By choosing JD Vance as his running mate in July, Donald Trump was betting on an electoral direction and geography. His victory makes the forty-year-old one of the youngest vice presidents in United States history, the first of the millennial generation, as well as one of the least prepared for a traditionally thankless role.
This journey is that of the exemplary rise of the son of a dysfunctional Appalachian family, absent father, drugged mother, in search of frameworks within which to flourish. This pursuit took him successively to the elite Marine Corps, to the prestigious Yale Law School, and then to the business world with a mentor, Peter Thiel, who was one of the first Silicon Valley billionaires to join Donald Trump.
This story produced a bestseller, peasant elegy (Harper, not translated), published before the presidential elections of November 2016. The book, which was later made into a film, was later highlighted by the press in an attempt to explain the unexpected victory of the New York businessman, led by those who they were left behind. for the globalization that this story represents and for the nostalgia for an America of the past.
The electoral geography focused on the key states of the “rust belt” in the northeast of the United States: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, that “blue wall” on which Joe Biden’s re-election hopes rested before yours. withdrawn on July 21 and resumed by Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. With his past and his mandate as senator from Ohio obtained in 2022, at only 38 years old, JD Vance had the necessary profile to address the workers who voted twice for Barack Obama, in 2008 and in 2012, and then enlist in the ranks. of “Make America Great Again.”
It is an understatement to say that the running mate was not among the initial supporters of Donald Trump, for whom he had not voted in 2016, preferring a libertarian maverick. At the time, he described the billionaire as“cultural heroine”capable only of providing a brief feeling of satisfaction to his voters. He even wondered about the possibility of the latter becoming “American Hitler”.
uninhibited nationalism
Then, JD Vance changed his mind and cleaned his social media accounts of the criticism he had launched against the former businessman, while growing a beard as if to materialize this change. He then doggedly sought their support for the Republican primary for senator in Ohio in 2022, multiplying clear positions in the media to attract their attention.
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