U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance. File
| Photo Credit: Reuters

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Former U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday (October 6, 2024) returned to Butler, a city in Pennsylvania where he narrowly escaped an assassination bid 12 weeks ago, and addressed thousands of his supporters in this key battleground state, urging them to elect him as the next President of the United States.

Joined by high-profile figures like Tesla owner Elon Musk and his running mate, Senator J.D. Vance, Mr. Trump (78) made a passionate plea to “defeat” Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate in the November 5 presidential poll.

“We must stop her country-destroying regime, radical-left agenda once and for all. We cannot have it happen. So you must get out and you must vote,” Mr. Trump said in Pennsylvania, which in this election cycle has emerged as a must-win situation for both candidates.

Mr. Trump launched a scathing attack on Harris and accused her of being a failure on multiple fronts, including border security and economy. “She imposed a natural gas export ban on Pennsylvania, which is killing your energy workers and your pricing,” he said.

“Kamala Harris is a radical-left Marxist. She is a woman that is not respected in Congress. She was laughed at Congress. Nobody thought she could win. They did a coup of Biden,” Mr. Trump said.

“Whether you like him or not, I am not a particularly big fan. We had a debate, and the debate ended. And all of a sudden, they come to him, and they say, we want you out. You are not going to win the election. And he said, ‘I do not want to get out’,” he added.

“He (Biden) got 14 million (1.4 crore) votes. If you believe in democracy or a system, he got 14 million votes. And she (Harris) got none. She was the first one out, 22 candidates, and she never made it to Iowa. She quit before Iowa, and now she is running. And that is okay. But, you know, we spent USD 150 million beating Biden, and as soon as he was down and out for the count, they said, let us take him out. We will give somebody else to run. Never happened before,” he said.

“She is a person that rated even worse in every statistic than any other senator. She was rated at the bottom of the US Senate. She has destroyed everything she touched,” Mr. Trump said.

The former President said if elected, on the first day of his presidency, he would seal the border and stop the migrant invasion into the country. “We will begin the largest deportation operation in the history of the United States,” he said, adding that 2024 is the most important election in the history of the country.

“Here are the facts. My opponent, Kamala Harris, is the most incompetent and far-left nominee ever to run for president. She is much further left than crazy Bernie Sanders. She wants to open the borders. She took the most secure border in US history and turned it into the worst border in the history of the world…. She let in 21 million (2.1 crore) illegal aliens from all over the world, from prisons and jails and mental institutions and insane asylums. And they are terrorists at record levels, at levels we have never seen before,” he alleged.

In his brief speech, Mr. Musk said this is a must-win situation for the country.

“President Trump must win to preserve the Constitution. He must win to preserve democracy in America. This is a must-win situation. So I have one ask for everyone in the audience, everyone who watches this video, everyone in the livestream. This one request is very important. Register to vote. And get everyone you know and everyone you do not know, drag them to register to vote…. Then make sure they actually do vote. If they do not, this will be the last election. That is my prediction,” he said.

Mr. Musk said the true test of someone’s character is how they behave under fire. “We had one president who could not climb a flight of stairs. Another who was fist-pumping after getting shot. Fight, fight, fight. Blood coming down the face. America is the home of the brave. There is no truer test than courage under fire. So who do you want representing America?” he asked the audience.

“This election, I think it is the most important election of our lifetime. This is no ordinary election. The other side wants to take away your freedom of speech. They want to take away your right to bear arms. They want to take away your right to vote effectively. You have got 14 states now that do not require voter ID. California, where I used to live, just passed a law banning voter ID for voting. I still cannot believe that is real. How are you supposed to have a proper election if there is no ID?” he asked.

Mr. Vance said Mr. Trump took a bullet for democracy.

“A Democrat senator called Donald Trump an existential threat to our democracy. Kamala Harris said he was attacking the foundations of our democracy. I think you all will join me in saying to Kamala Harris, how dare you talk about threats to democracy? Donald Trump took a bullet for democracy. What the hell have you done?” Mr. Vance said.

