Donald Trump has a new running mate. The former president announced on Monday that he has selected first-term Ohio senator J.D. Vance to campaign for vice president alongside him in 2024.
It’s a stunning turnaround for Vance, because for a large portion of his public life, he was one of Trump’s biggest critics. He first rose to national prominence with his June 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy about his unstable upbringing in Appalachia, his service in the military, and his eventual education at Ohio State University and Yale Law School.
The book took on new meaning and potency after Trump’s victory in the 2016 election as it was said to help decode the “angry white voters” of the South and Midwest, and the New York Times called it one of the best books “to help understand Trump’s win.” Vance, though, openly criticized Trump in those years, calling him “unfit for the nation’s highest office.” In 2021, though, when he ran for Senate, he changed his mind, started praising Trump, got his endorsement, and won.
Now that he’s officially slated as Trump’s number two, everyone in the media will start a deep dive into his policies and how they could impact everything from the economy to legislation on gun violence to health care. At Glamour we are especially interested in how Vance’s political views could affect American women, especially on one of the key issues they will be voting on in this election: reproductive rights.
The verdict? Well, at least he’s not as radical as Trump’s former VP, Mike Pence. Though, to be fair, it would be extremely hard for him to be worse (Republicans, don’t call my bluff here).
After all, Mr. “I won’t get dinner with a woman colleague” had some pretty extremist policies on things that impact American women every day, especially reproductive rights. Pence is extremely anti-choice, and has said he thinks those who agree with him “must not rest” until abortion is banned nationwide and fetal personhood is established.
But despite being not quite as out-there as Pence, Vance’s stated policy objectives on abortion are still regressive. According to The New York Times, he supports exceptions but otherwise his website during his Senate campaign just read “ban abortion.” That’s…unclear! He also campaigned against the constitutional amendment in Ohio that put abortion rights into state law, calling its passage a “gut punch.”
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