Donald Trump has finally made his VP pick for 2024, and you can tell who it is by every JD Vance meme crossing your timeline. The 39-year-old Senator will be the youngest Vice President since the days of Richard Nixon if Trump wins the election in November, plus the first with a full beard in over 150 years.
His relative youth and facial hair are two of the least interesting details about this man, however. You'll learn far more fascinating facts about Vance by following the memes.
Any Trump vice presidential pick would be a character, and Vance is no exception. The detail fueling the most jokes on social media is probably the bit about how he was once a "Never Trump" Republican, vowing never to support the controversial figure before 2016.
He backed up this position by liking several tweets that were highly critical of the former president, including one that suggested Vance for Hillary Clinton's vice president pick. In his tweets, which are now deleted, he famously called Trump "America's Hitler" and wrote a piece for The Atlantic titled "Opioid of the Masses" in which he referred to the former president as "cultural heroin."
Many of the JD Vance memes are focused on how funny it is that Vance did a whole 180 on how he feels about Trump, while many others poke fun at the book he published in 2016 that helped him make that turn.
Vance released his memoir Hillbilly Elegy in June 2016, and the book's popularity skyrocketed his name into recognition territory. It painted the VP pick as a child of a poor, working-class family in Rust Belt Ohio, though some from the area Vance spoke of refute the claim that it's a place of impoverished hillbillies. One tweet characterizes his hometown as a suburb, and others have recommended texts they feel better represent rural Ohio.
An entire other book was published to better represent the realities of the region, titled Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy.
Regardless of accuracy, Vance's memoir granted him a reputation as someone who understands Trump's base. Thus began his transformation into such a strong supporter that he ended up as the man's running mate.
Before he was elected to his Senate seat, Vance said "I regret being wrong about the guy" about Trump and rode that support from the former president's fans right into power.
He went on to reject any association with liberals like Hillary Clinton and adopted a set of highly conservative positions that are also fueling many a JD Vance meme, including his opposition to no-fault divorce and his desire to ban all pornography. He also differs from former Vice President Mike Pence on the issues of the limits of vice presidential power when it comes time to certify election results.
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