Vance adjusts to his new role as Trump’s running mate, aboard a plane with his name on it
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Ohio Republican Senator J.D. Vance campaigning at Middletown High School, Ohio, on July 22.
PHOTO: EPA-EFE
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United States Senator J.D. Vance was unsure where to stand or where to put his hands.
Sporting a fresh haircut and a closely tailored blue suit on his first day of solo campaigning as the Republican vice-presidential nominee,
His unease was understandable – the utilitarian design of airplane seating does not exactly facilitate group discussion – but also revealing.
Where a more seasoned politician may have simply leaned against a seat, Mr Vance in his initial confusion hinted at the inexperience of a 39-year-old embarking on his maiden national campaign just one year after being sworn in to his first elected office.
When a flight attendant approached and urged everyone to fasten their seatbelts before landing, Mr Vance plopped into an empty seat in the press cabin and quickly buckled up – as if he were just another passenger, and not the only one inside the plane with his name on the outside of it.
The in-flight candidate is, in many ways, a useful metaphor for the moment: a gifted yet fledgling political talent – whose calling card is his connection to the working class – adjusting to a new life with his own chartered Boeing 737 as the newly minted member of a Republican ticket headed by a three-time presidential contender.
He had arrived in Milwaukee last week for the Republican National Convention not knowing if he would be picked as Donald Trump’s running mate, and he left town at the end of it on his own chartered jet.
“When President Trump asked me to be his running mate, I really had no idea what was coming,” Mr Vance said during his speech in Ohio. “I thought he might ask me, but I thought he might ask somebody else – there were a lot of good guys running.”
As a first-time candidate in 2016, Trump and his campaign did not reserve a plane for the vice-presidential nominee, Mr Mike Pence. Instead, that task of lining up air travel fell to the team surrounding the then governor of Indiana. Trump was irate when he found out the Pence team had rented a plane, telling one aide that he preferred to use his own private jets.
Eight years later, Trump’s third campaign is a bit more professional. His 2024 operation started raising money online weeks ago for the running mate’s plane, which they refer to as Trump Force Two. In 2016, reporters referred to the Republican fleet as Hair Force One and Hair Force Two.
The red and blue Trump-Vance logo is splashed across the front of the plane, straddling the first dozen windows behind the cockpit. The tail is wrapped with names of dozens of contributors who helped underwrite the cost of the charter: Edward M. from Georgia, Victoria W. from Alabama, Barbara M. from Michigan...
Inside the jet, Trump campaign propaganda is inescapable. If you were curious what the price of petrol was during Trump’s last year in office, or how much the gross domestic product grew during that time, you can find the answers plastered on the walls above the windows along the 17 rows of the plane. Each overhead bin is wrapped with broad policy goals, in Trump-trademark all-caps: “Free, honest and lawful elections” and “Secure borders and reclaim national sovereignty”.
To be sure, the Trump campaign widely viewed Mr Vance’s first day on the trail
He drew large crowds in Middletown, Ohio, and in Radford, Virginia, where he made his case for supporting the Trump campaign by leveraging folksy tales about his hardscrabble upbringing. And he easily sparred with reporters on his plane, showing off his quick wit and combative instinct when asked about criticism from Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat, that Mr Vance has overstated his blue-collar roots.
“It’s very weird,” Mr Vance shot back, “to have a guy whose first job was at his dad’s law firm and who inherited the governorship from his father criticise my origin story.”
But there were plenty of signs of his inexperience, too.
He spoke mostly without a teleprompter at the two rallies, but some of his lines did not quite land. He made a strained joke about how Democrats may attack him as racist because he enjoyed Diet Mountain Dew.
In Ohio, he either ignored or was unaware of one headline-generating moment at his rally. State senator George Lang, speaking shortly before Mr Vance took the stage, told the crowd “it’s going to take a civil war to save the country” if Republicans fail to win the White House in November. Mr Lang issued a statement after the rally saying he regretted the “divisive remarks”.
On his plane, Mr Vance explained to reporters that his anti-abortion positions would take a back seat to Trump as the party’s presidential nominee. But on the campaign trail, he said it was fair game to make Vice-President Kamala Harris answer for all of the Biden administration’s policies.
“There is simply no way that you can sit here and say the policies of Joe Biden have worked, which is to say that we’ve got to kick Kamala Harris out of the Oval Office,” Mr Vance said in Radford. “Don’t give her a chance to run away from the Biden record – the Biden record is the Kamala Harris record.”
As the sun set over the Appalachian Mountains and Mr Vance climbed up the stairs for his return flight home to Ohio, he paused when a reporter on the runway shouted a question asking how he had enjoyed his first day on the trail.
“It was fun,” he shouted back.
Reporters, mostly stunned that he had stopped to answer, did not immediately offer a follow-up question. So Mr Vance ducked back into his plane. NYTIMES
