Takeaways From Day One of the Republican Convention (2024)

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Catch up on what happened on the first day of the convention.

At 9 p.m., as the country star Lee Greenwood sang the anthem that Mr. Trump has made his own, “God Bless the U.S.A.,” the former president stepped into view at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum, a gauze bandage over the ear wounded by his would-be assassin, his eyes seemingly close to tears. It was his first public appearance since the shooting, and the applause was rapturous from the delegates, elected officials and Republican elites, many of whom have doubted his leadership in the past.

“You will not take this man down,” Mr. Greenwood said, attributing the former president’s survival to divine intervention. “He has the courage, the strength and he will be the next president of the United States.”

Here are four takeaways from the convention’s first day:

It’s Trump’s party.

There was a time when Mr. Trump did not like to share the spotlight. On Monday, with a fresh bandage on his right ear, he showed no insecurities atop a political party he has molded into his own, despite 34 felony convictions, two impeachments, civil judgments for business fraud, sexual abuse and defamation, and pending indictments tied to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

As Mr. Greenwood sang, Mr. Trump shook hands with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News personality; Representative Byron Donalds of Florida; his sons Don Jr. and Eric; and his running mate, Mr. Vance. For the final hour of the session, as others took to the podium, the camera repeatedly swung back to the nominee, who sat beaming. He never stepped to a microphone.

After the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, a bipartisan majority of the House voted to impeach Mr. Trump for inciting an insurrection. Most Republican senators declined to convict him, a verdict that would have ended his political career. They did not think it would be wise or necessary.

On Monday, Mr. Trump’s political comeback reached the necessary milestone of renomination and party unification. He feels tantalizingly close to the final step: returning to the White House.

J.D. Vance was chosen for legacy, not electoral gain.

Eight years ago, Mr. Vance said he feared Mr. Trump could become “America’s Hitler.” On Monday, Mr. Trump anointed Mr. Vance, a 39-year-old freshman senator from Ohio, the heir apparent of his “America First” movement, trusting that his party control was absolute and his election was secure.

As a vice-presidential nominee from a reliably Republican state, Mr. Vance may not be much help securing any of the battleground states needed to deliver Mr. Trump a second term.

But as the first millennial running mate, Mr. Vance has a long political future ahead of him. And no one can articulate Mr. Trump’s vision of “America First” better than the smooth-talking senator, who viscerally understands a platform ostensibly designed to lift working-class Americans by crushing competition from immigrants, stopping imports through trade protectionism, and ending American entanglements abroad.

Mr. Vance, of course, is not the first Republican who was once harshly critical of Mr. Trump and is now obsequiously respectful. Senators Marco Rubio of Florida, Ted Cruz of Texas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina were at least as brutal. But Mr. Trump passed over those three competitors in 2016 to choose as his running mate Mike Pence, then the governor of Indiana, who was always content to stand in Mr. Trump’s shadow.

This time, Mr. Trump looked beyond the personal and political as he sought to ensure his brand of isolationist nationalism survives long after his departure.

Republicans try to chisel away at the Democratic coalition.

Black men dominated the early sessions, a Latina took the stage just after Mr. Trump’s emotional entry, a union leader gave the final speech, and a California lawyer closed the night with a Sikh prayer.

They all hailed from voting blocs core to the Democratic coalition.

The flurry of Black male speakers was particularly striking. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, Representative Wesley Hunt of Texas and Representative John James of Michigan came one after another, followed later by Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and Mr. Donalds. Trump campaign officials are determined to peel off a significant chunk of Black male votes from the Democrats in November, but they’d better hope those voters were tuned in Monday.

The closing speech by Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters president, was even more remarkable. He started it by saying that no Teamsters leader had ever addressed a Republican convention, and he acknowledged that his presence had divided his own union.

A significant percentage of the Teamsters’ 1.3 million members is already with Mr. Trump, but the leadership of organized labor has been a bulwark of support for President Biden. If nothing else, the Republicans’ invitation to Mr. O’Brien undermined the image of a united union front backing the Democrats.

President Biden is on defense.

