Vice President and Trump’s possible successor – DW – 06/11/2024

J.D. Vance’s rise in the Republican ranks was confirmed when he was selected as Donald Trump’s running mate last July. Many experts consider him the successor to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement and the favorite to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2028.

Trump has presented himself publicly as an unusual personality for more than four decades, and he displays a corresponding political style. Vance, a 40-year-old father of three, represents a completely different America and is unconventional by Republican standards.

Vance was born James David Bowman and raised by his maternal grandparents – whose last name he later adopted – in the steel mill town of Middletown, Ohio, while his mother struggled with drug and alcohol addiction. Were staying.

After graduating from high school, Vance enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served there for four years, including a six-month deployment to Iraq in 2005 as a military journalist. After leaving the Navy, he graduated from Washington State University, Ohio and Yale Law School. He later switched from law to technology investing in California, where he founded his own company.

He also met his wife Usha Chilukuri at Yale. The couple married in 2014 and have two sons and a daughter.

Of ‘Never Trumper’ to the MAGA senator

It was in May 2016 when Vance came into the public spotlight with the publication of his acclaimed book “Hillibilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” (“Hillbilly, a Rural Elegy – Memoirs of a Family and a Culture in Crisis”). He best seller Reflects Vance’s upbringing in Appalachia and is considered a window into the lives of residents of the manufacturing region known as the Rust Belt (rust belt), whose steel industry was in decline. In November of the same year, slim majorities in the region, more precisely in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, helped Donald Trump win the election which brought Trump to power.

In a 2016 interview nprVance said he “can’t stand Trump” and would consider voting for Hillary Clinton, but he also somewhat presciently suggested that Trump’s phenomenon was fueled by support from white working-class voters, Those who “can’t stand Trump.” They are necessarily economically disadvantaged, but, in some ways, they also feel very culturally alienated and very pessimistic about the future. “It’s one of the biggest factors in predicting whether someone will support Donald Trump.”

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel was among those who praised the book. the new York Times It was reported in July that Thiel, Vance’s longtime mentor and one of the first high-level Silicon Valley figures to endorse Trump in 2016, had brokered an early meeting between the former president and his future vice president in 2021. .

When Vance successfully ran in the 2022 Republican primary to represent Ohio in the U.S. Senate, he retracted his stance as “never a Trump supporter”.

Controversy and good performance in the campaign

Shortly after his election as a presidential candidate, a 2021 interview resurfaced in which Vance described the United States as a country run by “women with cats and women with no kids”, a comment that It was condemned by Democrats as well as singers Taylor Swift and others. Other celebrities.

Vance later faced the ire of minorities in his home state of Ohio when he shared false claims on social media that Haitian immigrants were eating dogs in the city of Springfield, his home state.

Vance himself won the debate by a narrow margin over Tim Walz in the eyes of critics. His disciplined effort was described by the press as “brilliant, crisp and impressive” (the new York Times

), as well as “efficient” (cnnBut the elephant in the room was his inability to accept that Trump had lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, which his rival made sure to take advantage of.

Is Vance a window to the Republican future?

Although Trump will dominate the headlines as president, we need to look closely at Vance’s stance on key political issues like abortion, immigration, and foreign policy and how his stances may shape the Republican Party’s post-Trump era.

Although the office of vice president rarely makes headlines, with Trump’s reinstatement at age 78, there is a better chance than usual that Vance will sit in the Oval Office at some point in the next four years.

(mn/cp)