Two days after being tapped as Donald Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance introduced himself to voters in a speech that highlighted the populist direction the two aim to take the Republican Party — and the nation.
Vance’s Republican National Convention speech capped a night Republicans spent prosecuting what they see as President Joe Biden’s biggest foreign policy failures and their consequences.
Gold Star families hammered Biden’s handling of the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal. The parents of a Hamas kidnapping victim led chants of “Bring them home.” A Jewish Harvard University graduate who is suing the school over claims of antisemitism, said that “the far left-wing tide of antisemitism is rising.”
“America is still worth fighting for,” said Sgt. William Pekrul, a World War II veteran nearing the age of 100 and recipient of two Bronze Stars and a Silver Star. “With President Trump as the commander-in-chief, I would go back and re-enlist today.”
Republicans also spent much of their prime-time lineup attempting to show Trump’s human side — including remarks by his 17-year-old granddaughter Kai Trump, who described the former president bragging that she had made the honor roll and peppering her with questions about her golf game.
Here are seven takeaways from the Republican National Convention’s third night:
Vance introduces himself – and hits Biden
Vance, perhaps best-known for his memoir “Hillbilly Ellegy,” is a freshman senator with a relatively little following outside Trump’s MAGA-verse prior to his selection this week.
Republicans used Wednesday night to introduce Vance and his life story to the nation.
Raised in a rural Ohio town that he said is “a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington,” Vance said he watched factories close and addictions rip through families, including his own. He joined the Marines and ultimately attended Yale Law School, where he met his wife, Usha.
“There is still so much talent and grit in the American heartland. But for these places to thrive, we need a leader who fights for the people who built this country,” Vance said.
Vance’s political leanings — populist and isolationist — more closely match Trump than the Republican Party of years past.
Vance connected those beliefs to his upbringing, and turned them into an attack on Biden’s record.
He said when he was in fourth grade, then-Sen. Biden backed the North American Free Trade Agreement — a deal passed with Republican support at the time. He called it “a bad trade deal that sent countless good American manufacturing jobs to Mexico.”
When he was in high school, Vance said, Biden backed a China trade deal and the US invasion of Iraq.
“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 across our country, jobs were sent overseas and children were sent to war,” he said.
A softer edge
What’s been clear since Vance became the GOP vice presidential pick is that the Trump campaign wants to make sure the Ohio senator did not come onto the national stage as a hard right Republican with conservative positions on abortion, social issues and isolationism.
Vance’s speech on Wednesday night followed that. Even before he took the stage, Vance’s wife Usha described him as a puppy loving, down-to-earth, self-made family man with degrees from a popular public university and posh Ivy league law school.
Later throughout his speech, the senator kept hitting on softer topics – like saying the Ohio State University chant before noting, “Gotta chill with that Ohio love. We gotta win Michigan, too.”
To be sure, there were bits of Vance’s speech that were Trumpian, such as attacking Biden for giving China “a sweetheart trade deal that destroyed even more good middle class jobs” and saying that Trump “didn’t need politics but the country needed him.”
Still, for every line similar to Trump’s 2016 argument that he alone could save the country, there were everyman lines that fall in line with his “Hillbilly Elegy” bio, from giving a shoutout to his mom being in the audience for being “10 years clean and sober” to talking about his family’s cemetery plot.
What he didn’t mention: His past critical comments about Trump or his stances on abortion and Ukraine. The speech overall was less a new version of the Trumpian braggadocio of hardline immigration politics and more an attempt to win over poor and middle-class voters across the political spectrum.
Usha Vance takes the stage
Wednesday wasn’t just JD Vance’s introduction to the American public. It was Usha Vance’s, too.
For years, JD has described his wife – whom he met while they attended Yale Law School – as a key part of his success. During his 2022 Senate campaign, she used her media appearances to help humanize him and defend him for criticisms that he’d changed his views for political expediency.
On stage in Milwaukee, Usha Vance laid out her husband’s biography and compared it to her own. Unlike her husband, she shared that she was raised in a middle class home in suburban San Diego by two loving parents who are Indian immigrants.
But, as she noted in a humanizing moment, JD adapted to the differences between them.
“When JD met me, he approached our differences with curiosity and enthusiasm,” she shared. “That JD and I could meet at all, let alone fall in love and marry, is a testament to this great country.”
But the nation’s full introduction to the Vance family will have to come later. At a convention dedicated to Trump, there wasn’t room for Usha to delve deeply into her own background, including the fact that she graduated summa cum laude from Yale University; attended Yale Law School; and clerked for both Brett Kavanaugh when he served on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Chief Justice John Roberts.
She also didn’t touch on her own reservations about stepping into the spotlight. Just last month, she told Fox News that she wasn’t “raring” to completely upend their lives, but she believed in her husband.
From the slammer to the RNC
Former Trump White House official Peter Navarro began his day in the Florida prison where he’s spent the last four months, jailed for refusing to cooperate with the House investigation into the January 6, 2021, insurrection.