Since a gunman nearly took Mr. Trump’s life, Mr. Biden has been in a difficult political position. He has tried to project statesmanship, addressing the nation with an appeal to unity and a plea to turn down the political heat. He called Mr. Trump to personally express his support, and temporarily pulled down political advertisem*nts.

On Monday night, as one Republican speaker after another castigated Mr. Biden’s leadership, the president was questioned on NBC News about whether he had contributed to the violence of American politics.

Mr. Biden told NBC’s Lester Holt that it had been “a mistake” to tell donors a week ago that he wanted to “put Trump in a bull’s-eye.”

But he added: “How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when a president says things like he says? Do you just not say anything because it may incite somebody? Look, I’m not engaged in that rhetoric. Now, my opponent is engaged in that rhetoric.”

Republicans have continued to suggest that Mr. Biden’s attacks on Mr. Trump incited the gunman, whose motives in fact are still unknown.

If Mr. Biden was playing defense, Republicans showed no reluctance to lace into the president.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia declared, “The Democrat economy is of, by, and for illegal aliens.” Charlie Kirk, the youthful founder of the pro-Trump group Turning Point U.S.A., said Mr. Biden had embraced a “fake, pathetic, mutilated version of the American dream.”

The Ohio steel town that shaped J.D. Vance’s life and politics.

Millions of people first learned of Middletown from “Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance’s best-selling memoir, and the Hollywood movie that followed.

Mr. Vance, 39, wrote about his chaotic upbringing there, raised in the intermittent care of a single mother struggling with addiction. In his depiction, Middletown was “little more than a relic of American industrial glory,” a place “hemorrhaging jobs and hope.”

His bleak portrait of the city, just north of Cincinnati, was initially held up as a reference guide for urbanites on the coasts desperate to understand Mr. Trump’s appeal among the struggling white working class.

Mr. Vance’s explanation was a stark one: some of Middletown’s woes were caused by the damaging decisions of government and big business, but the deeper problems lay in the fatalism, indolence and victim mentality of the city’s white working class.

The problems in his community “run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy,” Mr. Vance wrote in his book. “There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.”

Middletown, which has begun to stabilize after decades of decline, was at its lowest point in the years that Mr. Vance chronicled. Some people in the nicer parts of town thought Mr. Vance had been unfair, said Jason Moore, 39, a truck driver who was a year behind Mr. Vance in high school. But, he said, “people in this part of town would say he nailed it.”

When Mr. Vance’s grandparents moved to Middletown from eastern Kentucky in the 1940s, the city was in what most people say were its golden years. A half-dozen paper mills ran alongside the Armco steel mill, and the business owners lived in grand houses in town, bankrolling cultural festivals and a local symphony.

Most of the steelworkers — a mix of first and second-generation European immigrants, Black families who had moved up from the Deep South and white families from Appalachia — were represented by an independent and locally run union.

Middletown was, as Look Magazine declared in 1957, an “All-America City,” and many of its residents thought of it that way.

Mr. Vance’s grandfather, who worked at the mill, had been among those who found a foothold of economic security in Middletown, moving his family into a two-story house across from a neighborhood park. But that stability was fleeting. Mr. Vance’s mother had a child as a teenager, divorced, remarried and in 1984, gave birth to Mr. Vance, just as the city’s prosperity was beginning to founder.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the U.S. steel industry collapsed across the Midwest. The Middletown steelworks were no exception. In 1985, Armco’s corporate leadership decamped for the East Coast, draining the city of money, while the steel mill went through round after round of layoffs. Those who kept their jobs, some former employees said, found it an ever more miserable and more dangerous place to work.

Middletown struggled. Government-subsidized rentals began proliferating in the empty houses at a rate the city’s social services were not equipped to handle. Shopping centers were boarded up and the city pools were filled with concrete. Many residents turned to drugs, including Mr. Vance’s mother, who became addicted to narcotics. Her life became erratic as she cycled among boyfriends, and Mr. Vance sought refuge with “Mamaw,” his hard-edge but protective grandmother.

This was the Middletown Mr. Vance knew in his childhood.

