CBS News
Trump picks Sen. J.D. Vance as VP running mate for 2024 election
Former President Donald Trump has chosen Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio to be his vice presidential running mate this November. Trump announced his VP pick on social media just before he was to accept the presidential nomination at Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Monday.
Trump wrote, “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.”
He said of Vance that he had “honorably served our Country in the Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University in two years, Summa Cum Laude, and is a Yale Law School Graduate, where he was Editor of The Yale Law Journal, and President of the Yale Law Veterans Association.”
The former president noted that Vance’s book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was a bestseller that “championed the hardworking men and women of our Country.” And he pointed to Vance’s previous career as a venture capitalist.
Sources confirmed before Vance’s selection was announced that Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who were also considered to be top contenders for the No. 2 job, were informed that they had not been chosen.
Although Vance wasn’t at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally where a shooter made an attempt on the former president’s life, the senator expressed his concern and support for the president from Ohio. He also shared fundraising information for the families of those who were killed or injured at the rally.
“Courageous, United, and Defiant. This is leadership,” Vance wrote on X over the weekend after Trump asked Americans to remain “resilient” in their faith and “defiant in the face of wickedness.”
Vance has frequently joined Trump on the campaign trail and was long considered to be on the shortlist of VP contenders. Vance and his wife, Usha, were spotted leaving their Ohio home Monday morning, a sign that Vance might be the pick.
Ohio has been a reliably Republican-dominated state in recent elections, although the senior senator from the state, Sherrod Brown, is a Democrat and is also up for reelection this year. But Trump has focused less on choosing a running mate from a key battleground state and more on the qualities in a candidate that matter most to him.
Trump has prioritized picking a running mate who would be loyal to him and support him publicly, as Vance has increasingly done through the years.
Initially, though, Vance harshly criticized Trump and was an avowed “Never-Trump guy.” Earlier this year, Fox News’ Bett Baier confronted Vance with some of his previous statements, including comments that Trump could be “America’s Hitler” and “cultural heroin.” Vance told Baier he was “wrong” about Trump.
“I think you should, when you are wrong about something, you should change your mind and be honest with people about that fact,” Vance said in the interview.
Vance grew up in challenging circumstances, largely raised by his grandparents before going on to college and law school at Yale.
Now one of Trump’s most vocal allies, Vance defended the former president during his criminal trial in Manhattan, including after his conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for “hush money” payments.
“The entire purpose of this trial was to allow the media and the Democrats to say exactly that,” Vance told CNN after the New York verdict. “This was never about justice, this is about plastering ‘convicted felon’ all over the airwaves when in reality the only thing that Donald Trump is guilty of is being in the courtroom of a political sham trial.”
Asked in a June interview on “Face the Nation” about his interest in the vice presidency and his relatively brief experience in the Senate, Vance said, “In 18 months … we’ve done a lot of good work for our constituents.”
“We’ve got hundreds of millions of dollars to the Great Lakes,” he continued. “We’ve done a lot to help the people of East Palestine deal with the terrible train disaster. And, of course, we’ve done a lot of work on making sure that Ohio has gotten defense resources that make not just Ohio, but our country stronger. So there’s a lot we can hang our hat on.”
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
The editorials editor of the Los Angeles Times has resigned after the newspaper’s owner blocked the editorial board’s plans to endorse Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for president, a journalism trade publication reported Wednesday.
Mariel Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review in an interview that she resigned because the Times was remaining silent on the contest in “dangerous times.”
“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Garza said. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”
In a post on the social media platform X that did not directly mention the resignation, LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong said the board was asked to do a factual analysis of the policies of Harris and Republican former President Donald Trump during their time at the White House.
Additionally, “The board was asked to provide (its) understanding of the policies and plans enunciated by the candidates during this campaign and its potential effect on the nation in the next four years,” he wrote. “In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being president for the next four years.”
Soon-Shiong, who bought the paper in 2018, said the board “chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.”
Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review that the board had intended to endorse Harris and she had drafted the outline of a proposed editorial.
A LA Times spokesperson did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.
The LA Times Guild Unit Council & Bargaining Committee said it was “deeply concerned about our owner’s decision to block a planned endorsement in the presidential race.”
“We are even more concerned that he is now unfairly assigning blame to Editorial Board members for his decision not to endorse,” the guild said in a statement. “We are still pressing for answers from newsroom management on behalf of our members.”
Trump’s campaign jumped on Garza’s departure, saying the state’s largest newspaper had declined to endorse the Democratic ticket after backing Harris in her previous races for U.S. Senate and state attorney general.
Her exit comes about 10 months after then-Executive Editor Kevin Merida left the paper in what was called a “mutually agreed” upon departure. At the time, the news organization said it had fallen well short of its digital subscriber goals and needed a revenue boost to sustain the newsroom and its digital operations.
Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
The secretary of state’s office was the target of an unsuccessful cyberattack earlier this month, the agency confirmed to CBS News on Wednesday.
An official with the secretary of state’s office said the attack was an attempt to crash the absentee voting website, and it was discovered when the agency noticed a spike in attempts to access the site nine days ago, on Oct. 14. There were over 420,000 attempts made from around the world, which the official said was a coordinated attempt to make the website crash.
Security experts were ultimately able to thwart the attack. The secretary of state’s office said it still does not know who was behind the attack but suggested it may have been a foreign country.
Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the office, wrote Thursday evening in a social media post that “this was a big win for our cyber security team and our partners. We work everyday to protect Georgia voters and our systems.” In a separate post, he said, “The attack was detected and mitigated quickly.” CNN first reported the cyberattack attempt.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is aware of the cyberattack and worked with the Georgia secretary of state’s office in the aftermath of the incident, sources confirmed to CBS News. The FBI has not responded to a request for comment.
Georgia voters have also been showing up for early voting, which began on Oct. 15. Early voters shattered records this year for the presidential election, the secretary of state’s office said, more than doubling early voting figures from 2020 on the first day, with 310,000 ballots cast, compared with 136,739 on the first day of early voting in 2020.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger predicted there would be record turnout in Georgia this year, telling CBS News’ Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation” Sunday, “You look at the turnout — we’re almost pushing 1.4 million who’ve already voted early or who we’ve accepted their absentee ballots.”
Nicole Sganga and
contributed to this report.
