James David Vance, Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate, yesterday 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.
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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.
Also yesterday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov praised Vance over his stance on the war in Ukraine.
The war was launched by Moscow more than two years ago.
Vance, a senator from Ohio, was in favour of peace and an end to military aid for Ukraine, Lavrov said at the UN in New York yesterday.