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Donald Trump has finally announced that JD Vance will be his running mate to take on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential election, following months of speculation.
The former president, who narrowly escaped an assassination attempt on Saturday when a gunman opened fire at his rally in Pennsylvania, unveiled his vice presidential pick on Monday as the Republican National Convention got underway in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
For months, Trump has effectively been holding open auditions for the chance to succeed Mike Pence as his deputy, with Ohio Senator Vance, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem and New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik all believed to have been in the running at various points.
The process has seen the candidates jostle for Trump’s affections by speaking at his rallies, defending him on cable news and social media and even showing up at his New York hush money trial in a sign of support.
Despite beating out his rivals, Vance hasn’t always been so loyal to Trump.
Here’s all the times that he has spoken out against his running mate:
JD Vance
Back in August 2016, during Trump’s first run for the White House, the Ohio senator told ABC News that he didn’t think Trump was “offering many solutions” to the problems of America’s rural working class.
In a separate interview with Charlie Rose that summer, Vance – who rose to fame as the author of best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy – said that he was “never a Trump guy”.
Then, he went even further, telling Kentucky radio host Matt Jones he considered the businessman “a fraud”.
“I don’t think he actually cares about folks. I think he just recognizes that there was a hole in the conversation,” he said.
In another interview that August, Vance said that he might even be prepared to vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election in order to stop Trump from winning.
“You know, I think there’s a chance, if I feel like Trump has a really good chance of winning, that I might have to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton,” Vance admitted.
After his later entry into Republican politics, CNN reported on a series of Vance’s now-deleted tweets. In one, from summer 2017, he referred to Trump as “a moral disaster” with “no domestic policy agenda besides tax cuts.”
In another, he said: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump might be a cynical a**hole like [Richard] Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he might be America’s Hitler.”
He later apologized for the tweets and has sought to explain his conversion to Trumpism.
“Look, I was wrong about Donald Trump,” he told Fox News’s Bret Baier this June. “I didn’t think he was going to be a good president, Bret. He was a great president, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m working so hard to make sure he gets a second term.
“When you are wrong about something – you should change your mind and be honest with people about that fact.”
What the other candidates said about Trump:
Marco Rubio
The Florida senator’s belated pivot to Trump convert is particularly surprising given the nastiness of their sparring in the 2016 primaries when the two were bitter rivals for the Republican presidential nomination.
During their campaigns, Trump regularly called Rubio “Little Marco” and accused him of sweating profusely.
Rubio meanwhile mocked Trump for his use of spray tan and bronzer.
At one February 2016 campaign event, Rubio called Trump “a con artist” and said: “He runs on this idea that he is fighting for the little guy. But he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy.
“If you all have friends who are thinking about voting for Donald Trump, friends do not let friends vote for con artists.”
At another rally that same month, Rubio said: “He’s always calling me ‘Little Marco’. He’s taller than me, he’s like 6’2, which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5’2 – and you know what they say about men with small hands…”
When Rubio dropped out of the running that March, he told CNN: “For years to come, there are many people on the right, in the media and voters at large, that are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump.”
The Floridian subsequently has since dismissed the attacks on Trump claiming: “It was a campaign.”
Doug Burgum
The North Dakota governor has not been quite as critical of Trump as some of the other running mate favorites but did once say he would never do business with him.
Asked the question directly by NBC News in July 2023, Burgum answered: “I don’t think so. I just think that it’s important that you’re judged by the company you keep.”
Burgum has since walked back his criticism, saying: “I wish every American could see him the way Kathryn [Burgum, his wife] and I have got to know him in the last six months, because this guy is tireless, he’s committed, he’s smart, he’s funny. He’s nothing like he’s portrayed in the press.
“And so if you asked me that same question today, I’d be like, absolutely, I would do business with him.”
Tim Scott
Since suspending his own campaign for the Republican nomination, the South Carolina senator has emerged as one of Trump’s most unapologetic cheerleaders.
He was not always quite so obliging, however, once admitting to CNN that Trump can be “racially insensitive.”
In August 2017 – one month after the deadly violence at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia – Scott criticized Trump’s attitude towards the far-right, telling NPR: “What we want to see from our president is clarity and moral authority. And that moral authority is compromised... There’s no question about that.”
The following July, he told CNN he had had difficult conversations with the-then president about race.
“Yeah, they’re hard,” the senator said of those discussions. “They’re painful. They’re uncomfortable, to sit in the Oval Office and have a conversation with the president about things that you strongly disagree about.”
He added: “He didn’t change his perspective. I certainly can’t change my perspective. Mine’s educated by my experience.”
Later, as Trump’s rival for the 2024 nomination, he took the front-runner to task for not supporting a federal abortion ban, telling NBC’s Meet the Press: “President Trump said he would negotiate with the Democrats and walk back away from what I believe where we need to be, which is a 15-week limit on the federal level.”
