, now a state Senator in Georgia: "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole... or that he's America's Hitler".
'To go from those texts... to being Trump's biggest cheerleader, it's just kind of unbelievable," Mr McLaurin, who is a member of the Democratic Party, told BBC Newshour.
A few short years later, Mr Vance transformed himself into one of Trump’s steadfast allies.
The first-term senator from Ohio is now by Trump’s side as vice-presidential running mate – and, by extension, an early frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028 – with a reliably conservative voting record and Midwestern roots that Republicans hope will boost support at the ballot box.
In fact, Mr Vance has made something of a habit of transformation. How did he emerge from a tough upbringing to reach the highest levels of American politics?
Mr McLaurin told BBC Newshour that his former roommate previously felt like the Republican party needed to give working people hope as well as economic opportunities. If unsuccessful in doing so, Mr Vance believed a "demagogue" would fill that vacancy, he said.
According to Mr McLaurin, Mr Vance saw Trump as the demagogue.
When asked why Mr Vance has changed his stance on Trump, Mr McLaurin said he thinks it has to do with a "deep-seated anger".
"There’s this joke that men would rather run for office than go to therapy and I think that’s probably especially true in his case," he said.
Memoir makes him famous
Mr Vance was born James Donald Bowman in Middletown, Ohio, to a mother who struggled with addiction and a father who left the family when JD was a toddler.
He was raised by his grandparents, “Mamaw” and “Papaw”, whom he sympathetically portrayed in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy.
Mr Vance was adopted by his stepfather when he was six years old. He dropped his middle and last names - changing Donald, his biological father's name, to David, which preserved his nickname of JD. His last name changed from Bowman to Hamel, his stepfather's last name.
His mother split from his then-stepfather a few years later.
When he married after graduating law school, the couple took the last name of Vance to honour his maternal grandparents family name - leading to his current name: James David Vance.
Although Middletown is located in rust-belt Ohio, Mr Vance identified closely with his family’s roots slightly to the south in Appalachia, the vast mountainous inland region that stretches from the Deep South to the fringes of the industrial Midwest. It includes some of the country’s poorest areas.
Mr Vance painted an honest portrait of the trials, travails and bad decisions of his family members and friends. And his book also took a decidedly conservative view – describing them as chronic spendthrifts, dependent on welfare payments and mostly failing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
He wrote that he saw Appalachians “reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible” and that they were products of “a culture that encourages social decay instead of counteracting it”.
“The truth is hard,” he wrote, “and the hardest truths for hill people are the ones they must tell about themselves.”
While he poured scorn on "elites" and exclusive society, he painted himself as a counterpoint to the chronic failure of those he grew up with.
By the time the book came out, Mr Vance’s own bootstrap tugging had slung him far away from Middletown: first to the US Marines and a tour of duty in Iraq, and later to Ohio State University, Yale Law School and a job as a venture capitalist in California.
Hillbilly Elegy made him not only into a bestselling author, but a sought-after commentator who was frequently called upon to explain Donald Trump’s appeal to white, working-class voters.
He rarely missed an opportunity to criticise the then-Republican nominee.
“I think this election is really having a negative effect especially on the white working class," he told an interviewer in October 2016.
"What it’s doing is giving people an excuse to point the finger at someone else, point the finger at Mexican immigrants, or Chinese trade or the Democratic elites or whatever else.”
From venture capital to politics
In 2017 Mr Vance returned to Ohio and continued to work in venture capital. He and his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, whom he met at Yale, have three children - Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel.
As the child of Indian immigrants who grew up in San Diego, Usha Vance has a very different background from her husband. She also attended Yale as an undergraduate and received a masters degree from University of Cambridge. She served as a clerk to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after law school and is currently a litigator.
Mr Vance's name was long whispered about as a political candidate, and he saw an opportunity when Ohio’s Republican senator Rob Portman decided not to run for re-election in 2022.
