While the theme of the penultimate night of the 2024 Republican National Convention was devoted to national security and foreign policy — dubbed “Make America Strong Once Again” in the vein of Donald Trump’s now-infamous slogan — but the final part of the night was all about one man: JD Vance, who formally accepted the Republican nomination for vice president.
“My fellow Americans, my name is JD Vance from the great state of Ohio,” Vance said at the top of his speech, met with chants of “O-H-I-O.”
“We’ve got to chill with the Ohio love, we’ve got to win Michigan too,” he quipped, referencing the bitter, largely football-inspired rivalry between the two Rust Belt states.
Introduced by his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, and Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son who played a pivotal role in his selection of the junior Ohio senator, Vance took the stage in Milwaukee late Wednesday night to deliver his first major speech as the vice presidential nominee of the Republican Party — and used the opportunity to tell his story to the gathered GOP delegates and officials.
Vance sought to blame President Joe Biden, who he repeatedly referred to as “a career politician,” for some of the ills that cost jobs in communities in like the one in Ohio where he grew up — a message that Republicans will hope to sell to key battleground Rust Belt states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that Trump will need to swing back to his column in order to win another term in the White House.
His hometown of Middletown, Ohio, he said, was “cast aside” and forgotten by Washington politicians.
“When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good American manufacturing jobs to Mexico,” Vance said. “When I was a sophomore in high school, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden gave China a sweetheart trade deal that destroyed even more good middle-class jobs.”
“And when I was a senior in high school, Joe Biden supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq,” said Vance, a Marine Corps combat correspondent who deployed to the country in 2005. (Trump is on record supporting the Iraq War.)
“And At each step of the way, in small towns like mine in Ohio, or next door in Pennsylvania, or in Michigan, and other states all across our country, jobs were sent overseas and children were sent to war,” Vance said in a clear appeal to those must-win swing states, met with chants from the crowd of “Joe must go!”
“I agree,” he replied.
“And somehow, a real estate developer from New York City was right on all of these issues, while Joe Biden was wrong,” Vance said of Trump — not his first glowing comment about the man at the top of the Republican ticket, and far from the last.
"From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the great recession, from open borders to stagnating wages, the people who govern this country have failed and failed again,” Vance added. “That is, of course, until a guy named Donald J. Trump came along."
“This moment is not about me, it’s about all of us,” he later said. “It’s about the auto worker in Michigan, wondering why out of touch politicians are destroying your jobs. It’s about the factory worker in Wisconsin who makes things with their hands and is proud of American craftsmanship. It’s about the energy worker in Pennsylvania and Ohio who doesn’t understand why Joe Biden buys energy from tinpot dictators across the world when he can buy it from right here in this country.”
“Our movement is about single moms like mine, who struggled with money and addiction but never gave up,” he said, before indicating his mom, sitting next to House Speaker Mike Johnson. "And I am proud to say that tonight my mom is here, 10 years clean and sober. I love you, mom."
Noting her official decade of sobriety will be marked in Jan. 2025, Vance said that, “if President Trump is okay with it, let’s have the celebration in the White House.”
Touching on a number of hot-button issues in his introductory speech, from immigration — baselessly accusing Democrats of having “flooded this country with millions of illegal aliens” — to housing prices, from manufacturing to energy independence, he added: “We will, in short, Make America Great Again.”
“Mr. President, I will never take for granted the trust you put in me, and what an honor it is to help achieve the extraordinary vision that you have for this country,” he said to Trump. “No I pledge to every American, no matter the party, I will give you everything I have to serve you and to make this country a place where every dream you have for yourself, your family and your country will be possible once again.”
“And I will be a vice president who never forgets where I came from,” he pledged.
Here are some takeaways from the third day of the Republican National Convention:
On the same day he was released from prison, former Trump White House trade adviser Peter Navarro accused Democrats in the federal government of pursuing political prosecutions targeting Republicans and had a chilling message for the crowd: “You may be thinking this couldn’t happen to you. Make no mistake, they’re already coming for you.”
Navarro just completed a four-month sentence after being convicted of two counts of criminal contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from a House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters and the events that led up to it.