“That was how most of us lived,” said Rodney Muterspaw, 55, who spent decades on the city’s police force and five years as police chief.

Mr. Muterspaw went on to describe some of the larger context of the city’s distress. He recalled with regret that law enforcement responded to the growing drug epidemic by focusing disproportionately on low-income neighborhoods. And he remembered being sent as a police officer to monitor locked-out workers picketing the steel mill, essentially ordered, he said, to spy on “our dads, our brothers, our uncles.” Once an All-America city, Middletown appeared to have turned against itself.

Various attempts to lift the city’s fortunes failed, reinforcing a pessimism among many residents. In his book, Mr. Vance mentioned that efforts to revive the downtown were “futile,” a cynicism about government intentions that is far from rare.

“I’ve never seen a city that loves to hate itself as much as Middletown does,” Mr. Muterspaw said.

Some of Mr. Vance’s teachers did not recall any signs of Mr. Vance’s struggles at home, though by high school, he wrote in his memoir, he had found some stability living with his grandmother.

At least one teacher remembered his growing political consciousness.

“His grasp and understanding of government and politics was extraordinary,” said Mike Stratton, 79, who taught Mr. Vance’s Advanced Placement English class at Middletown High.

When class discussion turned to politics, Mr. Stratton recalled, Mr. Vance was an outspoken Republican: supporting limited government and then-President George W. Bush. Mr. Vance’s views were fairly standard Republican fare at the time, said Mr. Stratton, a Democrat.

“Middletown was a hotbed of conservative Republicanism back then, but J.D. Vance was a moderate,” he said.

Mr. Stratton said that these days, Mr. Vance’s political rhetoric, with its hard-right populism, seems quite different from what he heard in his classroom more than two decades ago.

Mr. Vance graduated from high school in 2003, when the city was still at its nadir, and joined the Marines. He built from there — degrees from Ohio State and Yale Law School, a job at a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, election to the U.S. Senate and now a place on a presidential ticket.

This rapid rise was fueled in large part by the success of “Hillbilly Elegy,” which attributed his community’s woes in large part on “a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”

Mr. Vance speaks differently now, blaming the ills of his community on immigration and elites, a far more populist tone.

Last year, after a freight train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed and burned in the industrial town of East Palestine, Ohio, Mr. Vance excoriated the “bicoastal elite,” saying that they use places like East Palestine “for cheap propaganda,” while reserving their sympathy for “Ukrainians, extreme sexual minorities, and criminals.”

Elites, Mr. Vance said, ignored the fact that their prosperity was only possible because of “heartland labor, heartland sweat, and heartland peril.”

That labor never stopped in Middletown, even in the grim years that Mr. Vance described in his book.

The steel mill’s current owner, Cleveland-Cliffs, announced this spring that it was investing nearly $2 billion to upgrade the plant, with $500 million of that coming through a grant from the Biden administration. The plan was cheered by the local of the International Association of Machinists, the union that now represents workers at the mill.

Attempts to turn the city’s fortunes around have continued, and some major projects have gotten underway, including Renaissance Pointe, described as a $200 million “epicenter” for stores, restaurants and hotels.

But reversing four decades of declining fortune is hard work. Downtown, there are brew pubs and a wine bar, but also plenty of empty storefronts.

Ami Vitori, 50, left Middletown after high school. But she came back in 2015, and in recent years has renovated an abandoned building downtown, attracting a restaurant, retail and even a boutique hotel. Mr. Vance praised her efforts in a 2017 New York Times opinion piece, which explained his decision to return to Ohio and open a nonprofit.

That nonprofit has since folded; Mr. Vance now lives in Cincinnati.

“Vance left Middletown behind a long time ago,” Ms. Vitori said. To her, his interest in his hometown nowadays seemed limited to using it as symbol of what he has overcome.

George F. Lang, a Republican state senator who represents Middletown, pushed back on that notion. He pointed out that Mr. Vance had announced his 2022 run for Senate in the city and also opened his regional senate office there. “The most important thing he can do for Middletown,” Mr. Lang said, “is be the example that he is.”