“The truth is that Kamala Harris and her allies, they attack Donald Trump in order to silence us, we the people. They have declared war explicitly on the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Kamala Harris proudly says she wants to censor the internet. But we all know that censorship is only the first step.,” he said.

“Just look at everything they have done to President Trump. First, they tried to silence him. When that did not work, they tried to bankrupt him. When that did not work, they tried to jail him,” he added.

“With all the hatred they have spewed at President Trump, it was only a matter of time before somebody tried to kill him,” Mr. Vance said.

Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, left, and Democratic vice presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, shake hands as they arrive for a CBS News vice presidential debate, Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024, in New York.
| Photo Credit: AP

Tim Walz and J.D. Vance are meeting for their first and possibly only vice presidential debate on Tuesday (October 1, 2024), in what could be the last debate for both campaigns to argue their case before the election.

The debate in New York hosted by CBS News gives Mr. Vance, a Republican freshman senator from Ohio, and Mr. Walz, a two-term Democratic governor of Minnesota, a chance to introduce themselves, make a case for their running mates, and go on the attack against the opposing ticket.

Tuesday’s matchup could have an outsized impact. Polls have shown Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump locked in a close contest, giving added weight to anything that can sway voters on the margins, including the impression left by the vice presidential candidates. It also might be the last debate of the campaign, with Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump teams failing to agree on another meeting.

The role of a presidential running mate is typically to serve as an attack dog for the person at the top of the ticket, arguing against the opposing presidential candidate and their proxy on stage. Both Mr. Vance and Mr. Walz have embraced that role.

Mr. Vance’s occasionally confrontational news interviews and appearances on the campaign trail have underscored why Mr. Trump picked him for the Republican ticket despite his past biting criticisms of the former President, including once suggesting Mr. Trump would be “America’s Hitler.”

Mr. Walz, meanwhile, catapulted onto Ms. Harris’ campaign by branding Mr. Trump and Republicans as “ just weird,” creating an attack line for Democrats seeking to argue Republicans are disconnected from the American people.

A new AP-NORC poll found that Mr. Walz is better liked than Mr. Vance, potentially giving the Republican an added challenge.

After a Harris-Trump debate in which Republicans complained about the ABC News moderators fact-checking Mr. Trump, Tuesday’s debate will not feature any corrections from the hosts. CBS News said the onus for pointing out misstatements will be on the candidates, with moderators “facilitating those opportunities.”

Mr. Trump, on Tuesday evening, said his advice to Mr. Vance was to “have a lot of fun” and praised his running mate as a “smart guy” and “a real warrior.”

As they’ve campaigned, both Mr. Walz and Mr. Vance have played up their roots in small towns in middle America, broadening the appeal of Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump, who hail from California and New York, respectively.

Mr. Walz, 60, frequently invokes his past job coaching a high school football team as he speaks about his campaign with Harris bringing “joy” back to politics and weds his critiques of the GOP to a message to Democrats that they need to “leave it all on the field.”

Mr. Walz, a Nebraska native, was a geography teacher before he was elected to Congress in 2006. He spent a dozen years there before he was elected governor in 2018, winning a second term four years later.

He also served 24 years in the Army National Guard before retiring in 2005. His exit and description of his service have drawn harsh criticism from Mr. Vance, who served in the Marine Corps, including in Iraq.

The 40-year-old Mr. Vance became nationally known in 2016 with the publication of his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which recounts his childhood in Ohio and his family’s roots in rural Kentucky. The book was cited frequently after Mr. Trump’s 2016 win as a window into working-class white voters who supported his campaign. Mr. Vance went to Yale Law School before working as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.

After the publication of his book, he was a prominent critic of Mr. Trump’s before he morphed into a staunch defender of the former President, especially on issues like trade, foreign policy and immigration.

JD Vance introduced himself to a national audience on July 17 after being chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate, sharing the story of his hardscrabble upbringing and making the case that his party best understands the challenges facing struggling Americans.

Speaking to a packed arena at the Republican National Convention, the Ohio senator cast himself as a fighter for a forgotten working class, making a direct appeal to the Rust Belt voters who helped drive Mr. Trump’s surprise 2016 victory and voicing their anger and frustration.