He received a long standing ovation amid chants of “Fight! Fight! Fight”, echoing Trump's comments after the attempt on his life over the weekend.
“This morning, I did walk out of a federal prison in Miami,” he said, charging: “Joe Biden and his department of injustice put me there.
“I’ve got a very simple message for you: If they can come for me, if they can come for Donald Trump, be careful, they will come for you.”
Navarro said if the GOP does not control all three branches of the government, Democrats will put more Republicans in prison and “control the rest of us.”
The House Jan. 6 committee sought documents and testimony from Navarro, who they believed had information relevant to their investigation.
The former Trump aide falsely claimed in his speech that the panel “demanded I break the law,” adding, “I refused.”
Navarro claimed he could not cooperate in the investigation because Trump had invoked executive privilege. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, however, barred Navarro’s lawyers from making that argument at his trial because Navarro failed to show Trump ever invoked it.
Also spotted on the convention floor on Wednesday: Paul Manafort, one of Trump's 2016 campaign managers who was sentenced to more than 7 years in prison after being convicted of several financial crimes as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump pardoned Manafort in 2020.
A number of ex-Trump administration officials took the stage in Milwaukee on Wednesday night, including familiar faces like Kellyanne Conway, urging Americans to put their old boss back into power.
Conway, a longtime GOP pollster who became the first woman to helm a successful presidential campaign, praised her old boss as someone who elevates women in the workplace in her speech.
“He had elevated women in New York real estate decades before, when few people would,” Conway said, recalling her time on the 2016 campaign and serving in Trump’s first administration. “I was in an early senior staff meeting in the White House, and as I glanced around the table, something caught my eye. In that meeting were Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mercedes Schlapp, Brooke Rollins, Ivanka Trump and me. I soon realized that among us, we have 19 children at the time, ages two through 16.”
“Show me a C-suite in America where five working moms of 19 young children could have the highest rank in the company and work alongside the president,” Conway said.
Minutes later, as Trump walked onto the convention floor in Milwaukee, he was accompanied by James Brown’s “It's A Man's Man's Man's World.”
Former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Tom Homan promised that a second Trump administration will follow through on the former president’s pledges to launch mass deportation operations and to designate cartels as terrorist organizations in order to wipe them "off the face of the Earth."
Homan, who served as acting ICE director under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, played a key role in implementing the policy of separating migrant children from their parents while in federal custody during Trump’s first term. Trump has promised multiple times in recent weeks that Homan would return if he is reelected.
“Here's what you need to know: this isn't mismanagement. This isn’t incompetence. This is by design. And there's a choice. This is national suicide,” said Homan of the Biden administration’s border policies. “As a guy who spent 34 years deporting illegal aliens, I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden's released in our country in violation of federal law: You better start packing now.”
Dozens of Republican National Convention delegates waved signs that read “Mass Deportations Now” as Homan spoke.
“I’ve got another message, another message to the criminal cartels in Mexico… and that's when President Trump is back in office, he's going to designate you a terrorist organization. He’s going to wipe you off the face of the Earth,” Homan said, before yelling “You’re done. You’re done.”
Ric Grenell, an acting director of national intelligence under Donald Trump and the nation's first openly gay person to hold a Cabinet-level role, spoke of an America that was stronger on the international stage under Trump than it had been previously.
"Republicans believed America's duty was to spread democracy by military force. We were misled about weapons of mass destruction," Grenell said of foreign policy from 2001 to 2008, when he was the spokesperson to four U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations — including during the post-Sept. 11, 2001, War on Terror and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
"There was only one man with the strength to call out the lies and failures of both Democrats and Republicans: Donald Trump," Grenell said, asserting that Russia, Iran, China and all of America's enemies "stand in fear and awe" of Trump's return to the White House.
"Donald Trump doesn't care if you're gay or straight; Black, brown or white, or what gender you are," Grenell said. "He knows that we are all Americans, and that it's time to put America first."
It may be worth noting that Trump's platform doesn't care about a person's race, gender or sexual orientation, except in cases where race or gender may be discussed in schools, or if a transgender student is considering participating in athletics. His Agenda47 platform also considers cutting "left-wing gender programs" from the American military, cutting federal funding for healthcare facilities that offer all manner of gender-affirming medical care, which is a field that includes more than care for only transgender people.
Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, a former White House doctor, slammed Vice President Kamala Harris in his Republican National Convention speech on Wednesday night, saying she “is as unfit in character as Joe Biden is in body and mind.”
Jackson, the former White House physician to Barack Obama and Donald Trump, focused his remarks on questions about Biden’s age and ability to continue doing the job -- questions Democrats have debated for weeks.
“We would not be in this situation were it not for Joe Biden's staff and his family. They should have compassion for him and prioritize his health and our country's security, but they have put their own interest above America's interest,” Jackson said. “Perhaps the greatest blame lies with his own vice president, Kamala Harris. She has not been truthful with us. She has lied to us. She has put party above country.”
Not to be outdone, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz not only took aim at Biden and Harris, but also poked fun at the expense of New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, who was found guilty at his federal corruption and bribery trial earlier this week.
He said Republicans are on a “mission to rescue and save this country” while taking jabs at President Joe Biden’s age and post-debate woes.
“They can run Biden from the nursing home, [vice president Kamala] Harris, George Clooney, Robert De Niro, whoever they want to run,” Gaetz told the crowd. “We are on a mission to rescue and save this country and we ride or die with Donald John Trump to the end.”
The Florida Republican added he didn't think it was ableist or “too much to ask” that the “American president be able to do the job.”
Gaetz went on to criticize Harris, who has been in the spotlight amid conversations about who could replace Biden on the top of the Democratic ticket in November following the 81-year-old president’s debate performance last month in Atlanta. Biden has been steadfast that he is staying in the race.
“Kamala Harris isn’t able to do any job,” Gaetz said, mispronouncing her first name.
“Under Biden-Harris, inflation has gotten so bad, you can no longer bribe Democrat senators with cash alone,” he said, before invoking Menendez. “You have to use gold bars just so the bribes hold value.”
Former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, a close ally of former President Donald Trump who mounted an unsuccessful bid to unseat Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2022, slammed President Joe Biden on his foreign policy judgment -- a policy area Biden has repeatedly leaned on when making the case for his continued candidacy amid Democratic doubts.
Zeldin recalled Biden’s hesitancy as vice president when then-President Barack Obama ordered the ultimately successful 2011 mission to kill Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda and mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Obama, Biden and others involved in that decision have all discussed Biden being among the few voices urging restraint, out of fear the intelligence about Bin Laden’s location at a compound in Pakistan might have been incorrect.
“As an American, and especially as a New Yorker, that's unforgivable. Even in his prime, he had bad judgment, and it's only gotten worse with age,” Zeldin said. “We cannot count on Biden to make this kind of crucial 3 a.m. decision. Heck, we can't rely on him at three in the afternoon.”
Others who spoke Wednesday included Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who hammered President Joe Biden and praised former President Donald Trump on their respective border policies, and South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, a Trump critic-turned-acolyte.
Referencing the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, Mace said that, “just as Trump quickly rose to his feet” after the shooting, “America will soon be back on hers” with him back in the White House.
In a powerful moment, the families who lost loved ones during the 2021 Kabul airport attack during the withdrawal from Afghanistan took President Joe Biden to task for the deaths of their loved ones.
Thirteen U.S. service members and roughly 170 Afghan civilians were killed in a suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport's Abbey Gate carried out by a lone ISIS-K attacker.
Christy Shamblin, whose daughter-in-law, Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole Gee, was killed in the attack, claimed that Biden has “refused to recognize their sacrifice,” she recalled that former President Donald Trump “spent six hours” meeting with them at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club.
“He allowed us to grieve, he allowed us to remember heroes,” she said. “Donald Trump knew all of our children’s names. He knew their stories and he spoke to us in a way that made us feel understood. Donald Trump carried the weight for a few hours with me, and for the first time since Nicole's death, I felt I wasn't alone in my grief.”
“I had expected to meet an arrogant politician,” Shamblin continued. “Instead I met a man who had empathy for us. He was compassionate and he spent time with us, because he knew it would make us feel better.”
Herman Lopez, the father of Marine Cpl. Hunter Lopez, said that President Biden “met the plane” when their bodies were returned, but claimed he “made the occasion more about his son,” Beau Biden, the former Delaware Attorney General and major in the Delaware Army National Guard, who died of brain cancer in 2015.
