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Who is JD Vance? Things to Know about Donald Trump's Pick for Vice President

Trump's pick for Vice President, US Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) arrives on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 15, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Getty Images/AFP)
Trump's pick for Vice President, US Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) arrives on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 15, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Getty Images/AFP)
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Who is JD Vance? Things to Know about Donald Trump's Pick for Vice President

Trump's pick for Vice President, US Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) arrives on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 15, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Getty Images/AFP)
Trump's pick for Vice President, US Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) arrives on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 15, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Getty Images/AFP)

Former President Donald Trump on Monday chose US Sen. JD Vance of Ohio to be his running mate as he looks to return to the White House.

Here are some things to know about Vance, a 39-year-old Republican now in his first term in the Senate:

Vance rose to prominence with his memoir

Vance was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio. He joined the Marines and served in Iraq, and later earned degrees from Ohio State University and Yale Law School. He also worked as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.

Vance made a name for himself with his memoir, the 2016 bestseller "Hillbilly Elegy," which was published as Trump was first running for president. The book earned Vance a reputation as someone who could help explain the maverick New York businessman’s appeal in middle America, especially among the working class, rural white voters who helped Trump win the presidency.

"Hillbilly Elegy" also introduced Vance to the Trump family. Donald Trump Jr. loved the book and knew of Vance when he went to launch his political career. The two hit it off and have remained friends.

He was first elected to public office in 2022

After Donald Trump won the 2016 election, Vance returned to his native Ohio and set up an anti-opioid charity. He also took to the lecture circuit and was a favored guest at Republican Lincoln Day dinners where his personal story — including the hardship Vance endured because of his mother’s drug addiction — resonated.

Vance's appearances were opportunities to sell his ideas for fixing the country and helped lay the groundwork for entering politics in 2021, when he sought the Senate seat vacated by Republican Rob Portman, who retired.

Trump endorsed Vance. Vance went on to win a crowded Republican primary and the general election.

He and Trump have personal chemistry

Personal relationships are extremely important to the former president and he and Vance have developed a strong rapport over years, speaking on the phone regularly.

Trump has also complimented Vance’s beard, saying he "looks like a young Abraham Lincoln."

Vance went from never-Trumper to fierce ally

Vance was a "never Trump" Republican in 2016. He called Trump "dangerous" and "unfit" for office. Vance, whose wife, lawyer Usha Chilukuri Vance, is Indian American and the mother of their three children, also criticized Trump’s racist rhetoric, saying he could be "America’s Hitler."

But by the time Vance met Trump in 2021, he had reversed his opinion, citing Trump’s accomplishments as president. Both men downplayed Vance's past scathing criticism.

Once elected, Vance became a fierce Trump ally on Capitol Hill, unceasingly defending Trump’s policies and behavior.

He is a leading conservative voice

Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, called Vance a leading voice for the conservative movement, on key issues including a shift away from interventionist foreign policy, free market economics and "American culture writ large."

Democrats call him an extremist, citing provocative positions Vance has taken but sometimes later amended. Vance signaled support for a national 15-week abortion ban during his Senate run, for instance, then softened that stance once Ohio voters overwhelmingly backed a 2023 abortion rights amendment.

Vance has adopted Trump's rhetoric about Jan. 6

On the 2020 election, he said he wouldn't have certified the results immediately if he had been vice president and said Trump had "a very legitimate grievance." He has put conditions on honoring the results of the 2024 election that echo Trump's. A litany of government and outside investigations have not found any election fraud that could have swung the outcome of Trump's 2020 loss to Democratic President Joe Biden.

In the Senate, Vance sometimes embraces bipartisanship. He and Democratic Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown co-sponsored a railway safety bill following a fiery train derailment in the Ohio village of East Palestine. He's sponsored legislation extending and increasing funding for Great Lakes restoration, and supported bipartisan legislation boosting workers and families.

Vance can articulate Trump's vision

People familiar with the vice presidential vetting process said Vance would bring to the GOP ticket debating skills and the ability to articulate Trump’s vision.

Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative activist group Turning Point USA, said Vance compellingly articulates the America First world view and could help Trump in states he closely lost in 2020, such as Michigan and Wisconsin, that share Ohio’s values, demographics and economy.

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Released Palestinians Describe Worsening Abuses in Israeli Prisons

Palestinian boxer Muazzaz Abayat, 37, holds his 2-month-old son Mohammed and daughter Mira, 5, at home in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Wednesday, July 17, 2024, days after his release from Israeli prison, frail, disoriented and with no initial memory of his family. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
Palestinian boxer Muazzaz Abayat, 37, holds his 2-month-old son Mohammed and daughter Mira, 5, at home in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Wednesday, July 17, 2024, days after his release from Israeli prison, frail, disoriented and with no initial memory of his family. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
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Released Palestinians Describe Worsening Abuses in Israeli Prisons

Palestinian boxer Muazzaz Abayat, 37, holds his 2-month-old son Mohammed and daughter Mira, 5, at home in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Wednesday, July 17, 2024, days after his release from Israeli prison, frail, disoriented and with no initial memory of his family. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
Palestinian boxer Muazzaz Abayat, 37, holds his 2-month-old son Mohammed and daughter Mira, 5, at home in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Wednesday, July 17, 2024, days after his release from Israeli prison, frail, disoriented and with no initial memory of his family. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

Frequent beatings, overcrowding, withholding of basic rations. Released Palestinians have described to The Associated Press worsening abuses in Israeli prisons crammed with thousands detained since the war in Gaza began 10 months ago.

