Monrovia, Liberia – Sen. JD Vance of Ohio has been selected by Donald Trump to be his running mate as he attempts to win back the White House.
With the release of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, in 2016, during Trump’s initial presidential campaign, 39-year-old Vance shot to national prominence.
After winning a Senate seat in 2022, Vance has emerged as one of the most ardent supporters of the former president’s “Make America Great Again” platform, especially when it comes to immigration, trade, and foreign affairs.
However, he is a relatively unknown figure in American politics and is joining the Trump ticket at a unique time.
The campaign has been rocked by an attempted assassination attempt on Trump during a rally on Saturday. It has also drawn attention to the nation’s coarse political vocabulary and highlighted the significance of those who are just one heartbeat away from being president.
Vance was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio. He attended Yale Law School and Ohio State University before joining the Marine Corps and serving time in Iraq.
After that, he worked for an investment firm in Silicon Valley before moving back to Ohio to start a nonprofit organization that would, according to him, seek to provide opioid addiction therapies that could be “scaled nationally.”
In the end, Our Ohio Renewal was closed after failing to fulfill its goal. After publishing his autobiography Hillbilly Elegy, Vance gained notoriety as a person who may shed light on the reasons for Trump’s popularity in middle America, particularly among working-class and rural white people who supported him in his 2016 presidential campaign.
Vance portrayed Trump as “America’s Hitler,” “a moral disaster,” and “a complete fraud” in the early years of his political career, according to an Aljazeera report.
But in the end, Vance changed his tone, much like many other Republicans who tried to be relevant in the Trump era. He claimed that Trump’s administration had shown him to be incorrect, and he went on to become one of his staunchest supporters.
Vance received recognition for his remarkable turn around in 2022 when he ran for a vacant Senate seat. With Trump’s much sought-after endorsement, he rode to victory in both a fiercely contested Democratic general election and a packed Republican primary.
In a related development, the shooting of former US President Donald Trump on July 13, 2024, at a campaign rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, is currently being investigated by authorities.
While Trump was addressing a group of supporters on Saturday, a sniper’s bullet from a neighboring rooftop slightly damaged his right ear.
US Secret Service personnel shot 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, the gunshot suspect, in the course of escorting Trump, who was bleeding from the ear, to a nearby hospital.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will assume the lead in the investigation as the body tasked with looking into assassinations and attempted assassinations of presidents and presidential candidates. But there will also be involvement from other agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service, and state police.