“Worse than that, he never said their names out loud, and during last month’s debate, claimed no service members died during his administration,” Lopez continued, to boos from the crowd. “None. That hurt us all deeply.”
Lopez led the RNC crowd in a call and response of reading the names of each of the 13 service members killed in the attack, a very emotional and somber moment at the gathering.
Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn shared a video of Republican senators confronting U.S. Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee over the assassination attempt against Donald Trump.
In a separate video, Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso and Blackburn explained themselves. The Wyoming lawmaker said that they demanded "specific answers" about what transpired during the Pennsylvania rally, "and how that shooter was able to get off a clear shot" at the former president.
"I've got a message for her: She can run, but she cannot hide, because the American people want to know how an assassination attempt was carried out on former President Donald Trump," Blackburn added.
Seventeen-year-old Kai Trump described her relationship with Donald Trump, saying, “To me, he’s just a normal grandpa.”
“He gives us candy and soda when our parents aren't looking,” she said to laughs.
Kai Trump, the eldest daughter of Donald Trump Jr., said when she made the high honor roll, the former president printed it out to proudly show to friends.
“He calls me during the middle of the school day to ask how my golf game is going and tells me all about his,” she said. “But then I have to remind him that I'm in school, and I'll have to call him back later.”
Kai Trump said she was “shocked” when she learned the former president was shot Saturday.
“I just wanted to know if he was OK,” she said. “It was heartbreaking that someone would do that to another person. A lot of people have put my grandpa through hell, and he's still standing.”
She then had a message for her grandfather, who was watching from the stands: “You are such an inspiration, and I love you.”
“The media makes my grandpa seem like a different person, but I know him for who he is,” Kai Trump said. “He's very caring and loving. He truly wants the best for this country, and he will fight every single day to make America great again.”
While introducing her, Donald Trump Jr. said his daughter called him Monday asking to speak at the convention because she wanted to let Americans know what the former president “is actually like.”
It was the first speech she ever gave, her father said.
Donald Trump Jr., started his remarks recounting the attempted assassintion of his father last Saturday and honoring the man in the crowd who was killed.
“As those bullets rained down, we came millimeters away from one of the darkest moments in our nation's history,” he said, before turning his attention to Corey Comperatore , the father and former fire chief who died in the crowd on Saturday shielding his family from the bullets.
“But we did lose an American hero that day,” Donald Trump Jr. said. “We wish that we were with us tonight, but his memory will live on forever in the hearts of his family, his community and the nation that he loved.”
The younger Trump then noted that his father in that moment “showed America’s character.
“When he stood up, with blood on his face, and the flag in his back, the world saw a spirit that could never be broken,” he said.
He later said he had never been prouder of his father than in that moment on Saturday.
“That’s when the world found out that there is tough and then there’s Trump tough,” he said. “And the good news is, America is Trump tough.”
Donald Trump Jr. noted that Americans have been filled with “fear and anxiety” before the attempt on his father’s life occurred, running through a list of issues including people coming across the border, “indoctrination” in education and “attacks on freedom of speech.” He then went on to accuse Democrats of “lying” about a litany of topics.
“But they can only run away from reality for so long,” he said. “All hell has broken loose in America and it’s impossible to hide anymore.”
As Usha Chilukuri Vance, the wife of JD Vance, recounted in her speech introducing her husband, the two of them couldn't have grown up further apart, metaphorically speaking
JD Vance's background is well-known, the subject of a memoir and a major motion picture: raised by his grandmother, a U.S. Marine who then took advantage of the G.I. Bill to go to Yale Law.
Usha Vance, on the other hand, "grew up in San Diego, in a middle-class community with two loving parents — both immigrants from India — and a wonderful sister."
"That JD and I could meet at all, let alone fall in love and marry, is a testament to this great country," Usha Vance said.
Her husband, whom she met at Yale Law School, approached their different lives "with curiosity and enthusiasm...although he's a meat and potatoes kind of guy, he adapted to my vegetarian diet and learned to cook food for my mother — Indian food."
The JD Vance she met in college, was first friends with, then married, is the same person today. "Except for that beard," she added.
