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Tonight, the United States will get its first major look as JD Vance, vice presidential candidate. Of course, this won’t be the first time they’ve seen JD Vance the person. Most of America got to know him in 2016 when his part-memoir, part-manifesto Hillbilly Elegy became a New York Times bestseller. They got to know him again when he made his volte-face on Donald Trump, going from comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler to becoming Trump’s biggest defender when he ran for Senate in Ohio.
But tonight will debut JD Vance, Trump’s running mate. Vance has been met with a raucous reception from the all corners of the Republican Party. When he entered the Fiserv Forum on Tuesday evening, he received a hero’s welcome. When he appeared on the convention floor and took his seat beside Donald Trump, he was treated as the Chief Operating Officer to Trump’s CEO.
Trump’s decision to pick Vance — a MAGA warrior who ardently opposes abortion and also opposes supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia — shows that Trump feels little need to do the dance of deference to the defeated. That’s a dance the presidential nominee traditionally performs once the primary ends.
Indeed, Trump tried doing this two-step in 2016 after he initially said Ted Cruz “holds the Bible high, he puts it down, then he lies”. He picked Mike Pence, the pious Indiana governor who supported free trade, but he endorsed Cruz.
Likewise, when Nikki Haley took the stage on Tuesday evening, she put her earlier feud with Trump in the freezer.
Trump chose Pence in order to consolidate his voter base by winning over wary evangelicals. But the former president doesn’t need to win over evangelicals any more, since he gave them the ultimate golden goose during his first term, by nominating the three Supreme Court Justices who killed abortion rights.
Rather, he’s chosen to double down on MAGA.
His Vance pick also shows that — as Democrats continue to turn on each other and Joe Biden’s poll numbers dive deeper — Trumpworld feels like it’s going to win. Why try to grow the tent and risk angering the base with a RINO pick instead of picking a running mate Trump really wants?
Indeed, throughout the convention in Milwaukee, Republicans have become increasingly confident they can beat Biden — and are not sweating the idea that Kamala Harris could beat Trump, either. One thing that unites Harris’s fellow Californian, former House speaker Kevin McCarthy, and South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace, who voted to kick McCarthy out as speaker, is certain that Harris won’t be a threat.
“I think President Trump wins either way,” McCarthy told The Independent, in between picking fights with Representative Matt Gaetz.
Meanwhile, Mace told The Independent that when it comes to abortion, Harris “won’t tell you what her position is.”
But the selection of Vance is the epitome of a high-risk, high-reward pick.