“In small towns like mine in Ohio, or next door in Pennsylvania, or in Michigan, in states all across our country, jobs were sent overseas and children were sent to war,” he said.

“To the people of Middletown, Ohio, and all the forgotten communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and every corner of our nation, I promise you this,” he said. “I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from.”

The 39-year-old Ohio senator is a relative political unknown, having served in the Senate for less than two years. He rapidly morphed in recent years from a bitter critic of the former President to an aggressive defender and is now positioned to become the future leader of the party and the torch-bearer of Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” political movement.

The first millennial to join the top of a major party ticket, Mr. Vance enters the race as questions about the age of the men at the top — 78-year-old Mr. Trump and 81-year-old President Joe Biden — have been high on the list of voters’ concerns. He also joins Mr. Trump after an assassination attempt against the former President — in which Mr. Trump came perhaps millimetres from death or serious injury — underscoring the importance of a potential successor.

But Mr. Trump’s decision to choose Mr. Vance wasn’t about picking a running mate or the next Vice President, said Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, who introduced the senator at a fundraiser earlier on July 17.

“Donald Trump picked a man in J.D. Vance that is the future of the country, the future of the Republican Party, the future of the America First movement,” he said.

In his speech, Mr. Vance shared his story of growing up poor in Kentucky and Ohio, his mother addicted to drugs and his father absent. He later joined the Marines, graduated from Yale Law School, and went on to the highest levels of U.S. politics — an embodiment of an American dream he said is in now in short supply.

“Never in my wildest imagination could I have believed that I’d be standing here tonight,” he said.

Mr. Vance gained prominence following the publication of his bestselling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” which tells the story of his blue-collar roots. The book became a must-read for those seeking to understand the cultural forces that propelled Trump to the White House that year. Mr. Vance spent years as a Trump critic, assailing the former President with insults, before he changed his mind.

Mr. Vance, who had never attended, let alone spoken at a previous Republican convention, spent much of his speech talking up Mr. Trump and going after Mr. Biden, using his relative youth to draw a contrast with the 81-year-old President.

Mr. Vance says he was in fourth grade when “a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good American manufacturing jobs to Mexico.”

“Joe Biden has been a politician in Washington as long as I’ve been alive,” he added. “For half a century, he’s been a champion of every single policy initiative to make America weaker and poorer.”

The crowd inside the convention hall welcomed Vance warmly. They erupted into chants of “Mamaw!” in honour of his grandmother, and chanted “J.D.’s Mom!” after he introduced his mother, a former addict who has been sober for 10 years.

Mr. Vance was introduced on July 17 night by his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, who talked of the stark difference between how she and her husband grew up — she was a middle-class immigrant from San Diego, and he is from a low-income Appalachian family. She called him “a meat and potatoes kind of guy” who respected her vegetarian diet and learned to cook Indian food for her mother.

Mr. Trump, again wearing a bandage over his injured ear, watched Mr. Vance speak from his family box and was often seen smiling.

Most Americans — and Republicans — didn’t know much about Mr. Vance before July 17 night. According to a new poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which was conducted before Trump selected the freshman senator as his choice, 6 in 10 Americans don’t know enough about him to have formed an opinion. That includes 61% of Republicans.

Democrats have attacked Mr. Vance for his past support for a national abortion ban, his criticism of U.S. involvement in Ukraine, and his eagerness to blame Democrats for Trump’s assassination attempt. But the young senator steered clear of such controversies in his remarks, which were light on the red-meat conservative attacks that convention audiences typically expect.

Mr. Biden’s campaign responded with a blistering statement calling Vance “unprepared, unqualified, and willing to do anything Donald Trump demands.”

“Tonight, J.D. Vance, the poster boy for Project 2025, took center stage. But it’s working families and the middle class who will suffer if he’s allowed to stay there,” said Michael Tyler, Biden campaign communication director.

Convention organizers had stressed a theme of unity, even before Mr. Trump survived an attempted assassination at a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13. Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election and the subsequent attack on the U.S. Capitol, officials said, would be absent from the stage.

But that changed with former White House official Peter Navarro, who was greeted with a standing ovation hours after being released from a Miami prison where he served four months for defying a subpoena from the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of the former president’s supporter.

