For nearly nine years, Donald J. Trump has been the singular face of Republican politics and the undisputed leader of the Make America Great Again movement. On Monday, the former president came as close as he may ever come to anointing a successor.
The choice of J.D. Vance as Mr. Trump’s running mate, a politician nearly 40 years his junior, immediately vaults the first-term senator to the forefront of a G.O.P. future that is not so far away.
If elected in November, Mr. Trump, 78, can serve only a single term — the 22nd Amendment states that no person shall be elected president more than twice — a rarity for a candidate naming a potential vice president. That short tenure has added extra urgency to the question of what comes next for Trumpism, a movement inextricably tethered to one man who has so thoroughly transformed the Republican Party.
Mr. Vance, 39, is the first millennial to make a major presidential ticket, a Marine veteran and a politician who has thoroughly remade himself as a full-throated MAGA enthusiast. In recent months, it was Mr. Vance’s aggressive defense of Trumpism and Mr. Trump, even on mainstream news outlets, that helped him stand out for the former president as a worthy inheritor.
“Trump is going to hold on to the MAGA baton for as long as he can,” said Chip Saltsman, a longtime Republican strategist. But Mr. Vance, he added, is “somebody that’s going to have an inside track, a head start on getting the MAGA baton in four years.”
The changing of the ideological guard was clearly, and at times uncomfortably, apparent on the convention floor on Monday. Mentions of Mr. Vance’s name earned roars of approval. The face of Senator Mitch McConnell, an avatar of the pre-Trump G.O.P., inspired boos when he appeared on the big screens above delegates.
Mr. Trump, whose fame soared from hosting the television show “The Apprentice” for more than a decade, has long been leery of anointing anyone a successor. He made his choice of Mr. Vance after months of deliberations and less than 48 hours after an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania that has rattled the nation.
“President Trump and I have talked about this a great deal and I feel certain J.D. feels the same way,” said Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, a close Republican ally of the former president. “What they’re focused on right now is not some sort of long-term vision, it’s about November.”
Still, as Alex Conant, a veteran Republican strategist who has worked on presidential campaigns, put it, “The next presidential race starts in January 2025.”
Jeff Kaufman, the chairman of the Republican Party in Iowa, where the nominating contest will begin yet again in 2028, hailed Mr. Vance as representing “a new generation of Donald Trump policies.”
Representative Ashley Hinson of Iowa called the choice “inspired.”
“I’m 41 and J.D.’s 39, right? So I think about that next generation of Republican leader — I’m inspired by this pick,” Ms. Hinson said. “I’m sure he’ll be back in Iowa a lot.”
Any succession plan is far from secured.
As Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s vice president, can attest, the balancing act of serving as the No. 2 to Mr. Trump is uniquely perilous. Mr. Pence spent almost the entirety of his four years as a loyal lieutenant. Yet his decision to certify the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021 — as Trump supporters constructed gallows for the vice president outside the Capitol — forever tarnished the Trump-Pence relationship.
Mr. Vance, notably, has said he would not have certified the election.
Mr. Vance is not viewed as the politically safe pick. He has been serving in public office for just 18 months. He has never been through a presidential run, unlike the other top contenders, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota.
Mr. Vance has also embraced some more radical and far-reaching ideas aligned with Mr. Trump, including once calling for the firing of “every civil servant in the administrative state” to replace them with “our people.” More recently, in a post on X, he blamed President Biden and the Democrats for rhetoric that “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Not so long ago, Mr. Vance’s acid pen was trained on Mr. Trump.
Back in 2016, Mr. Vance called him “cultural heroin” and even compared him to Hitler. After the election, Mr. Vance’s best-selling book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was almost required reading for liberals seeking to understand how Democrats had fumbled away an election in which working-class white voters turned out in record numbers to elect Mr. Trump.
Now Mr. Trump is betting there is no one more devoted than a convert.
Republicans hope Mr. Vance’s elevation to the ticket will cement the new demographic appeals of the Republican Party to the working class. In his book, Mr. Vance recounted his own hardscrabble upbringing in poor corners of Ohio and Kentucky.
“We’ve seen a movement in the Republican Party to appeal to more blue-collar workers — it’s a continuation of that,” said Gov. Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, who has disagreed sharply with both Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance on some issues, including aid to Ukraine. Mr. DeWine said the pick showed that the former president “wants someone who is closely aligned to him on policy.”
Mr. Biden’s first remarks about Mr. Vance on Monday were to tag him as “a clone of Trump on the issues.”
The choice of Mr. Vance was also a victory for the more isolationist forces pressing for an America First ideology. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who is slated to speak at the convention later in the week, was among those who said they were thrilled.
At an event on Monday, Mr. Carlson said the strongest case for the first-term senator was in the enemies he had amassed. “Every bad person I’ve ever met in a lifetime in Washington was aligned against J.D. Vance,” said Mr. Carlson, an outspoken opponent of American military entanglements abroad.
At least in the immediate term, Mr. Vance is expected to amplify rather than reshape Mr. Trump’s vision. But he arrives on the ticket aligned, on both foreign and domestic matters, focused less on slashing spending and more on curbing the administrative state, and with a skepticism of intervening abroad.
“He is somebody who represents what we need more of in politics, which is someone who is smart, independent-minded, energetic,” Vivek Ramaswamy, the Trump-aligned former presidential candidate, said on Monday. “The one negative is that leaves one fewer of those people in the Senate who are already scarce enough to push our America First agenda.”
Mr. Ramaswamy was born and raised in Ohio and signaled his interest in the Senate seat. If Mr. Vance is elected vice president, Mr. DeWine will then appoint an interim senator.
Mr. Vance also has had some key Silicon Valley financiers in his corner, including David Sacks, who spoke at the Republican convention on Monday, the multibillionaire Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who contributed $10 million to a pro-Vance super PAC in 2022.
Blake Masters, who ran for Senate from Arizona in 2022, also with $10 million in Thiel support, praised Mr. Vance’s “unique vision.”
“It’s not just about what conservatism has been in the past, which is obviously an important part of conservatism, but it’s about where do we go in the future,” Mr. Masters said. “I think that is what made Trump so different in 2016. He was actually talking about things in a different way than Republican politicians who had come before.”
Mr. Masters lost his 2022 race. He is running for a House seat this year with Mr. Vance’s backing, while Mr. Trump has endorsed his rival. Mr. Masters mockingly appropriated one of Vice President Kamala Harris’s favorite sayings to sum up the Vance pick.
“J.D. is what can be, unburdened by what has been,” he said.
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