Former President Donald Trump has selected Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his pick to be vice president should he win in November.

“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 wrote on his Truth Social platform on Monday afternoon. “J.D. has had a very successful business career in Technology and Finance, and now, during the Campaign, 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.”

Shortly after Trump announced his pick, Vance was officially selected by delegates at the Republican National Convention to be the party’s nominee for vice president. He was approved by a voice vote without opposition.

Moments earlier, Vance entered the convention floor at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum to cheers, hugs and handshakes alongside his wife, Usha Vance, an attorney who he met while both attending Yale Law School. The two have three children together.

He was nominated by Ohio Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, who described Vance as “a man who loves America and will represent our people with moral courage, strength and honor.”

“JD is a living embodiment of the American Dream,” Husted said. “He came from humble beginnings and even as his life took him to places he might never have imagined, he never forgot where he came from. Ohio values are in his blood.”

In an interview with Fox News’ “Hannity” on Monday night, his first since becoming Trump's running mate, Vance said the call from Trump was "a moment I’ll never forget."

The Biden campaign immediately slammed the pick, labeling Vance as a the favored choice of billionaires and corporations and as a Trump loyalist who will “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,” as Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said on a press call on Monday afternoon.

“A clone of Trump on the issues,” President Joe Biden said at Maryland’s Joint Base Andrews before boarding Air Force One for a campaign trip to Las Vegas. “I don’t see any difference.”

On the press call, Reproductive Freedom for All president Mini Timmaraju, called Vance an “extreme anti-abortion politician” and O’Malley Dillon warned that Vance’s addition to the Republican ticket makes it “more clear than ever that our rights, our freedoms and our democracy are on the line.”

Vance, a Trump critic-turned-convert, has emerged as a leader on the Republican Party’s rightmost reaches and a favorite among some of the more radical figures in Trump’s world. Prior to winning his Senate race in 2022, Vance was a Marine and venture capitalist who wrote a bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” that garnered bipartisan praise for its depiction of his tumultuous upbringing in Middletown, Ohio, and path to Yale University Law School.

“I was a convert in 2019 to the cause of Trump's America First agenda,” Vance said in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington last week. “I was cognizant of the fact that, because I was a convert, Trump had not yet taken over the Republican Party, even in Washington, D.C., even in 2019 even though he was the president of the United States.”

“There were people who were aggressively pushing back against his influence, who were already planning a return to basically reimplementing the Wall Street Journal editorial page’s preferred positions in 2019. I think that's over now.”

In 2016, Vance notably called Trump an “idiot,” “noxious” and “reprehensible,” labeling himself as “a Never Trump guy” and telling a friend that Trump could be “America’s Hitler” as the then-businessman made his first run for president. Now, as Trump is just days away from receiving the Republican nomination for the first time, he has chosen the man who has become one of his most loyal supporters in Washington as his running mate.

“I always wish his memory was as bad as Joe Biden's, because he would forget about what I said about him in 2016,” Vance said in his speech last week.

Republicans were quick to praise Trump’s pick, with House Speaker Mike Johnson saying in a statement that Vance “possesses a profound understanding of the anxieties of working families and has both the lived experience and the policy expertise to help President Trump deliver a government worthy of the people it is supposed to serve.” New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, a member of House leadership and a vice presidential contender herself, said Trump “made a strong VP choice” and called Vance “a strong America First leader and proven conservative.”

Trump “is the strongest leader to enter the political arena in modern American history! Today he selected [Vance] as his running mate, whose small town roots and service to [the] country make him a powerful voice for the America First Agenda,” North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who Trump listed as a finalist for the vice presidential slot, wrote on social media. “I look forward to campaigning for the Trump-Vance ticket to Make America Great Again!”

Billionaire Elon Musk, who endorsed Trump after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania over the weekend, wrote on social media that a Trump-Vance ticket “resounds with victory.”

