Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Monday selected Ohio Sen. JD Vance — a Marine veteran, author, and once-critic of the former president — as his running mate for the 2024 election.
Vance, 39, is the first post-9/11 veteran to find a spot on a major party ticket and, if elected, would likely be the first Marine veteran to serve as the second-in-command, a Military.com analysis of vice presidential biographies found. He is the first veteran on a major party ticket since John McCain in 2008.
Of the 49 vice presidents in U.S. history, less than half had some sort of military experience. Examples included service in militias, the National Guard, the US Navy, and the Army. Military.com could not find any evidence that any vice president served in the Marine Corps.
In a statement Monday, the CEO of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Allison Jaslow, supported the former president’s decision in selecting Vance.
“The post-9/11 generation of veterans is ascendant in America today,” Jaslow said. “We applaud former President Trump for choosing a post-9/11 veteran to join him in his candidacy to be commander in chief again, and notably, someone who served in the enlisted ranks and is representative of the average veteran.”
The ascension by veterans of recent conflicts is part of a larger historical trend when it comes to the top offices of the country, Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library, told Military.com on Tuesday.
“With the presidency, we often talk about how, after each major conflict, there’s often a generation of presidents or presidential candidates that have served in that conflict,” she said. She cited examples such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president and commander of Allied forces during World War II.
According to Military.com‘s analysis and Chervinsky, this proved mostly true for the vice presidency, in which nearly two dozen officials elected to that office had some sort of military experience spread over many American conflicts. Examples range from Richard Nixon’s Navy service during World War II to Aaron Burr’s service in the Continental Army at the outbreak of the American Revolution.
“I saw that with the vice presidents with World War II, the War of 1812, and the Vietnam War, but interestingly, not as much with the Civil War, which I thought was an interesting sort of aberration,” Chervinsky said.
Vance, having served in Iraq, would represent another notch in that historical trend, joined by other Global War on Terror veterans elected to public office such as Reps. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, and Jason Crow, D-Colo.
Chervinsky said that her confidence was “pretty high” that Vance would indeed be the first Marine VP if elected. Definitively answering that question is difficult, however. Vice presidents don’t often rise to household names when viewed through the lens of history, and in many cases, their military service is not remembered as publicly as others.
Saint Louis University professor, Joel K. Goldstein, one of the foremost scholars of the vice presidency, told Military.com he could not confirm whether Vance would be the first Marine if elected to the position, partly because the topic is so niche and partly because he had never researched it.
Both Chervinsky and Goldstein said that military experience has long been a boon for political candidates, in part because it demonstrates public service and certain skills expected of service and represents a small but significant portion of the US population. In some cases, it can draw increased scrutiny into candidates’ backgrounds.
Historically, vice presidents are not chosen based on “their capacity to be a good leader, but rather because they offer some other type of characteristic,” Chervinsky said. “For a long time, it was some sort of geographic balance to the president … or a way to bring in an important state or an important constituency to try and boost the ticket’s electoral prospects.”
In an opinion column for The Washington Post, conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt argued that Trump’s pick of Vance was an appeal to veterans. A Military Times poll during the 2020 presidential race showed that older veterans supported Trump while younger veterans backed President Joe Biden.
Trump didn’t serve in the military and avoided the Vietnam War with deferments, according to The Associated Press, as did Biden. “So, in a sense, Vance’s service is a balance against President Trump’s record,” Goldstein said.
Vance enlisted in the Corps as a combat correspondent, or 4341 military occupational specialty, according to his service record, which was provided to Military.com by the service on Monday. He served for four years, from 2003 to 2007.
During that time, he deployed to Iraq for six months. The last enlisted vice president was Al Gore, who similarly deployed to Vietnam for six months as an Army correspondent. Vance earned the Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal, Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal, Iraq Campaign Medal, Sea Service Deployment Ribbon, and some conventional honors awarded during the Global War on Terror.
In his 2016 book, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” which recounted his childhood in working-class Ohio, Vance said that his “final two years in the Marines flew by and were largely uneventful,” though he recalled two instances during his service that changed him.
One was meeting with local Iraqis during his deployment, which he said helped change his perspective on gratitude. The other was more of a “constant,” he wrote — about the mindset he learned while in the Corps, where he reflected on climbing obstacles, buying cars as a young enlisted Marine without locking into a 21% loan interest rate, and his role as a combat correspondent.
“The Marine Corps demanded that I think strategically about these decisions, and then it taught me how to do so,” he wrote. “When I joined the Marine Corps, I did so in part because I wasn’t ready for adulthood. I didn’t know how to balance a checkbook, much less how to complete the financial aid forms for college. Now I knew exactly what I wanted out of my life and how to get there.”
Vance went on to attend Ohio State University and Yale Law School before working as a venture capitalist. His book “Hillbilly Elegy” was a national bestseller, though some Appalachians criticized it as stereotyping. At that time, Vance considered himself a “Never-Trump,” referring to the former president as “reprehensible,” “cultural heroin,” and privately questioning whether he was “America’s Hitler.”
Vance, now considered a populist conservative, was elected into the Senate to represent Ohio in 2022 with no prior political experience and has since become one of Trump’s closest allies. Trump selected Vance as his running mate just two days after a 20-year-old from Pennsylvania fired multiple shots at the former president on Saturday, shaking the country with a targeted act of political violence.
Since his election to the Senate, Vance has opposed foreign aid to Ukraine as it continues fighting against Russia’s invasion, which began the same year he was elected into office. In April, he used the Iraq War as a historical example against intervention.
“I believed the propaganda of the George W. Bush administration that we needed to invade Iraq, that it was a war for freedom and democracy, that those who were appeasing Saddam Hussein were inviting a broader regional conflict,” he said on the Senate floor. “I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to, that the promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.”
