The chairman of the Democratic National Committee slammed Sen. JD Vance on Monday shortly after former President Donald Trump tapped the Ohio Republican as his 2024 running mate — insisting that Vance would help the GOP nominee “undermine our democracy.”
“This is the most consequential election of our lifetimes, and with Donald Trump’s decision today to add J.D. Vance to the Republican ticket, the stakes of this election just got even higher,” DNC Chair Jaime Harrison said in a statement.
“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,” he added, referencing the Heritage Foundation think tank plan to implement conservative policies in a potential second Trump administration – which the former president has disavowed.
“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,” Harrison continued.
“Let’s be clear: A Trump-Vance ticket would undermine our democracy, our freedoms, and our future,” he added. “There is so much on the line, and it’s more important than ever that we reelect President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris this November.”
Trump, 78, announced his selection of Vance, 39, shortly before he was formally named the GOP’s 2024 nominee for president at the party’s convention in Milwaukee on Monday.
“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” Trump announced on Truth Social.
The “Hillbilly Elegy” author will be “strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond,” according to Trump.
The DNC’s criticism of Vance follows a stinging statement released by the Biden campaign that charged that the senator is better equipped to “enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda.”
“[V]ance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people,” Biden-Harris 2024 Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement.
Vance, a first-term senator, would be the second-youngest vice president to ever assume office if Trump were to win in November.