On Monday, former President and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump officially named Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio as his choice for vice president and running mate.
“After much deliberation and consideration, and considering the immense talents of many others, I have determined that the person best suited to serve as Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the great State of Ohio,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social announcing his choice.
Vance has appeared on the campaign trail in support of Trump. In the hours after the shooting at the Trump rally, Vance posted on X “The central tenet of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. This rhetoric led directly to the attempted assassination of President Trump,” he said.
Vance wasn’t always a Trump supporter. But he has long had ties to Silicon Valley through his former life as a venture capitalist, including to Peter Thiel, a longtime Trump supporter and investor. Since winning his 2022 Senate race, Vance has emerged as a vocal Trump supporter and critic of big tech companies, and could play a key role in how the Trump administration approaches the sector.
Vance’s 2016 Memoirs Hillbilly Elegy It’s about growing up poor in the Rust Belt, and it marked himself as someone who understood — and could explain — the forces of discontent that led to Trump’s victory. At the time, Vance called himself an “anti-Trump guy,” even speculating that Trump might be “America’s Hitler” in a 2016 text message. The text was made public by a former classmate of Vance’s at Yale Law School in 2022.
But since Trump’s victory in 2016, Vance has become more aligned with the former president. In 2021 interview with Time, Vance explained his change of heart by saying that he had “kind of understood Trump’s problems all along. I just thought this guy wasn’t serious and wasn’t going to be able to make real progress on the issues that I cared about.”
During his 2022 Senate campaign, Vance met with Trump, who then supported him. “Like others, JD Vance may have said some not-so-positive things about me in the past, but he understands it now, and I’ve seen it in spades,” the The former president said in a statement at the time. Vance has since said he would not have voted to certify the 2020 election resultsallowing states to send multiple electors, something former Vice President Mike Pence refused to do.
Vance is no stranger to the world of tech and venture capital, and he has long-standing connections in Silicon Valley. In 2020, he launched an Ohio-based venture capital fund, Capital of NaryaBillionaire and right-wing advocate Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Eric Schmidt and Scott Dorsey were all investors. He also worked for Thiel’s own fund, Mithril Capital, and Thiel has also supported Vance’s successful 2022 Senate campaign. In June, Vance attended a fundraising dinner for Trump, organized by tech investor David Sacks.
