NEW RIGHT NOD — As the Republican National Convention began today in Milwaukee in the shadow of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life, the now-official GOP nominee for president’s first order of business was to name his running mate: Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). Just 39 years old, Vance’s 2016 bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” vaulted the former venture capitalist and Marine Corps veteran to national prominence — which he then parlayed into a successful 2022 run for Senate. He’s moved from a “Never Trump” conservative who once compared the former president to Hitler to one of Trump’s chief defenders. And even before he was named Trump’s running mate, Vance was a preeminent figure on the “New Right,” a collection of largely younger conservatives who want to take many pillars of the first Trump term — overt nationalism, anti-immigration and America First anti-interventionism — to a more direct and extreme place. Trump’s bet is that Vance’s Rust Belt voice will resonate in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, all of which are likely essential to President Joe Biden’s path to 270 electoral votes. But unlike some other figures who were considered veep shortlisters, such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) who may have helped Trump with Latino voters and suburban voters, the Vance pick looks a lot more like service to style and ideology. It’s a nod to the populist right and advocates for Vance like Donald Trump Jr., Steve Bannon and Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. And it’s an overture to Silicon Valley billionaires fed up with Biden. Peter Thiel, who has demurred about financially backing Trump this cycle, once hired Vance at his venture capital firm and helped to bankroll Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign. Vance, who said in February that he wouldn’t have certified the results of the 2020 election if he was in then-Vice President Mike Pence’s place, will be introduced more fully to the country this week at the RNC, where he’ll get the chance to articulate his own vision for the country. If you want to know more about him right now, Nightly has you covered with the most important, up to the minute Vance coverage: 55 Things to Know About J.D. Vance, Trump’s VP Pick: Donald Trump’s pick for vice president made a 180-degree turn from fierce critic to bulldog surrogate for the former president. What Trump picking Vance for VP means for the Senate: Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate means there could be an upcoming vacancy in the Senate — but it wouldn’t last long. If Vance is elected as vice president, Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine will get to pick his replacement in Congress’ upper chamber. The backstory on how Trump picked Vance: Two days before Donald Trump named J.D. Vance as his running mate, the Ohio senator boarded real estate titan Steve Witkoff’s G6 Gulfstream jet. His destination: Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. The surreptitious meeting, which has not previously been reported, helped to solidify Trump’s decision to pick the 39-year-old freshman senator as his running mate. Trump had spoken with North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the other two vice presidential contenders, earlier in the week. To those familiar with his deliberations, it was clear he had been the most impressed with Vance. Is There Something More Radical than MAGA? J.D. Vance Is Dreaming It: Vance’s new identity as a MAGA militant has existed alongside — and, at times, served to obscure — another influential role that Vance has taken on in Washington. In certain conservative circles, Vance has emerged as the standard-bearer of the “New Right,” a loose movement of young, edgy and elite conservatives trying to take the ideological revolution that began under Trump — including his overt embrace of nationalism, his hard-line stance on immigration, his vocal opposition of U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts like Ukraine and his overt skepticism toward certain liberal democratic principles — in an even more radical direction. Unlike Trump’s more conventional Republican followers, Vance’s New Right cohort see Trump as merely the first step in a broader populist-nationalist revolution that is already reshaping the American right — and, if they get their way, that will soon reshape America as a whole. What J.D. Vance Believes: In June, Vance sat down for a long conversation with Ross Douthat, a New York Times Opinion columnist, about how he sees his own political evolution, his relationship to the American elite and to Trump himself, his views on populist economics and America’s support for Ukraine. Trump: Tribune Of Poor White People: A 2016 interview with Vance in The American Conservative, published after the release of Hillbilly Elegy. How Democrats plan to attack Vance: As NBC News reports, the Democratic playbook on going after Vance is to paint him as “extreme,” in particular on the issues of abortion and defending democracy that have become pillars of Biden’s campaign. “He’s dangerous. So is his book”: Silas House, the Appalachian Studies chair at Berea College in Kentucky and one of the premier thinkers in and about the South, spoke with POLITICO Magazine in 2022 about “Hillbilly Elegy” and Vance as a political figure. All of J.D. Vance’s Trump quotes that could come back to bite him: Vance didn’t always have kind words for his running mate. In the year before Trump took the Oval Office, Vance, who once described himself as a “Never Trump guy,” was quick to criticize the former president, using words like “idiot” and even “Hitler” to describe Trump. Farewell to the dumbest Senate primary ever: Low-lights from the fractious Republican primary that delivered the Ohio Senate nomination to Vance in 2022. How J.D. Vance won an Ohio U.S. Senate race that captured national attention: Vance’s path to general election victory in one of the most closely watched and hard-fought Senate races of 2022. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @calder_mchugh.
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