At just 39 and with only two years of experience in Senate, Ohio lawmaker would be the youngest US VP ever, is seen as embracing ex-president’s isolationist America First movement

Presumptive Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump said Monday that Ohio Senator JD Vance will be his vice presidential pick.

Posting to his Truth Social Network, Trump said: “After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator JD Vance of the Great State of Ohio.”

Trump, 78, announced his pick on the first day of the Republican Party convention in Milwaukee, an extravaganza turbocharged by the attempted assassination of the former president.

Seen as the standard-bearer for a new kind of populism that has come to the fore under Trump, 39-year-old Vance embraces the ex-president’s isolationist, anti-immigration America First movement.

One of the least experienced VP picks in modern history, the one-term senator is further to the right than the ex-president on many issues, including abortion, where he embraces calls for federal legislation. He made his name with the 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” a best-selling account of his Appalachian family and modest Rust Belt upbringing, which gave a voice to rural, working-class resentment in left-behind America.

Critics have pointed to numerous awkward remarks one-time “Never Trump guy” Vance has made in the past, including calling the billionaire an “idiot,” “noxious” and “reprehensible,” and suggesting he was “America’s Hitler.”

“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” Vance wrote privately to an associate on Facebook in 2016. When his Hitler comment was first reported, in 2022, a spokesperson did not dispute it, but said it no longer represented Vance’s views.

Vance reinvented himself as a Trump supporter in recent years and ultimately won the ex-president’s key endorsement in the 2022 Ohio Senate race. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum were both informed that they each were not Trump’s pick, according to people familiar with their conversation, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity before the formal announcement.

Trump had been said to have narrowed his list to three candidates, Vance, Burgum and Rubio, all of whom would bring different benefits and vulnerabilities.

Vance is perhaps most ideologically aligned with the former president and would energize his base.

Burgum would have brought business acumen and a steady hand, though Trump has noted his signing of a highly restrictive abortion law could be a drawback.

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