- JD Vance, Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate, on Thursday at the Republican National Convention showered Trump with praises over his handling of the failed assassination attempt against him.
- “He can stand defiant against an assassin one moment and call for national healing the next.
- “He is a beloved father and grandfather,” Vance told the crowd in what was his first speech after being officially nominated the Republican’s vice presidential candidate.
- “They said he was a tyrant. They said he must be stopped at all costs. But how did he respond?”
- He called for national unity, for national calm, literally, right after an assassin nearly took his life,” Vance said of Trump.
- Vance, a senator from Ohio 40 years younger than Trump, is a rising star within the Republican Party; he is a veteran of the Iraq War, a Yale-educated lawyer and former venture capitalist.
- At the beginning of his speech, the 39-year-old officially accepted his nomination as Trump’s running mate for the Nov. 5, election.
- Vance was not always a loyal Trump ally once even going so far as to call himself “a Never Trump guy.”
- When he was promoting his bestselling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” on poverty and drug addiction that afflicts poor white communities where he came from in Middletown Ohio, Vance wrote a blistering essay describing Trump as cultural heroin and a new pain reliever.
- “I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place,” he said in a separate interview that same year.
- Vance later renounced his criticism and, with Trump’s support, won the race for a U.S. Senate seat from Ohio in 2022.
- In his speech on at the convention in Milwaukee, Vance described himself as a fighter for working-class Americans who feel left behind.
- “To the people of Middletown, Ohio, and all the forgotten communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and every corner of our nation, I promise you this: I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from.”
- Trump, 78, was confirmed as the Republican presidential candidate on Monday, just two days after the failed assassination attempt against him.
- At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, a shooter was able to climb to an elevated position with an assault rifle and fire a number of shots at Trump, causing panic to break out in the audience.
- Trump, wounded in the ear and left bleeding, struck a defiant tone as he pumped his fist while being whisked off the stage.
- The shooting upended what had already been a tumultuous campaign season, dominated by Trump’s criminal trials and concerns about the candidates’ age.
- Biden, 81, has come under immense pressure to withdraw from the race after a disastrous debate performance in June super-charged existing fears about his mental acuity. (dpa/NAN)
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