And Vance opposes abortion under any circumstance, including rape, incest and life of the mother
By Mark Sumner
Daily Kos Staff
Donald Trump announced on social media Monday that he has picked Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate for the 2024 campaign. Vance once called Trump “America’s Hitler” and wrote an op-ed titled “The Opioid of the Masses” in which he compared the Republican candidate to heroin addiction.
But that was before Vance made the cynical decision to become one of Trump’s most reliable surrogates and sycophants to further his own political career.
Trump’s selection of Vance likely indicates that he feels elevated enough by his brush with death over the weekend to abandon all pretense of reaching out, even within the GOP. Not only can Vance be relied on to parrot MAGA orthodoxy, but he often takes the most extreme positions—a slightly more literate Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Vance began his pro-Trump turnaround in 2018 as he eyed a potential spot in the Senate. Eventually, as Rolling Stone reported in 2022, Vance “kissed Trump’s ass just enough” to win his race. From there, he transformed into one of the media’s most beloved Trump surrogates. He’s a favorite at Republican functions, including making a recent appearance to praise Project 2025.
Trump promised the nation that his vice presidential selection process would be like “The Apprentice.” Unfortunately, that didn’t mean a series of episodes in which Trump bellowed, “You’re fired!” at the likes of Vivek Ramaswamy or Kristi Noem. That might, at least, have been entertaining.
Instead, it meant months of shortlists and even shorter lists of potential choices whose names were never all that official. Even when it came down to what seemed to be the final trio of North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and Vance, reports amounted to little more than speculation and supposed leaks—with the lingering possibility that Trump could go into far-right field and make a choice ranging from one of his children to Russia-loving talk show host Tucker Carlson.
Then there was the last-minute maneuvering by his United Nations ambassador and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Haley dropped her opposing run, did a 180-degree turn to endorse Trump, instructed her delegates to vote for Trump, and then announced that she would be speaking at the convention after earlier claiming she would not attend. All of which seemed like a potential run-up to a surprise last-minute announcement: Trump would choose the candidate he called “a birdbrain” throughout her campaign, forming a unity ticket spanning all the way from MAGA fascism to extreme far-right conservatism. Kumbayas all around.
Had Trump selected Burgum, he would have been picking a running mate who brings little in the way of a personal support base and little enthusiasm from Trump supporters. Burgum’s biggest selling points were that he never threatened to upstage Trump, and that he’s rich enough to act as Trump’s go-between to the billionaire boys club staking his campaign.
Rubio was always problematic. Not only has he fumbled his every turn in the national spotlight and failed to catch fire with Trump’s base, he also has the Florida problem. Making a sitting senator pack up his bags and depart the state because Trump would rather write Mar-a-Lago on his luggage tags than his address in New York apparently wasn’t enough fun for Trump.
Of all the candidates who were considered, Vance is the most like Trump: a scam artist who abandoned all of his previous positions when it seemed advantageous to his own career. That’s not only made him a favorite among Trump supporters: It makes him the only VP pick who might claim to be not just Trump’s running mate, but his heir.
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