Trump’s VP pick is JD Vance, ending his search for a presidential running mate

Donald Trump has selected Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his presidential running mate, ending months of speculation about the presumptive Republican nominee’s choice to help him challenge President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” Trump said Monday in a Truth Social post.

Two other top Republican contenders, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, were told earlier that they would not be picked as Trump’s VP, NBC News reported.

The selection provides a sudden, massive jolt in stature for the 39-year-old Vance, who joined the Senate as a political newcomer less than two years ago.

Vance gained fame in 2016 through his bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” which traced his rural upbringing in Ohio and mused on the culture and politics of Appalachia.

While not without its critics, the book quickly earned Vance a reputation as a trenchant political analyst who, despite an Ivy League education, possessed a unique sense of how the White working class viewed the rest of the country.

Vance and Rubio both were once vocal Trump critics. Vance in 2016 had called Trump a “total fraud,” while Rubio had slammed Trump as a “con artist” while running against him in the 2016 Republican presidential primary.

Burgum ran against Trump in the current presidential primary cycle, though he largely avoided directly criticizing the ex-president at that time.

All three men have become aggressive cheerleaders for Trump as the veepstakes heated up.

Vance and Burgum, for instance, both appeared outside of Trump’s criminal hush money trial in New York City to decry the prosecution of the presumptive Republican nominee.

After the jury in that trial convicted Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records, Rubio compared the whole affair to show trials carried out in Cuba under the communist regime of Fidel Castro.

Trump’s VP announcement came in the middle of a deluge of major national news — including a failed assassination attempt against the former president at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend.

The attack, which left one rally attendee dead and Trump with a minor injury, sent shockwaves across the country and spurred condemnations of violence across the political aisle.

Biden, in an Oval Office address after the Trump rally shooting, urged Americans to lower the temperature of political rhetoric and reaffirm the democratic norms of civil disagreement and decency.

Meanwhile, Trump’s bevy of legal battles were shaken up Monday morning, when federal Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the criminal case charging the former president with illegally retaining classified documents and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them.

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