MILWAUKEE – Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance His wife saysAs he To deliver his accept The speech on the third day of the Republican National Convention was simple.
Vance, the 39-year-old senator from Ohio whom former President Trump picked as his vice presidential running mate earlier this week, is scheduled to address about 2,400 delegates and thousands of attendees at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Arena on Wednesday night, as well as millions of Americans watching the Republican convention at home.
“I’m going to go out there tonight and I’m going to hype up the crowd,” Vance said at a finance event just hours before he was due to deliver a prime-time speech to the convention.
The senator added that he “makes a very simple but important case: that President Donald J. Trump must be reelected to the White House.”
Trump’s running mate Vance to deliver ‘most important speech’ of career
Former President Trump applauds Senator J.D. Vance’s gesture during the Republican National Convention at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee on July 16, 2024. (Reuters/Elisabeth Franz)
He then joked: “I’m really looking forward to tonight and I’m not going to ruin it, but if I do, it’ll be too late. [Trump] You made the right choice. It’s official.”
As the Republican convention kicked off in Wisconsin’s largest city, Trump made his highly anticipated and high-stakes vice presidential announcement, which will see him share a slate with one of his key Senate allies, a one-time Trump critic who has transformed into a leading supporter of the America First movement.
The former president and Vance teamed up on Monday and Tuesday nights in the Trump family box seats on the Republican Convention floor.
Vance, a former venture capitalist who wrote the best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” before running for office, is scheduled to take to the podium Wednesday night to talk about his experiences.
A source in Vance’s political circles told Fox News that the speech is expected to focus “on his background, his incredible life story and how it ties into his America First agenda.”
Another source familiar with the speech told Fox News that the speech “will marry Trump’s life experiences with his policies, including first-hand accounts of the tough upbringing that shaped his views on many of the big issues he is passionate about.”
Those issues include trade, immigration, ending the endless wars, fentanyl and opioids, and how inflation hits the poor the hardest, according to the source.
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The story begins with Vance growing up in a working-class family in a small town in southwest Ohio: His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother struggled with drug and alcohol abuse for years, so Vance was raised by his maternal grandparents.
After graduating from high school, Vance enlisted in the U.S. Marines and served in Iraq, before graduating from Ohio State University and earning a law degree from Yale University.
Vance, who lives in Cincinnati, moved to San Francisco after law school and worked as a principal at a venture capital firm owned by a billionaire venture capitalist. Peter Thiel, She later became a major donor to Vance’s winning campaign for the 2022 Senate election.
Sen. J.D. Vance and his wife, Usha Chirukuri Vance, watch as he is nominated for vice president at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on July 15, 2024. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Before his Senate run, Vance gained national attention when his story of growing up in a struggling steel town and his Appalachian roots in Kentucky became a New York Times bestseller and a Netflix film called “Hillbilly Elegy.” The story shone a spotlight on the values of many working-class Americans who have come to support Trump’s policies.
Vance was a vocal critic of former President Trump when he first ran for president in 2016.
But Vance ultimately supported Trump, praising the former president’s tenure in the White House and, in a 2021 Fox News interview, apologizing for his previous criticism of Trump.
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Trump’s endorsement of Vance just days before the 2022 Republican Senate primary gave him a victory in what is expected to be a crowded and fiercely contested race.
“I think the American people are going to want to hear the story of J.D. overcoming adversity as a young man, serving his country in uniform as a Marine in Iraq, then becoming a business leader and now a successful elected leader,” Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, a fellow military veteran, told Fox News on Tuesday.
Former President Trump and Senator J.D. Vance react during Day 1 of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on July 15, 2024. (Reuters/Mike Seeger)
In a preview of things to come, Democrats were quick to criticize Vance on Monday.
President Biden told reporters that Vance was “a Trump clone on many issues.”
“Vance will be loyal only to Donald Trump, not to our country,” Vice President Harris said in a campaign video released Wednesday.
And the president’s campaign said Vance was selected ” [former Vice President] Mike Pence said on January 6 that he would not “do everything in my power to support Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and whatever harm it may cause to the American people.”
Fox News’ Alexis McAdams contributed to this report.
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