Given Mr. Vance’s ongoing rise to prominence, Ms. Vitori said she hoped for more.

“I honestly hope he’s done what he’s had to do to get where he is,” she said. “And once he’s there, he may actually try to do some good for people and places like Middletown.”

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A bandaged Trump shows a glimpse of vulnerability.

Just as he had mouthed “fight” in the moment after the assassination attempt, the delegates on the floor chanted “fight! fight! fight!” But Mr. Trump did not look to be in a fighting mood. He appeared to choke up.

There was no mischievous smirk, practiced scowl, shimmying to the Village People, or any of the other hallmarks of a typical Trump performance. There was something subdued in the way he pumped his fist and flashed a thumbs-up. Lee Greenwood performed “God Bless the U.S.A.” and the eyes of Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. filled with tears. Mr. Trump took his seat, surrounded by family and next to his newly named running mate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio. Mr. Trump looked overwhelmed by it all.

Was this just a deft bit of convention choreography from the consummate showman, or was everything sinking in? As he’d said in one of his first interviews after the shooting, “I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be dead.”

This is not a man known for open displays of vulnerability, or softness. He often mocks such signs of weakness in others. Mr. Trump’s public performances ordinarily range from wrathful to comedic. Those who know him well saw something in the moment.

“I saw a man who knows he got a second lease on life,” Kellyanne Conway said on Fox News after Mr. Trump’s walk-on ended.

When the applause subsided, Mr. Trump settled in for more than an hour. He listened as an entertainer and internet personality, Amber Rose, spoke about how she had found a home in the Republican Party. “These are my people. This is where I belong,” she said.

Mr. Trump beamed.

Convention lineup showcases future of G.O.P.

And Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia noted how he had won election in a Democratic state by presenting himself as a successful business person — and promised that Trump would do the same this November.

Trump and his running mate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, are the main acts at this four-day convention of Republicans in Milwaukee. But even in a party that is so devoted to the former president, the gathering is providing a platform for the next generation of Republicans, a glimpse of what the party might be like after 2028. On the first night of the convention, the speakers gave delegates a look at their styles, their passions and, in the case of governors, their records.

“I am the first Black lieutenant governor of North Carolina,” said Mark Robinson, who is running for his state’s top office this November. “And I plan on being the first Black governor of North Carolina.”

They loyally promoted the Trump platform — talking about immigration, tax cuts and what they said was weak foreign policy by the Biden administration — but they were sure to weave in some self-promotion.

“All of the things that conservatives talked about, we just did it and it worked,” Ms. Noem said. “Our economy took off”

Senator Katie Britt of Alabama, who delivered a widely panned response to President Biden’s State of the Union address this year, assailed Democrats. Under the current administration, “prices are high and expectations are low,” she said, adding: “This is pain for millions of Americans.”

Her speech drew a low-key response. By contrast, Mr. Scott, who had been on Trump’s list of potential vice-presidential candidates, commanded the attention of the crowd from the moment he stepped onto the stage.

“Wow,” he said. “Wow!”

“If you didn’t believe in miracles before Saturday you better be believing right now,” he said, adding: “Our God still saves. Still delivers. And he still sets free.”

Mr. Youngkin’s comparisons between his own political success in Virginia and what he predicted would happen with Trump suggested his own political ambitions. “Eight years ago, there was an outsider, a businessman who stepped out of his career to rebuild a great nation with the strongest economy,” he said. That outsider businessman was Donald J. Trump.

“I believe Virginia will this year elect another outsider businessman as president of the United States,” he said.

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A Teamsters boss delivers a rare speech to the Republican convention.

His praise of former President Donald J. Trump — “In light of what happened to him on Saturday, he has proven to be one tough S.O.B.,” Mr. O’Brien said — will not sit well with some leaders of his 1.3 million-member union. Nor will his praise for some other Republicans, including Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and Representative Nicole Malliotakis of New York.

But the Teamsters leader also laced into corporate America for having what he called no allegiance to the United States. He lamented that “Americans vote for a union but can’t get a union contract,” and he mourned workers who are fired for labor organizing.

