The Biden campaign says former president Donald Trump’s decision to select Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate makes it “more clear than ever that our rights, our freedoms, and our democracy are on the line this November.”
The fearmongering rhetoric comes just two days after Trump survived an attempted assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pa.
Trump announced his VP pick on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, selecting Vance from a shortlist that reportedly included North Dakota governor Doug Burgum and Florida Senator Marco Rubio.
Vance, an Ohio-based venture capitalist and the author of the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, entered politics less than two years ago when he bested then-Congressman Tim Ryan to serve as Ohio’s junior senator.
Vance was able to beat out a crowded GOP primary field in the race thanks to an endorsement from Trump, despite having once been a staunch critic of the former president. The 39-year-old Marine Corps veteran has since turned into one of the former president’s most loyal supporters.
“Clearly, Vance won Trump’s veepstakes by passing his MAGA litmus test with flying colors,” Biden-Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told reporters on Monday. “Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running mate because he will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6th – bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law, and certainly no matter the harm to the American people.”
O’Malley said Vance has “wholeheartedly endorsed” the Heritage Project’s Project 2025 agenda and he is “proudly anti-choice and wants to take women back decades.”
The campaign hit Vance for a comment he made in 2021 about on this issue of exceptions to abortion bans for rape and incest survivors, where he said “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society,” Vance said at the time.
“The question to me is really about the baby,” he added. “We want women to have opportunities, we want women to have choices, but, above all, we want women and young boys in the womb to have a right to life.”
However, one year later, Vance said, “I’ve always believed in reasonable exceptions.”
Trump, for his part, has veered more moderate on the issue of abortion this cycle, advocating for the issue to be handled by the states.
The RNC platform committee voted last week to adopt a new Republican Party platform that will move the GOP away from the national abortion ban it formerly championed and instead call for the issue to be handled by the states.
Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All, told reporters on the Biden campaign press call that Vance is “just as committed to banning abortion nationwide as Donald Trump himself,” despite Trump being in favor of states handling the issue.
“And today’s choice guarantees that a Trump-Vance administration will jeopardize reproductive freedom in all 50 states,” she claimed. “This isn’t an abstract idea. We know they have no plans to stop at overturning Roe.”
She cited Vance’s A-plus rating from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and his vote against the Right to IVF Act, though he signed onto a letter with other Senate Republicans indicating support for continued nationwide access to IVF.
Meanwhile, the Biden campaign also seized on Vance’s previous comments in an old blog post that Social Security and Medicare represent “roadblocks” to any kind of real “fiscal sanity.” Trump signaled in March that he was open to making cuts to the programs, after having opposed making any changes to the programs during the GOP primary.
“He’s railed against the Affordable Care Act and its protections for millions of Americans with preexisting conditions, literally publishing an op-ed in the New York Times opposing it,” O’Malley Dillon added.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), speaking as a member of the campaign’s national advisory board, told reporters that Trump’s pick is “great news for the wealthiest Americans and lousy news for everyone else.”
Biden himself took a similar approach, writing in a post on X: “Here’s the deal about J.D. Vance. He talks a big game about working people. But now, he and Trump want to raise taxes on middle-class families while pushing more tax cuts for the rich.”
Meanwhile, DNC committee chairman Jaime Harrison said Trump’s decision to pick Vance as his running mate means the “stakes of this election just got even higher.”
“J.D. Vance embodies MAGA – with an out-of-touch extreme agenda and plans to help Trump force his Project 2025 agenda on the American people,” Harrison said in a statement. “Vance has championed and enabled Trump’s worst policies for years – from a national abortion ban, to whitewashing January 6, to railing against Social Security and Medicare. Let’s be clear: A Trump-Vance ticket would undermine our democracy, our freedoms, and our future.”