“If they can come for me, if they can come for Donald Trump, be careful. They will come for you,” he said in a fiery speech, comparing his legal troubles to those faced by Mr. Trump, who earlier this year was convicted on 34 felony charges in his criminal hush money trial.

Also spotted on the floor of the convention: Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign chair, and Roger Stone, who were both convicted as part of the investigation into Russia’s meddling in that election. Trump pardoned both Manafort and Stone.

Beyond Mr. Vance’s primetime speech, the Republican Party focused on July 17 on a theme of American global strength.

In a particularly powerful moment, the relatives of service members killed during Mr. Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan took the stage, holding photographs of their loved ones.

Christy Shamblin, whose daughter-in-law Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee died in the attack, spoke of the six hours she said Trump spent with her family in Bedminster, New Jersey and “spoke to us in a way that made us feel understood.”

“Donald Trump carried the weight for a few hours with me. And for the first time since Nicole’s death I felt I wasn’t alone in my grief,” she said.

Herman Lopez, whose son, Marine Cpl. Hunter Lopez, was among those killed, read aloud the names of all 13 U.S. service members who died in the Aug. 26, 2021, attack.

Also featured were the parents of Omer Neutra, one of eight Americans still being held hostage in Gaza after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.

His parents, Ronen and Orna, said Mr. Trump called them after their son, a soldier in the Israeli army, was captured, and offered support. As they spoke, the crowd chanted “Bring them home!”

Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, is now one of Trump’s fiercest allies and defenders and among those short-listed to be Trump’s vice presidential pick.
| Photo Credit: AP

J.D. Vance appeared on the scene of American public life with his 2016 best-seller memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. President Barack Obama cited it while explaining the cultural and economic reasons that made the disruptive politics championed by Donald Trump appealing to the white working class. Mr. Vance, then 32, was a strong critic of Mr. Trump, who he said was unfit to be the President of the U.S. Two weeks shy of 40, Mr. Vance — now a U.S. Senator from Ohio — will be among the star speakers at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and could even become the running mate of Mr. Trump. Whether Mr. Trump chooses him or not, Mr. Vance has emerged as a frontrunner to inherit the former’s America First politics.

Mr. Vance’s book portrayed the crisis of the white working class from his personal vantage point, and in the years that followed, he presented himself as someone who overcame that crisis through faith and hard work. He was once an atheist but gradually moved towards faith and in 2019, he baptised and became a Catholic. He told an interviewer that he “spent a lot of his life buying into the lie that you had to be stupid to be a Christian.”

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Defining politics

Speaking at a conservative conference in Detroit, Michigan, on June 16, he called for defining politics in terms of what it stands for, not merely what it stands against. “We stand for an American nation built by American people, American workers,” he said. “We have to see the problem and find the solution. Make more of the stuff that we need in our own country. That is the solution. Twenty million people who have no business to be here, are here, because of Joe Biden. The solution is to deport each one of them.”

“America is not an idea as Democrats say. Seven generations of my family, from the Civil War to the 21st century are connected to this land. We are not just an idea, this is our home. That is the single principle at stake in this election.”

In an interview with Steve Bannon, a fellow traveller, during his Senate campaign in 2022, he said: ‘I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.’

As a strong votary of America First politics Mr. Vance is preferred by the nationalist base of the Republican Party. In a straw poll at the Turning Point convention in Detroit, 43% preferred him as Vice President on Mr. Trump’s ticket, which was three times the support for the next popular candidate.

From being a strong critic of Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance transformed himself into an ardent supporter and moved to the centre stage of U.S. politics as a highly visible and articulate lawmaker. “When Donald Trump was President, there was peace around the world. Now, there is a conflict in every corner of the world,” he told the Detroit gathering. Young, sharp and articulate, Mr. Vance presents himself as someone who is more structured, coherent and methodical than his leader.

Mr. Vance is married to Usha Chilukuri, his former Yale Law School classmate. “Like Mr. Obama, he is also a writer and a story teller,” a Democrat who served in the Obama administration said. “He’s a leader to watch.”