Although his campaign was initially slow to get going, he got a kick-start via a $10m (£7.7m) donation by his former boss, Silicon Valley power broker Peter Thiel. But the real hurdle stopping him from getting elected in increasingly Republican Ohio was his past criticism of Trump.
He apologised for his previous remarks and managed to mend fences and earn Trump’s endorsement, pushing him to the top of the Republican field and eventually into the Senate.
In the process, Mr Vance has become an increasingly important player in the world of Make America Great Again politics – and has signed up almost completely to Trump’s agenda.
Where does he stand on the issues?
In the Senate he has been a reliable conservative vote, backing populist economic policies and emerging as one of the biggest congressional sceptics of aid to Ukraine.
Given his short tenure in the Democrat-led chamber, the bills he has sponsored have rarely moved forward, and have more often been about sending messages than changing policy.
In recent months, Mr Vance introduced bills to withhold federal funds for colleges where there are encampments or protests against Israel's war in Gaza, and to colleges that employ undocumented immigrants.
Mr Vance also sponsored legislation in March that would cut the Chinese government off from US capital markets if it does not follow international trade law.
He hit all of these themes at a recent speech at the National Conservatism Conference, where he declared: "The real threat to American democracy is that American voters keep on voting for less immigration and our politicians keep on rewarding us with more."
He said the idea of the American Dream – "This very basic idea that you should be able to build a good life for yourself and your family in the country you call home" - was "under siege by the left".
And he said that American involvement in Ukraine had "no obvious conclusion or even objective that we’re close to getting accomplished".
Also at the conference, he said the UK was "not doing so good" because of immigration and claimed that under a Labour government, the country had become the “first truly Islamist country” with a nuclear bomb.
Mr Vance, who was baptised as a Catholic in 2019, has expressed support in the past for a nationwide abortion ban after 15 weeks. But he recently backed Trump's view that the matter was for states to decide.
When his Hitler comment was first reported, in 2022, a spokesperson did not dispute it, but said it no longer represented his views.
How did Republicans - and others - react?
Mr Vance received waves of loud applause when he entered the convention arena in Milwaukee on Monday. He walked over to the Ohio contingent and, looking somewhat in awe of the scene, took selfies with delegates as he was being introduced.
"He's from humble beginnings and he's young," said delegate Amanda Suffecool, the party's chair in Portage County, in north-east Ohio. "A lot of people are going to think he looks like him."
Mr Vance was also one of the first top Republicans to point the finger at Democrat campaign rhetoric in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally on Saturday.
"The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs," he posted on X hours after the shooting. "That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination."
In comments on Monday, President Biden called Mr Vance a "clone of Trump" - indicating how Democrats will attempt to portray him for the rest of the campaign.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn07dv4mrg2o
And this next bit I suggest is highly relevant!
Who is Usha Vance, lawyer and wife of Trump's VP pick?
While she does not seek out the political spotlight, Mrs Vance, 38, wields considerable influence over her husband’s career, Mr Vance has said before.
Mrs Vance - née Chilukuri, the child of Indian immigrants - was born and raised in the suburbs of San Diego, California.
The two met as students at Yale Law School in 2013, when they joined a discussion group on “social decline in white America”, according to the New York Times.
The content influenced Mr Vance's best-selling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, about his childhood in the white working-class Rust Belt, which became a 2020 movie directed by Ron Howard.
Whilst her husband regularly rails about "woke" ideas he says are pushed by Democrats, Mrs Vance was formerly a registered Democrat and is now a corporate litigator at a San Francisco law firm which proudly touts its reputation for being “radically progressive”.
Mrs Vance previously graduated with a BA in history from Yale University and was also a Gates Scholar at Cambridge University, where she came away with an MPhil in early modern history, according to her LinkedIn profile.
She once clerked for Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court justice, on the District of Columbia court of appeals. Then she clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Both men are part of the highest court's conservative majority.
And it is this stellar CV that leaves Mr Vance feeling “humbled” he has said.
Full article here...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c897483zpyeo