“That is economic terrorism at its worst,” Mr. O’Brien said — rhetoric not usually heard in the halls of a Republican convention.

At first Mr. O’Brien’s remarks were well-received, particularly as he talked about the criticism he would receive from Democrats for speaking at the convention. But as he continued to speak, the audience fell largely quiet, a marked contrast to the enthusiastic applause and cheers for other speakers.

A few moments that were clearly intended as applause lines were greeted with just a few claps or outright silence. And as the speech went on, some in the auditorium turned away from Mr. O’Brien to look instead at Mr. Trump, who was seated on a riser toward the back of the room.

Many in organized labor say Mr. Trump was no friend of labor as president, while President Biden has done pretty much all the unions of asked for, including signing into law a more than $30 billion bailout for the Teamsters’ embattled pension fund.

One rank-and-file Teamster responded to the address on social media: “A true Teamster Leader would not be at the Republican National Convention under any circ*mstances,” wrote Keith Gleason, a Chicago member. “Biden helped save our pensions, not Trump.”

Trump, in his first appearance since an assassination attempt, revels in cheers.

A camera trailed him from backstage, where he looked somber as he waited on a red carpet. Then, as Lee Greenwood sang “God Bless the U.S.A.,” Mr. Trump strode onto the floor of Fiserv Forum, saw the crowd on its feet and broke out in a wide grin.

He climbed stairs to a box where he was met by his family, top supporters and his newly minted running mate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio.

But it was the crowd that held Mr. Trump’s focus. As he did just moments after being shot at, Mr. Trump pumped his fist. He clapped, waved, and looked genuinely grateful.

As Mr. Greenwood sang his final stanza, Mr. Vance bounced on his heels and patted Mr. Trump on the back. And Mr. Trump seemed briefly overwhelmed, squinting and looking as if he were holding back a tear.

The song over, the crowd filled the silence, Republican delegates pumping their fists and chanting, “Fight! Fight!” — replaying Mr. Trump’s defiant shouts in Butler, Pa., on Saturday — a call that is quickly becoming a rallying cry.

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Prominent Black Republicans made a prime-time pitch for Trump.

Most of the men mentioned their families’ experiences with the racial segregation of the Jim Crow era and the low-income single mothers who raised them. But they also celebrated the personal and professional triumphs they have enjoyed — both Mr. Hunt and Mr. James underlined their West Point bona fides, while Mr. Scott spoke of his work in the U.S. Senate.

They also levied thinly veiled criticisms against Democrats.

“Black people were sold on hope,” Mr. James said. “Now our streets are rife with crime, our kids can’t read, and illegals are getting better help from Democrats in four days than we have gotten in 400 years.” He later quipped, “If you don’t vote Donald Trump, you ain’t Black” — an allusion to Mr. Biden’s assertion four years ago that Black voters “ain’t Black” if they were considering voting for Mr. Trump.

And all underlined the need for Mr. Trump to return to the White House, arguing that it would improve Black communities.

“This November, we are not deciding simply the fate for the next four years — we are setting a course for the next 40 years,” said Mr. Scott, the only Black Republican U.S. senator and a onetime vice-presidential contender. He drew the most applause from the audience when he declared, “America is not a racist country!”

The spotlight on Black male conservatives comes as the Republican Party seeks to make inroads with Black communities, particularly Black men. Mr. Trump won more than 12 percent of Black men in 2020, according to exit polls. And current surveys of the presidential race show that growing numbers of Black voters are interested in supporting Mr. Trump this November.

Black conservatives have sought to take advantage of this enthusiasm gap with appeals to Black men, whose support they believe they can build upon to stunt Democrats’ progress at the margins. Mr. Hunt and Mr. Donalds have coordinated a handful of events geared toward Black voter outreach, including events at cigar bars in Philadelphia and Atlanta, the Democratic heartbeats of two battleground states. Black Republicans are also hosting several Black outreach events in the Milwaukee area this week.

Asked about these efforts during a Bloomberg round-table discussion in Milwaukee on Monday, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia said that “there’s definitely an opportunity” for Republicans to appeal to Black voters this November.

