James David Vance was announced on Monday (15) as the vice presidential candidate for former Republican President Donald Trump (2017-2021) in the United States election on November 5.
JD Vance, as he is known, is 39 years old and has been a senator for the state of Ohio since January 2023.
He was a member of the United States Marine Corps and served as a combat correspondent (military journalist) in the Iraq War. He then studied art, political science and philosophy at Ohio State University and law at the prestigious Yale University.
He was an aide to Republican Senator Bob Schuler, a corporate lawyer and an investor in the technology industry.
Vance became famous in 2016, when he released his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy”, in which he described the difficult conditions of his childhood and adolescence in Middletown, Ohio, in a family marked by poverty and addiction.
The book became a bestseller and in 2020 a Netflix film, released in Brazil with the title “Once Upon a Dream”, with Amy Adams playing the role of Vance’s mother and Glenn Close playing his grandmother.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, he criticized Trump, saying he did not see him “offering many solutions” for the United States.
However, in an interview with Fox News in 2021, he said he regretted it. “I was very open about the fact that I made those criticisms, and I regret them, I regret being wrong about the guy. [Trump]”, Vance said.
When he ran for Senate in Ohio in 2022, Trump endorsed him. However, the former president did not miss the opportunity to criticize the young candidate for the “slight” of six years earlier. “JD is kissing my ass, he wants my support so bad,” Trump said during a rally that year.
Once elected, Vance dedicated much of his term to demanding explanations about the derailment of a train in East Palestine, in eastern Ohio, in February 2023, which resulted in the contamination of the region’s air, soil and waterways with dangerous chemicals.
The former enemy is now one of Trump’s closest politicians, whom he has been helping with fundraising events for the campaign. On Saturday (13), shortly after the attack on the former president in Pennsylvania, Vance blamed the Democrats for the attack.
“Today was not just an 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. This rhetoric led directly to the assassination attempt on President Trump,” said Vance, who is married with three children.
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