Shortly after an assassination attempt, Republican nominee Donald Trump has appointed US senator J.D. Vance as his running mate. The former president tapped the Ohio conservative to be his number two at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Monday.
Of course, this comes just days since narrowly avoiding death at a campaign rally. Trump said after the shooting he hoped to “unite our country.” However, his running mate has been one of the most partisan and divisive members of congress.
Trump: no longer a ‘moral disaster’
At the time of his new boss’s election win in 2016, Vance called Trump “a moral disaster” and even compared him to Hitler in a private Facebook message:
I go back and forth between thinking [he] is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?
Vance also decried the state of the Republican party:
We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people, and I have been saying for a long time that we need to offer those people SOMETHING (and hell, maybe even expand our appeal to working-class black people in the process) or a demagogue would. We are now at that point. Trump is the fruit of the party’s collective neglect.
But, he has since reinvented himself as a Trump loyalist. He told Fox News this week:
I was certainly skeptical of Donald Trump in 2016. But [he] was a great president, and he changed my mind.
Unknown quantity
Some may know Vance from his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” For many Americans, though, he remains an unknown quantity. Being on Trump’s ticket for re-election will catapult him into screens across the country. Vance embraces his boss’s isolationist, anti-immigration America First movement, but offers little chance of expanding the ticket’s appeal to more moderate voters and women.
He is further to the right than Trump on some issues including abortion, where he embraces calls for federal legislation. In 2021, he said that he didn’t support exceptions for abortion even when people had been raped:
It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term. It’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.
Vance then appears to have changed his position, saying:
We have to provide exceptions for the life of the mother and rape and so forth.
Nevertheless, the president of Emily’s List – an organisation that supports Democrat women that support abortion rights – Jessica Mackler – said:
By naming Vance to his ticket, Trump made clear that his administration will sign a national abortion ban and put birth control and IVF at risk.
Vance otherwise appears to follow Trump’s bombastic pattern on policies. He’s said that he thinks there should be “large-scale deportations.” He thinks Israel should continue to have unfettered funding for its genocide in Palestine. He wants to gut government, much as Trump tried to do during his own presidency.
Unity ‘essential’
Despite Trump’s calls for unity, Vance immediately blamed Democrats for the attack, saying anti-Trump rhetoric “led directly [the] attempted assassination.”
Trump’s son has also blamed the Democrats:
Don't tell me they didn't know exactly what they were doing with this crap. Calling my dad a "dictator" and a "threat to Democracy" wasn't some one off comment. It has been the *MAIN MESSAGE* of the Biden-Kamala campaign and Democrats across the country!!! pic.twitter.com/DjwhvU7VlF
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 14, 2024
In blaming Democrat’s for the attempted assassination, Vance and Trump Junior have shown that “unity” is just for their own allies. The assassination may well align the Republican party behind the former president as an anti-establishment figure, but claims that the Democrats are to blame for the shooting are typical. Trump and his team are not interested in unity across the aisle – all they want is license to continue their politics without any criticism at all.
Assassination or not, Trump and his allies have only ever wanted to act with impunity.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
Featured image via YouTube screenshot/The Wall Street Journal
