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- JD Vance, 39, would likely be the first Marine veteran to serve as vice president if elected.
- Donald Trump announced Vance, once a critic of the former president, as his running mate on Monday.
- In a sense, Vance’s service “is a balance” against Trump’s Vietnam draft deferments, an expert said.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Monday selected Ohio Sen. JD Vance — a Marine veteran, author, and once-critic of the former president — as his running mate for the 2024 election.
Vance, 39, is the first post-9/11 veteran to find a spot on a major party ticket and, if elected, would likely be the first Marine veteran to serve as the second-in-command, a for The Washington Post, conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt argued that Trump’s pick of Vance was an appeal to veterans. A Military Times a populist conservative, was elected into the Senate to represent Ohio in 2022 with no prior political experience and has since become one of Trump’s closest allies. Trump selected Vance as his running mate just two days after a 20-year-old from Pennsylvania fired multiple shots at the former president on Saturday, shaking the country with a targeted act of political violence.
Since his election to the Senate, Vance has opposed foreign aid to Ukraine as it continues fighting against Russia’s invasion, which began the same year he was elected into office. In April, he used the Iraq War as a historical example against intervention.
“I believed the propaganda of the George W. Bush administration that we needed to invade Iraq, that it was a war for freedom and democracy, that those who were appeasing Saddam Hussein were inviting a broader regional conflict,” he said on the Senate floor. “I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to, that the promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.”