His goals today, she said, are the same as for their family: to create opportunities, to build. better life and to solve problems with an open mind.
"It's hard to imagine a more powerful example of the American Dream," she said.
With that, JD Vance took the stage, to cheers, formally accepting the vice presidential nomination and lauding the man who bestowed the title upon him, Donald Trump, with praise.
“He didn't need politics, but the country needed him,” Vance said. “Prior to running for president, he was one of the most successful businessmen in the world. He had everything anyone could ever want in a life, and yet, instead of choosing the easy path, he chose to endure abuse, slander and persecution. And he did it because he loves this country.”
“Consider the lies they told you about Donald Trump, and then look at that photo of him defiant, fist in the air. When Donald Trump rose to his feet in that Pennsylvania field, all America stood with him,” Vance continued.
Referencing the shooting over the weekend, Vance urged the crowd not to forget that “instead of a day of celebration, this could have been a day of heartache and mourning.” He went on to praise Trump for shouting “fight, fight, fight” as he was escorted off the stage by Secret Service agents with a bloodied ear.
“What did he call us to do? To fight, to fight for America. Even in his most perilous moment, we were on his mind, his instinct was for us, for our country, to call us to something higher, to something greater, to once again be citizens who ask what our country needs of us,” Vance said.
In sharing his own backstory, Vance gave a CliffsNotes version of his bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” and then some.
“Never in my wildest imagination, could I have believed that I'd be standing here tonight,” the Ohio senator said.
Vance told of growing up in economically downtrodden Middletown, Ohio, and having a drug-addicted mother.
He said his grandmother took him in and was his “guardian angel,” once threatening to run over a kid who was dealing drugs with her car if Vance did not stop hanging around him.
“She loved the Lord, ladies and gentlemen,” Vance said. “She was a woman of very deep Christian faith. But she also loved the F word. I'm not kidding. She could make a sailor blush.”
Vance then joined the Marines for four years and attended Ohio State University and Yale Law School before becoming a venture capitalist that helped create jobs “in the kind of places that I grew up in,” he said.
“Some people tell me I've lived the American dream, and of course, they're right, and I'm so grateful for it,” he said. “But the American dream that always counted most was not starting a business or becoming a senator or even being here with you fine people — though, it's pretty awesome. My most important American dream was becoming a good husband and a good dad. I wanted to give my kids the things that I didn't have when I was growing up, and that's the accomplishment that I'm proudest of.”
Vance wrapped up his speech accepting the nomination to be the Republican candidate for vice president by arguing that the United States should be a nation for its citizens first and one that welcomes "newcomers... on our own terms."
"America is not just an idea. Is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation," Vance said. "Now it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers, but when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms."
"That's the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years in the past to hopefully 250 years in the future," Vance continued.
In the final stretch of his speech, Vance argued the most important thing that Republicans can do to fight for the "American nation that we all love" is to reelect former President Donald Trump.
"Mr. President, I will never take for granted the trust you have put in me, and what an honor it is to help achieve the extraordinary vision that you have for this country," Vance said. "To the people of Middletown, Ohio, and all the forgotten communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio and every corner of our nation, I promise you this, I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from."
The Biden campaign quickly issued a statement after Vance's speech that sought to tie the vice presidential candidate to Project 2025.
Project 2025 is the 920-page conservative roadmap, led by the think tank the Heritage Foundation, for if a Republican wins the election. Former President Donald Trump has sought to distance himself from the plan and claimed he doesn’t know who is behind it, even though many high-ranking officials from his administration are listed as authors or contributors.
Biden campaign spokesman Michael Tyler called Vance “the poster boy for Project 2025.”
“Backed by Silicon Valley and the billionaires who bought his vice presidential selection, Vance is Project 2025 in human form – an agenda that puts extremism and the ultra wealthy over our democracy,” Tyler said.
“An agenda that cuts health care, bans abortion, slashes Social Security and Medicare, and is a rubber stamp for Donald Trump to become a dictator on ‘day one’ and ‘terminate’ our Constitution as he wishes.”
“J.D. Vance is unprepared, unqualified, and willing to do anything Donald Trump demands,” Tyler continued.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.