JD Vance, Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, on Thursday at the Republican National Convention showered Trump with praises over his handling of the failed assassination attempt against him.

“He can stand defiant against an assassin one moment and call for national healing the next. He is a beloved father and grandfather,” Mr Vance told the crowd in what was his first speech after being officially nominated as the Republican’s vic- presidential candidate.

He added, “They said he was a tyrant. They said he must be stopped at all costs. But how did he respond?”

He called for national unity, for national calm, literally, right after an assassin nearly took his life,” Mr Vance said of Mr Trump.

Mr Vance, a senator from Ohio 40 years younger than Trump, is a rising star within the Republican Party. He is a veteran of the Iraq War, a Yale-educated lawyer and former venture capitalist.

At the beginning of his speech, the 39-year-old officially accepted his nomination as Mr Trump’s running mate for the November 5 election. Mr Vance was not always a loyal Trump ally once, even going so far as to call himself “a Never Trump guy.”

When he was promoting his bestselling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” on poverty and drug addiction that afflicts poor White communities where he came from in Middletown, Ohio, Mr Vance wrote a blistering essay describing Mr Trump as cultural heroin and a new pain reliever.

“I think that he’s noxious and is leading the White working class to a very dark place,” he said in a separate interview that same year.

Mr Vance later renounced his criticism and, with Mr Trump’s support, won the race for a U.S. Senate seat from Ohio in 2022.

In his speech at the Milwaukee convention, Mr Vance described himself as a fighter for working-class Americans who felt left behind.

“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,” said Mr Vance.

Mr Trump, 78, was confirmed as the Republican presidential candidate on Monday, just two days after the failed assassination attempt against him.

At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, a would-be assassin was able to climb to an elevated position with an assault rifle and opened fire on Mr Trump, causing panic to break out in the audience.

Mr Trump, wounded in the ear and left bleeding, struck a defiant tone as he pumped his fist while being whisked off the stage.

The shooting upended what had already been a tumultuous campaign season, dominated by Trump’s criminal trials and concerns about the candidates’ age.

Mr Biden, 81, has come under immense pressure to withdraw from the race after a disastrous debate performance in June super-charged existing fears about his mental acuity. 

(dpa/NAN)