Navarro ended it onstage at the RNC in Milwaukee, where he received a standing ovation – and cheers of “Welcome home!” – from Republicans who, just a night earlier, promised to restore “law and order” to America.
“What these lawfare jackals don’t understand,” a defiant Navarro said, “when they put people like me in prison and fire figurative and now literal bullets at Donald Trump, they also assault our families.”
The motives of the alleged gunman in Pennsylvania are not yet clear. He was a registered Republican who also gave a small donation years ago to a liberal cause.
The tone of Navarro’s rhetoric, including a declaration that he “went to prison so you won’t have to” and a warning that Democrats will put “a whole army of illiterate illegal aliens” on “your front doorstep,” was a notable departure to the unusually reserved language used by many speakers on the first two nights of the convention.
Navarro was not the only controversial figure on the convention floor in Milwaukee. Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was convicted and pleaded guilty to a variety of crimes and spent nearly two years in prison, was also present. After losing the 2020 election, Trump pardoned Manafort “from convictions prosecuted in the course of Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation, which was premised on the Russian collusion hoax.”
Trump himself, of course, was found guilty on all 34 charges of falsifying business records earlier this year, making him the first former president in US history to be convicted of a felony.
Gold Star families lambast Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal
Perhaps the most poignant moment of the convention so far came when the families of some of the 13 service members who were killed in a suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul during the United States’ August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan sharply criticized Biden’s actions, then and now.
“Look at our faces. Look at our pain and heartbreak,” said Cheryl Juels, the aunt of Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee.
“That was not an ‘extraordinary success,’” she added, using the same words Biden did weeks after the withdrawal to describe it.
“Joe Biden owes the men and women who served in Afghanistan a debt of gratitude and an apology,” Juels said.
Herman Lopez, the father of Marine Col. Hunter Lopez, said that when Biden met the families of the 13 service members killed, the president “made the occasion more about his son, lost to cancer, than our sons and daughters.”
He then said Biden had lied in the June CNN debate with Trump that on his watch, there haven’t been “any troops dying anywhere in the world.”
Col. Lopez’s mother, Alicia Lopez, said in the three years since those 13 service members were killed, “there has been a deafening silence from the Biden and Harris administration. Despite our pleas for answers and accountability, they have pushed us away and tried to silence us.”
Herman Lopez then said the names of all 13 service members who were killed in the suicide bombing.
It was an emotional moment, and one reminiscent of Gold Star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. “You have sacrificed nothing — and no one,” Khizr Khan said.
GOP senators confront Secret Service director
A stunning scene played out far from television screens in Milwaukee, as Republican senators confronted Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and chased her through Fiserv Forum, demanding answers to questions about Saturday’s assassination attempt.
“This was an assassination attempt! You owe the people answers. You owe President Trump answers!” Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn shouted at Cheatle, who continued to walk with her head down and ignore the senators’ criticism.
“It’s stonewalling!” Sen. John Barrasso, the No. 3 Senate Republican, said.
Blackburn later posted a video of the encounter to X, writing: “The American people deserve answers from the Secret Service.”
In another video posted by Blackburn, she is joined by Sens. James Lankford and Kevin Cramer, as well as Barrasso, as the group confronted Cheatle.
In the full video, Barrasso demanded Cheatle’s “resignation or full explanation to us, right now.”
When pressed by Blackburn why Trump was still able to go on stage when they had already been made aware of a threat, Cheatle replied, “I don’t think that this is the forum to have this discussion.”
Cheatle indicated she’ll address their questions at another time and moved to leave. At that point, the senators said, “We’re going with you,” and began following her.
As they walked, Barrasso accused her of having “no shame, no concern.”
“You’re supposed to protect the president of the United States!” he said.
“You answer to us!” added Cramer.
Burgum’s audition to be energy secretary
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum’s speech was notable not only for its awkwardness – he stumbled through a joke referencing his torn Achilles tendon shortly before his first presidential primary debate performance in the same arena where the convention is now taking place – but also for its emphasis on energy policy.
That’s by design. When Burgum ran a longshot bid for president this cycle, rumors surfaced that he was really positioning himself to be energy secretary for a future Republican administration. Energy security and energy policy are in the governor’s comfort zone and that was on full display Wednesday night.
In his speech, Burgum argued the Biden administration’s “war on energy hurts every American” and a new Trump administration would unleash “American energy dominance” that would be a “path to prosperity and peace through strength.” At another point, Burgum said innovation “has always been the source of American greatness and President Trump champions innovation over regulation.”
The speech will further fuel speculation that Burgum is headed for some future post in Washington, should Trump return to the White House. Burgum was a finalist to be Trump’s vice presidential running mate and found himself just a few days ago waiting in a hotel near the site of the Republican National Convention for final word. When Trump finally did call Burgum, the former president told Burgum he would not be his running mate. But, in a possible allusion to the future, Trump started the call by saying, “Hey, Mr. Secretary.”
CNN’s Alayna Treene and Morgan Rimmer contributed to this story.
