Speaking Wednesday at the Republican National Convention, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio became the latest, and potentially most consequential, of Donald J. Trump’s apprentices to accept the position in prime time.
For years as the host of “The Apprentice,” Mr. Trump picked out protégés from boardrooms full of young supplicants. There was a delicate art to getting the nod. Offend him and you might be dismissed; appear too thirsty and you could get the boot as well. The key was to be yourself but also be him, to be a mirror but a flattering one, to be an echo auto-tuned to please the boss’s ear.
Mr. Vance spent much of his two years in the Senate auditioning for the promotion to vice-presidential nominee, cultivating a relationship, apologizing for his Never-Trumper apostasy and recently blaming Biden campaign rhetoric for leading “directly” to the assassination attempt against Mr. Trump.
Accepting the nomination on Wednesday night, he cast himself as a loyal fighter, an ideological heir and a grateful son of the working class with roots in Appalachia and the Rust Belt.
With Merle Haggard’s “America First” as his walk-on music, he began his speech praising Mr. Trump: “He didn’t need politics,” Mr. Vance said, “but the country needed him.” Mr. Trump looked on smiling in split-screen, as if watching a winner at a season finale.
When it came to introducing himself, Mr. Vance had a head start and a challenge. He was telling a story he had already told, in the memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” and so had Ron Howard, in the 2020 film adaptation.
But that story was in some ways not fitted to this audience. His book made the case that poor Appalachians — part of the rural base of the Trumpist G.O.P. — were often at fault for their own problems of unemployment and addiction and that they told themselves “lies” to blame their woes on outsiders.
Wednesday, the author gave that story a bit of a rewrite. He depicted his hometown, Middletown, Ohio, as having been “cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class,” who Mr. Vance said had shipped jobs away and let fentanyl stream in. In this remake, President Biden was the villain, the elites’ longtime capo.
Running mates are often chosen to be attack dogs, and they can use the convention to show their bite. Other times, they’re chosen to fit a cultural niche. For the Midwestern Mr. Vance, part of his assignment was simply geographic. He mentioned Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin so often he could have been a Big Ten football announcer.
But it was also demographic. Like one predecessor, John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, Mr. Vance served as an avatar of a kind of rural American life that his party celebrates as especially authentic.
This part of his story Mr. Vance told with a warmer, personable touch. He regaled the hall with memories of “Mamaw,” the rough-talking grandmother who raised him while his mother, Beverly, struggled with drug addiction, and who kept 19 loaded handguns stashed around the house. He introduced Beverly in the audience, congratulating her on “10 years clean and sober.” He was quick with jokes: When his mention of attending “The Ohio State University” prompted a Michigan “Go Blue!” chant, he said, “We’ve had enough political violence.”
Another essential part of Mr. Vance’s résumé was his birth date. At 39, he is half the age of Mr. Trump, and less than half that of President Biden, and his introduction emphasized this. (So did, inadvertently, the news networks’ split-screen of Mr. Biden’s deplaning at Joint Base Andrews, walking gingerly down the steps after a Covid diagnosis.)
“Joe Biden has been a politician in Washington for longer than I’ve been alive,” Mr. Vance said. He offered Mr. Trump, 78, a political heir and a little youth serum.
Mr. Vance, the stagecraft suggested, could be Mr. Trump’s son. He could, specifically, be Donald Trump Jr. — who advocated Mr. Vance — with a few tweaks. (On Tuesday’s “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart said that Mr. Vance looked as if the younger Trump were the default avatar in a videogame and Mr. Trump had upgraded his settings.)
Speaking earlier in the hour, Donald Trump Jr. drew a prince-and-the-pauper image of them: “A kid from Appalachia and a kid from Trump Tower in Manhattan!” (Middletown is not actually in Appalachia.) At times, Wednesday’s program felt as if Mr. Vance were being not only hired but also adopted.
His prime-time debut was a family affair. His wife, Usha, gave him an apolitical introduction, recalling how this “meat and potatoes” man had adapted to her vegetarian diet. (She wore blue, as though to signal her past as a registered Democrat.) He spoke of his affection for her Indian immigrant parents.
All this came in the context of the family-heavy Trump convention — in addition to the Trump children and grandchildren on display, Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, heads the Republican National Committee.
This homey tableau left out a lot. Mr. Vance’s social conservatism was left aside, though earlier in the day CNN dug up a 2022 recording of him saying, “I would certainly like abortion to be illegal nationally.” He did not talk, as he had before, of the need to “seize the institutions of the left” and subject them to a “de-woke-ification program” even if courts rule it illegal. There was no rhetoric about stolen elections, or about Mr. Vance’s statements that as vice president he would not have certified the 2020 results.
There would be time for other aspects of policy, on the campaign trail and if Mr. Vance won the vice presidency. Wednesday night’s introduction was about bringing J.D. Vance into the family, which, in the Trump operation, is all part of the apprenticeship.
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