“Trump’s VP pick is great news for the wealthiest Americans and lousy news for everyone else. Billionaires on Wall Street and Silicon Valley are cheering, but there is no joy for working people,” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said on the Biden campaign press call.

As Vance has embraced Trump and his ideology, Trump has returned the favor in kind. In a Fox News radio interview last week, Trump described the 39-year-old Vance as looking like a “young Abraham Lincoln.”

If elected, Vance would be the youngest vice president since Richard Nixon, who was just a few months younger when he took office in 1953 as part of the Eisenhower administration. Vance has three children with his wife, Usha Vance, who he met at Yale and who works as a corporate litigator. She previously clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and for now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he served on a lower court.

“This guy turned out to be an absolute star. He is a young star and he's a great senator and a real fighter, J.D. Vance,” Trump said at a March rally in Ohio. 

Vance has emerged as one of Trump’s staunchest defenders since arriving in Washington. He made an appearance outside Trump’s criminal hush-money trial earlier this year and authored an op-ed slamming the district attorney and the judge in the case. On Saturday, just two hours after Trump had been shot at by a would-be assassin, Vance blamed the violence on Biden’s campaign. Law enforcement have still not publicly identified a motive for the gunman, a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man who was shot and killed by Secret Service after opening fire.

“Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance wrote on social media. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.”

Vance is also the favored pick of Charlie Kirk, the influential leader of the pro-Trump youth organization Turning Point USA known for antisemitic, anti-immigrant and otherwise racist rhetoric. Kirk, who is close with Trump and whose organization is closely aligned with the Trump campaign, is slated to speak at the Republican National Convention on Monday night.

“I talked to the president over the weekend encouraging him to choose J.D. Vance,” Kirk said on his streaming show last week. “He's the only vice president of the finalists who's actually MAGA populist nationalist, not a more corporate, chamber of commerce mold.”

Vance himself has pitched himself as an economic nationalist in favor of producing more domestically and decreasing reliance on foreign trade, vehemently anti-immigrant, and an opponent of U.S. funding for Ukraine’s war against Russian invaders.

“The thing on immigration is that no one can avoid that it has made our society poorer, less safe, less prosperous and less advanced,” Vance said in his speech at the National Conservatism Conference last week.

The Ohio senator, who turns 40 in August, will now be pitted against Vice President Kamala Harris as both junior partners will attempt to make the case to the American people that they are fit to assume the presidency if the 78-year-old Trump or the 81-year-old Biden can no longer serve. Both campaigns have agreed to a CBS News debate later this summer.

“The VP will take it to JD Vance,” Warren said on the Biden campaign press call on Monday. “She knows what she's talking about, and she doesn't give an inch, and she has the better end of the argument.”

It is also likely the debate over abortion access will play a role in their rivalry, as the Trump campaign attempts to balance anti-abortion policies with winning over swing voters and as Harris serves as Biden’s point person in the fight to restore the protections once granted by Roe v. Wade. For his part, Vance previously voiced support for abortion bans without exceptions for rape or incest, favored a national abortion ban and, as he ran for office in 2022, compared abortion to slavery.

More recently, Vance has said he supports the Supreme Court decision to continue to allow access to mifepristone, the most widely-used medication for abortions, and said he agreed with Trump that abortion policy should be left up to the states. But he has also repeatedly supported some of the most restrictive state abortion bans and advocated for a national 15-week abortion ban as recently as last November.

On his Senate campaign website, Vance has a section titled “End Abortion,” in which he writes he is “100 percent pro-life” and that he believes “that abortion has turned our society into a place where we see children as an inconvenience to be thrown away rather than a blessing to be nurtured.” 

“J.D. Vance is an exceptional selection as President Trump’s running mate,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the prominent antiabortion organization Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement. “During his time in the Senate, he has earned an A+ on our Scorecard. With approximately 750,000 babies in states like California and New York still lacking basic protections, we need champions whose boldness will not waver.”