A lot of Mr. Trump’s message “is resonating with people,” he said.

Amber Rose, a mixed-race model and a former partner of the rapper Kanye West, also addressed the crowd on Monday. In her remarks, she said that while she had once been skeptical of Mr. Trump, she had realized she agreed with many of his policies after looking into him herself.

“That’s when it hit me,” she said to cheers from the crowd. “These are my people. This is where I belong. I let go of my fear of judgment, of being misunderstood, of getting attacked by the left, and I put the red hat on, too.”

Sarafina Chitika, a spokesperson for the Biden campaign, disagreed with Ms. Rose’s comments: “A vote for Donald Trump is a vote to line the pockets of millionaires like Rose at the expense of actual Black communities, and those are the facts.”

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Whatley then did the same for Trump, who stood, applauded and reached out and took Vance’s hand. And we are now adjourned for the day, until tomorrow’s programming.

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In J.D. Vance, Donald Trump selects an inheritor.

If elected in November, Mr. Trump, 78, can serve only a single term — the 22nd Amendment states that no person shall be elected president more than twice — a rarity for a candidate naming a potential vice president. That short tenure has added extra urgency to the question of what comes next for Trumpism, a movement inextricably tethered to one man who has so thoroughly transformed the Republican Party.

Mr. Vance, 39, is the first millennial to make a major presidential ticket, a Marine veteran and a politician who has thoroughly remade himself as a full-throated MAGA enthusiast. In recent months, it was Mr. Vance’s aggressive defense of Trumpism and Mr. Trump, even on mainstream news outlets, that helped him stand out for the former president as a worthy inheritor.

“Trump is going to hold on to the MAGA baton for as long as he can,” said Chip Saltsman, a longtime Republican strategist. But Mr. Vance, he added, is “somebody that’s going to have an inside track, a head start on getting the MAGA baton in four years.”

The changing of the ideological guard was clearly, and at times uncomfortably, apparent on the convention floor on Monday. Mentions of Mr. Vance’s name earned roars of approval. The face of Senator Mitch McConnell, an avatar of the pre-Trump G.O.P., inspired boos when he appeared on the big screens above delegates.

Mr. Trump, whose fame soared from hosting the television show “The Apprentice” for more than a decade, has long been leery of anointing anyone a successor. He made his choice of Mr. Vance after months of deliberations and less than 48 hours after an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania that has rattled the nation.

“President Trump and I have talked about this a great deal and I feel certain J.D. feels the same way,” said Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, a close Republican ally of the former president. “What they’re focused on right now is not some sort of long-term vision, it’s about November.”

Still, as Alex Conant, a veteran Republican strategist who has worked on presidential campaigns, put it, “The next presidential race starts in January 2025.”

Jeff Kaufmann, the chairman of the Republican Party in Iowa, where the nominating contest will begin yet again in 2028, hailed Mr. Vance as representing “a new generation of Donald Trump policies.”

Representative Ashley Hinson of Iowa called the choice “inspired.”

“I’m 41 and J.D.’s 39, right? So I think about that next generation of Republican leader — I’m inspired by this pick,” Ms. Hinson said. “I’m sure he’ll be back in Iowa a lot.”

Any succession plan is far from secured.

As Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s vice president, can attest, the balancing act of serving as the No. 2 to Mr. Trump is uniquely perilous. Mr. Pence spent almost the entirety of his four years as a loyal lieutenant. Yet his decision to certify the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021 — as Trump supporters constructed gallows for the vice president outside the Capitol — forever tarnished the Trump-Pence relationship.

Mr. Vance, notably, has said he would not have certified the election.

Mr. Vance is not viewed as the politically safe pick. He has been serving in public office for just 18 months. He has never been through a presidential run, unlike the other top contenders, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota.

Mr. Vance has also embraced some more radical and far-reaching ideas aligned with Mr. Trump, including once calling for the firing of “every civil servant in the administrative state” to replace them with “our people.” More recently, in a post on X, he blamed President Biden and the Democrats for rhetoric that “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Not so long ago, Mr. Vance’s acid pen was trained on Mr. Trump.

