Vance plans to unfurl the tale of a boy who grew up in poverty in southwest Ohio with an absent father and a drug-addicted mother and who is now nominated to become the next vice president — an up-from-the-bootstraps story that the Trump-Vance ticket hopes will resonate with working-class and rural America, according to a second person familiar with the remarks.
He will try to connect the dots for voters about how the lessons he learned growing up in greater Appalachia shaped his populist and isolationist worldview, from his and Trump’s restrictionist trade policies and skepticism of overseas entanglements to their shared hard-line immigration stance and concerns about the scourge of fentanyl in communities across America.
Vance — whose 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” became a bestseller — is also expected to tick through his early business career as a venture capitalist before seeking public office in 2022 and shooting through the party’s ranks to serve as Trump’s vice-presidential pick after less than two years in the Senate, according to the two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal plans.
His wife, Usha Vance, will speak just before him.
President Biden, meanwhile, tested positive for the coronavirus following a campaign event in Las Vegas and planned to return to his home in Wilmington, Del., to self-isolate, a White House spokesperson said in a statement.
On a night when the theme is “Make America Strong Once Again,” Vance, 39, headlined the convention along with several other hard-right firebrands, including Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), former acting national intelligence director Ric Grenell, former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro and Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr.
Extolling Trump’s bearded No. 2. pick Wednesday, Gaetz said that “J.D. looks like a young Abraham Lincoln” but noted that, like former president Ulysses S. Grant, Vance also hails from Ohio “and like General Grant, J.D. Vance knows how to fight.”
“So they can run Biden from the nursing home,” Gaetz said, finishing his speech and building to his crescendo: “We are on a mission to rescue and save this country. And we ride or die with Donald John Trump to the end.”
Donald Trump Jr. and his cadre of loyalists were instrumental in pushing Vance as Trump’s No. 2, a decision that the former president did not finalize until the final 24 hours before the announcement Monday. Navarro, meanwhile, traveled to Wisconsin on Wednesday from Florida, where he was released from federal prison in Miami after serving a four-month sentence for ignoring a congressional subpoena.
Taking the stage, Navarro immediately referred to his prison time, faulting “Joe Biden and his Department of Injustice,” before recounting a favored Trump message: that the former president is merely a martyr, fighting against nefarious forces on behalf of his flock.
“If they can come for me, and if they can come for Donald Trump, be careful,” Navarro said. “They will come for you.”
Parts of the evening, especially those focused on undocumented immigrants — who Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancé, Kimberly Guilfoyle, described as “violent criminal aliens” — were laced with dark imagery.
Thomas Homan, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, accused Biden and Vice President Harris of unraveling Trump’s hard-line immigration policies.
“Biden is the first president in American history to come into office and unsecure a border. Who the hell does that?” Homan said, before later adding that Biden and Harris were making a deliberate choice that he described as “national suicide.”
Arizona ranchers Jim and Sue Chilton took the stage moments later, with Jim Chilton offering his “beautiful wife” a kiss on the side of her head. But he quickly turned ominous, as well, alleging that since Biden has been president, the hidden cameras on their ranch have recorded more than 3,500 “drug packers” and other undocumented immigrants crossing through their stead.
“These are not asylum seekers,” he said. “It looks like and it feels like an invasion because it is.”
Illegal crossings at the southern border have soared to record highs under Biden, though in recent months his administration has launched a broad crackdown that has pushed the numbers back down to Trump-era levels. The Trump administration also faced spikes and record numbers of families crossing the border in 2019. Trump also helped kill a $118 billion border security bill spearheaded by Democrats because he said he didn’t want Biden to have an election-year policy win.
In many ways, Vance is the most ideologically and stylistically similar to Trump of the three men ultimately considered for vice president, and it is unclear whether he will help Trump dramatically expand the electoral map.
He could, however, arguably help the former president fortify his support in Pennsylvania, one of the three “Blue Wall” states — which include Michigan and Wisconsin — that Democrats now largely believe are Biden’s only path to keeping the White House.
In 2020, Biden lost White men by between 17 and 23 percentage points, according to national exit polls and comparable surveys. But the Trump campaign is still working to increase Trump’s support among this demographic; in a July Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, 54 percent of White men supported Trump to 38 percent for Biden, a 16-point margin.
Trump aides hope Vance could help shore up support from White men and are expected to deploy him across the country in working-class and rural areas similar to where he grew up.
Vance was not always a Trump supporter. In 2016, he described Trump as either a “cynical asshole” or “American’s Hitler” in a text message to a former law school classmate, and in an essay for the Atlantic magazine the same year, he called Trump “cultural heroin.” In an updated 2018 version of his memoir, he revealed that he did not vote for Trump in 2016, instead opting for a third-party candidate.
But he has said he voted for Trump in 2020, and as he sought the Senate seat, Vance quickly modulated his public and private comments about Trump, seeking out his oldest son as an ally and becoming one of the former president’s staunchest defenders.