Israeli officials have acknowledged that they have made conditions harsher for Palestinians in prisons, with hard-line National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir boasting that prisons will no longer be “summer camps” under his watch.

Four released Palestinians told the AP that treatment had dramatically worsened in prisons run by the ministry since the Oct. 7 attacks that triggered the latest war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Some emerged from months of captivity emaciated and emotionally scarred.

A fifth prisoner, Muazzaz Abayat, was too weakened to detail his experience soon after his release in July following six months at southern Israel’s Naqab prison. Frail-looking and unable to focus, he could only muster the strength to speak for several minutes, saying he was regularly beaten.

Now at home outside Bethlehem, the 37-year-old can hardly leave his armchair.

“At night, he hallucinates and stands in the middle of the house, in shock or remembering the torment and pain he went through,” said his cousin, Aya Abayat. Like many of the detained, he was put under administrative detention, a procedure that allows Israel to detain people indefinitely without charge.

The AP cannot independently verify the accounts of the prisoners. But they described similar conditions, even though they were held separately. While Abayat was only able to speak briefly, the other four spoke to the AP at length, and one requested anonymity for fear of being rearrested. Their accounts match reports from human rights groups that have documented alleged abuse in Israeli detention facilities.

Alarm among rights groups over abuses of Palestinian prisoners has mainly focused on military facilities, particularly Sde Teiman, a desert base where Israeli military police have arrested 10 soldiers on suspicion of sodomizing a Palestinian detainee. The detention facility at the base has held most of the Palestinians seized in raids in the Gaza Strip since the war began.

The soldiers, five of whom have since been released, deny the sodomy allegation. Their defense lawyer has said that they used force to defend themselves against a detainee who attacked them during a search, but did not sexually abuse him.

The Israeli army says 36 Palestinian prisoners have died in military-run detention centers since October. It said some of them had “previous illnesses or injuries caused to them as a result of the ongoing hostilities,” without elaborating further.

According to autopsy reports for five of the detainees, two bore signs of physical trauma such as broken ribs, while the death of a third “could have been avoided if there had been greater care for his medical needs.” The reports were provided to the AP by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, an Israeli rights organization whose doctors observed the autopsies.

Facing calls to shut down the Sde Teiman facility, the military has been transferring hundreds of Palestinians from the base to the prisons run by Ben Gvir’s ministry.

But according to Abayat and the others who spoke to the AP, conditions in those facilities are traumatic as well.

Munthir Amira, a West Bank political activist who was held in Ofer Prison, said guards regularly beat detainees for punishment or often for no reason at all.

He said he and 12 others shared a cell with only six beds and a few thin blankets, freezing during the winter months. When prisoners had to go to the bathroom, they were handcuffed and bent over, and they were let outside for only 15 minutes twice a week, he said. Amira was held in administrative detention, apparently over his Facebook posts critical of Israel.

He said he lost 33 kilograms (72 pounds) during his three months in detention because of minimal food.

The treatment drove some to the edge: Amira recounted a day when he and his cellmates watched through their cell window as another inmate tried to kill himself by jumping off a high fence. He said they banged on their door to get help. Instead, he said, soldiers with two large dogs entered their cell, bound their hands, lined them up in the corridor and beat them, including on their genitals.

He said that when he was first arrested in December, guards ordered him to strip naked and spread his legs, then beat him into submission when he refused. During the ensuing examination, one guard prodded his genitalia with a metal detector, he said.

The National Security Ministry said in a statement to the AP that it was not aware of the claims of abuse from the five released men. It said it follows “all basic rights required” for prisoners, and that detainees can file complaints that will be “fully examined.”

But it said it has intentionally “reduced conditions” for Palestinian detainees “to the minimum required by law” since Oct. 7. The purpose, it said, “is to deter ... terror activities.”

Since the war began, the Palestinian prison population has nearly doubled to almost 10,000, including detainees from Gaza and several thousand people seized from the West Bank and east Jerusalem, according to HaMoked, an Israeli rights group that gathers figures from prison authorities.

Those detained include alleged militants seized in raids in the West Bank and Palestinians suspected in attacks on soldiers or settlers. But others also have apparently been detained for social media posts critical of Israel or past activism, according to a report from the United Nations human rights office.

All four former detainees who spoke at length said hunger was perhaps their greatest challenge.

Breakfast was 250 grams (9 ounces) of yogurt and a single tomato or pepper shared among five people, said Omar Assaf, a Ramallah-based retired Arabic language professor, also held at Ofer. He, too, said he was interrogated over his social media posts.

For lunch and dinner, he said, each person received two-thirds of a cup of rice and a bowl of soup shared with others.

“You didn’t see the color of fruit ... not a piece of meat,” he said.

Harsher conditions were imposed immediately after Oct. 7, according to Mohamed al-Salhi, who at the time was serving a 23-year sentence in a Jerusalem prison for forming an armed group.

Days after the attack, he said, guards stripped his cell of everything, including radios, televisions and clothing. Eventually, the number of inmates in the cell grew from a half-dozen to 14, and curtains in the communal showers were removed, leaving them to wash exposed, he said. Al-Salhi was released in June after completing his sentence.

A half-dozen Palestinian families gathered outside Ofer one day earlier this month to await their relatives’ release. As the gate slid open, several emaciated-looking men, with unkempt hair and rough beards, walked out before dropping to the ground to pray.

Mutasim Swalim embraced his father. He said he spent a year in prison over a Facebook post.

“The taste of freedom is very nice,” he said.

Others declined to speak.

“I just spent two months in prison,” one said as he staggered by. “I don’t want to go back.”