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On Monday, former president and current Republican nominee for president Donald Trump officially named senator J.D. Vance of Ohio as his pick for vice president and running mate.
“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,” wrote Trump in a post on Truth Social announcing his pick.
Vance has appeared on the campaign trail in support of Trump. In the hours following the Trump rally shooting, Vance posted on X saying, “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.”
Vance wasn’t always a Trump supporter. But he has long had connections to Silicon Valley through his former life as a venture capitalist, including to longtime Trump supporter and investor Peter Thiel. Since winning his Senate race in 2022, Vance has come out as an ardent Trump supporter and a critic of big tech companies, and could play a key role in shaping how a Trump administration would approach the industry.
Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy is about growing up in poverty in the Rust Belt, and he branded himself as someone who understood—and could explain—the forces of discontent that led to Trump’s victory. At the time, Vance referred to himself as a “never-Trump guy,” even going so far as to reportedly speculate that Trump could be “America’s Hitler” in a 2016 text message. The text was made public in 2022 by a former Yale Law School classmate of Vance’s.
But since Trump’s 2016 victory, Vance has become more aligned with the former president. In a 2021 interview with Time, Vance explained his change of heart, saying he “sort of got Trump’s issues from the beginning. I just thought that this guy was not serious and was not going to be able to really make progress on the issues I cared about.”
During his Senate campaign in 2022, Vance met with Trump, who later endorsed him. “Like some others, J.D. Vance may have said some not so great things about me in the past, but he gets it now, and I have seen that in spades,” the former president said in a statement at the time. Vance has since said that he would not have voted to certify the results of the 2020 election, allowing states to send multiple electors, which former vice president Mike Pence refused to do.
Vance is no stranger to the world of tech and venture capital and has long had connections in Silicon Valley. In 2020 he started an Ohio-based venture capital fund, Narya Capital. Billionaire and right-wing backer Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Eric Schmidt, and Scott Dorsey were all investors. He also worked for Thiel’s own fund, Mithril Capital, and Thiel also backed Vance’s successful 2022 Senate run. In June, Vance attended a fundraising dinner for Trump, hosted by tech investor David Sacks.
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Vance is an investor in Rumble, alongside Thiel, a YouTube alternative favored by the right due to its lack of content moderation. The company’s website describes the platform as “immune to cancel culture” and reported 67 million monthly active users at the end of 2023. Rumble has hosted Russian propaganda, and reporting from WIRED earlier this year found that the company is being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
During his campaign, Vance advocated for the repeal of Section 230, the law that protects platforms from being legally responsible for the content that users post, but only for large platforms, saying that the law should protect smaller alternative platforms (of which Rumble is one). “Voters really want us to do something about the tech industry,” he said in the 2022 Time interview.
“President Trump’s new Truth Social, or GETTR, or any of the alternative platforms that we’re using, we need to reform it in a way that protects them, to protect new entries into this market, while destroying the stranglehold and the power of big tech,” Vance said in a 2022 forum.
Other contenders for Trump’s VP pick included North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, Florida senator Marco Rubio, South Carolina senator Tim Scott, New York congressperson Elise Stefanik, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, and former presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy, among others.
