July 16, 2024 |
Photo – Trump and Vance – Courtesy BBC web page
The Republican presidential ticket is settled. Former President Donald Trump announced that Ohio Senator J.D. Vance will be his running mate in the 2024 election.
Vance, 39, was elected to the senate from his home state in 2023. He is widely seen as the heir apparent to the America First movement ushered in by Trump’s election in 2016. He is the first U.S. Marine and the first millennial to be part of a major presidential ticket.
The attempt to assassinate Trump on Saturday and the lingering threats on his life gave new urgency to choosing a vice-presidential running mate.
The reaction from Biden-Harris campaign underlined the significance of the choice. The chair of the Democrat ticket, Jen O’Malley-Dillon, said, “Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6, “bend over backwards for Trump”.
Republicans likely would welcome a VP who has Trump’s back. Here’s what Vance said after being selected as Trump’s vice-president selection.
Trump wrote in a statement. “J.D. honorably served our Country in the Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University in two years, Summa Cum Laude, and is a Yale Law School Graduate, where he was Editor of The Yale Law Journal and President of the Yale Law Veterans Association.”
Vance wrote one New York Times bestseller, “Hillbilly Elegy, A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis.” The book recounts the struggles of growing up in white working-class America while struggling against poverty, drugs, alcohol and the lies of the political class in Washington, D.C.
An elegy is defined as a sorrowful poem filled with melancholy. In English literature, it is often written as a lament for the dead.
Vance is often described a voice of America’s forgotten men and women.
Trump officially became the 2024 Republican Party presidential nominee on Monday after he received support from a majority of delegates at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Meanwhile, Trump is one of only six Americans to receive a major party’s nomination more than twice. The five others include Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Grover Cleveland, William Jennings Bryan, Franklin Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon.
The official nomination of Trump came two days after a shooter attempted to assassinate Trump during a campaign rally on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania.
On Saturday, hours after the assassination attempt on the former president, Vance tweeted this: “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.” Vance went onto say the that the rhetoric from the Biden White House “led directly President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
The Wyoming Congressional Delegation applauded the decision. Senator John Barrasso, “No one will work harder for the American people than President Trump and JD Vance.”
Lummis said Vance’s rise from poverty to become a vice-presidential nominee makes him “an inspiration to young people across the country.”
U.S. Representative Harriet Hageman saluted the choice and said she can’t wait to see Vance debate Vice President Kamala Harris.
Near the close of the opening day of the Republican Convention in Milwaukee last night, Donald Trump was given a hero’s welcome as he appeared for the first time in public since surviving the assassination attempt on Saturday. Lee Greenwood was on the stage singing his familiar tribute as Trump walked to his seat and stood beside his vice-presidential pick.
Trump appeared at the convention a little more than 48 hours after surviving Saturday’s failed assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.