Back in 2016, Mr. Vance called him “cultural heroin” and even compared him to Hitler. After the election, Mr. Vance’s best-selling book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was almost required reading for liberals seeking to understand how Democrats had fumbled away an election in which working-class white voters turned out in record numbers to elect Mr. Trump.

Now Mr. Trump is betting there is no one more devoted than a convert.

Republicans hope Mr. Vance’s elevation to the ticket will cement the new demographic appeals of the Republican Party to the working class. In his book, Mr. Vance recounted his own hardscrabble upbringing in poor corners of Ohio and Kentucky.

“We’ve seen a movement in the Republican Party to appeal to more blue-collar workers — it’s a continuation of that,” said Gov. Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, who has disagreed sharply with both Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance on some issues, including aid to Ukraine. Mr. DeWine said the pick showed that the former president “wants someone who is closely aligned to him on policy.”

Mr. Biden’s first remarks about Mr. Vance on Monday were to tag him as “a clone of Trump on the issues.”

The choice of Mr. Vance was also a victory for the more isolationist forces pressing for an America First ideology. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who is slated to speak at the convention later in the week, was among those who said they were thrilled.

At an event on Monday, Mr. Carlson said the strongest case for the first-term senator was in the enemies he had amassed. “Every bad person I’ve ever met in a lifetime in Washington was aligned against J.D. Vance,” said Mr. Carlson, an outspoken opponent of American military entanglements abroad.

At least in the immediate term, Mr. Vance is expected to amplify rather than reshape Mr. Trump’s vision. But he arrives on the ticket aligned, on both foreign and domestic matters, focused less on slashing spending and more on curbing the administrative state, and with a skepticism of intervening abroad.

“He is somebody who represents what we need more of in politics, which is someone who is smart, independent-minded, energetic,” Vivek Ramaswamy, the Trump-aligned former presidential candidate, said on Monday. “The one negative is that leaves one fewer of those people in the Senate who are already scarce enough to push our America First agenda.”

Mr. Ramaswamy was born and raised in Ohio and signaled his interest in the Senate seat. If Mr. Vance is elected vice president, Mr. DeWine will then appoint an interim senator.

Mr. Vance also has had some key Silicon Valley financiers in his corner, including David Sacks, who spoke at the Republican convention on Monday, the multibillionaire Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who contributed $10 million to a pro-Vance super PAC in 2022.

Blake Masters, who ran for Senate from Arizona in 2022, also with $10 million in Thiel support, praised Mr. Vance’s “unique vision.”

“It’s not just about what conservatism has been in the past, which is obviously an important part of conservatism, but it’s about where do we go in the future,” Mr. Masters said. “I think that is what made Trump so different in 2016. He was actually talking about things in a different way than Republican politicians who had come before.”

Mr. Masters lost his 2022 race. He is running for a House seat this year with Mr. Vance’s backing, while Mr. Trump has endorsed his rival. Mr. Masters mockingly appropriated one of Vice President Kamala Harris’s favorite sayings to sum up the Vance pick.

“J.D. is what can be, unburdened by what has been,” he said.

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“They hired 85,000 new I.R.S. agents to harass hard-working Americans.”

The majority of those new employees will replace the 52,000 expected to retire in the near future, and many will focus on customer service and updating the agency’s technology infrastructure — not investigating the finances of ordinary Americans.

Of the agency’s current work force of 82,000, about 10,000 are agents, 8,000 of whom perform audits and 2,000 of whom investigate potential tax crimes. In fact, the two most common I.R.S. jobs have little to do with tax auditing or investigations: About 17,000 are customer service representatives who answer taxpayer phone calls, and 10,000 are seasonal employees who file mail or transcribe data. Other jobs include lawyers, examiners, technicians and appeals officers.

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Trump started to smile as he entered the arena. He climbed the stairs into his box, then pumped his fist and clapped as he acknowledged the crowd.

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“When Donald Trump was president, I helped him spread economic prosperity with the largest tax cut in American history.”

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