The Denier of Donald Trump and the Establishment of Taxes in the U.S.: On the First Day of a Republican National Convention, Jeff Vance Addressed Silicon Valley Tech Investor David Sacks
Former President Donald Trump has found a denier as his running mate, one who’s sown doubts about the upcoming presidential election.
The nomination came on the first day of the Republican National Convention, which was followed by an attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania a couple days later. Trump said on Truth Social that a bullet pierced the upper part of his ear, and law enforcement confirmed one spectator died during the incident and two were critically injured. The Secret Service killed the gunman, who the FBI has identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old from Pennsylvania.
After a close call, Trump called for unity and then returned to his usual rhetoric, railing against what he called legal “witch Hunts” against him by the DOJ.
He has positioned himself as a liaison to Silicon Valley, courting key tech figures to support Trump. Tech investor David Sacks told Axios that Vance had “been instrumental” in making a Trump fundraiser Sacks hosted with fellow investor Chamath Palihapitiya come to life. Vance has also maintained a close relationship with Peter Thiel, one of Silicon Valley’s most famous conservatives, who helped bankroll Vance’s Senate candidacy.
Trump mentioned in his Truth Social post that he had served in the Marine Corps and graduated from Ohio State University. He also referenced Vance’s famous book, Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir about his family and hometown of Middletown, Ohio, that was later made into a film. Trump also pointed to Vance’s “very successful business career in Technology and Finance” and said during the campaign, he’d be focused on “the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond….”
“I’d like it to be primarily a state issue,” Vance said in an interview with the Cincinnati Inquirer. “Ohio is going to want to have a different abortion policy from California, from New York, and I think that’s reasonable.”
In the debate with Tim Ryan in 2020, Vance said he would support a number of different exceptions but did not specify what exactly they would be.
The leader of the congressional Republican Party is against aid to Ukraine. In April, he wrote that he opposed virtually any proposal for the US to continue funding the war.
The senators wanted to know what the American people had spent their money on. The counteroffensive is going in the right direction. Do the Ukrainians have a chance of victory than they did 6 months ago? What is our strategy, and what is the president’s exit plan? What does the administration define as victory in Ukraine?”
When he was running for the Senate, he thought that the election of 2020 was stolen from Trump. And earlier this year, Vance told ABC News he still questions the results of the 2020 election.
On CNN in May, Vance downplayed the severity of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, despite chants from the crowd that Vice President Mike Pence should be hanged.
Vance has taken a hard line on immigration; he has often decried a “crisis” at the southern border and called for funding and constructing a border wall.
In a 2021 podcast, Vance advised Trump to, “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” and then potentially defy the Supreme Court if the president was sued.