Donald Trump unveiled a big surprise that we’d all been waiting for on the first day of the RNC Convention in Milwaukee. Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) is his nominee for vice president this year.

Is Vance the best possible choice for America’s next vice president? Of course not. Unfortunately, Trump couldn’t convince Tucker Carlson to run.

But Vance was the least bad choice of the people who were still on Trump’s shortlist, and we should all be able to live with that. None of us were likely to change our vote based on Trump’s VP selection anyway unless he had picked Tulsi or Vivek.

With all that said and considering the myriad ways that Mike Pence betrayed Donald Trump and America, I think it’s fair to take a look at JD Vance with a critical eye. He has a lot of great positive qualities and those are what are getting all the headlines this week in conservative media outlets.

You probably know all of these already. Vance grew up poor and wrote the bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy. He joined the Marines and served one tour in Iraq, although it was as a public relations guy. That experience is part of why he’s so great at roughing up reporters. He knows all their dirty tricks.

He went to Yale Law School and became an attorney. While there, he met Usha Chilukuri, the daughter of Indian immigrants and married her. Vance’s wife was such good friends with her classmate Vivek Ramaswamy that she and JD named one of their sons Vivek (red flag).

She has a history of voting in Democrat primaries. As recently as 2014 she was voting for Democrats. The only time she has voted Republican, was when her husband ran for an Ohio Senate seat in 2022 (big red flag).

Vance’s wife is an attorney and she worked at a law firm that is directly affiliated with the DNC (enormous red flag accompanied by glaring alarm bells!!!!). Her law firm is described as a far left, very progressive firm. She resigned from her job immediately when it was announced that her husband was Trump’s VP choice, but still…

Ramaswamy, of course, emerged during the GOP primaries this year as one of the biggest phonies in the race. He is an American citizen by way of being an anchor baby. Ramaswamy is also a mass immigration globalist. He believes it would be perfectly fine for America to be flooded with a billion immigrants—so long as they have college degrees. He’s also good friends with Pete Buttigieg.

I don’t want to criticize Vance too much with guilt-by-association accusations, but it’s kind of weird that he and his wife are so close with the Ramaswamy family. Is Vance really the America First, anti-immigration eagle that he’s being portrayed as?

There’s also the fact that Vance was a notorious Never Trumper. He even called himself a Never Trumper and said that Donald Trump “disgusts” him. It’s good that he finally came around to support Trump, but I don’t think it’s untoward to have a bit of mistrust for Vance because of this. A lot of MAGA voters in Ohio apparently feel the same way.

In the 2022 election, Gov. Mike DeWine and many other Ohio incumbents won reelection by 20 points or more (DeWine won by 25). JD Vance won by 6. And that was only after Trump endorsed him and campaigned vigorously for him there. It was a Ron DeSantis-style situation all over again.

I really don’t understand people who didn’t “get” Trump from the very first day when he came down the golden escalator in 2015. Hopefully, Vance really has changed.

In the plus column, all the right people seem to hate JD Vance in Washington, DC. Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell can’t stand him. Their acolytes lobbied hard to stab Vance in the back and prevent him from becoming Trump’s nominee. The entire bloodthirsty foreign policy establishment doesn’t like him, either.

Vance has street cred from his time in Iraq and he understands that America can’t afford any additional pointless forever wars. Because of his poor roots, he seems to understand that the elites have enormous contempt for the sort of heartland Americans who fight their wars. This is one of my favorite quotes from Vance:

“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”

That is the only proper response from an American politician to the war in Ukraine. You can imagine how Lindsay Graham’s head nearly exploded when he heard that.

At the end of the day, I’m going to trust Donald Trump and cast my vote for the Trump/Vance ticket. Do I think JD Vance will pick up the MAGA torch when Donald Trump leaves office in 2029?

Nah. But at least we have Byron Donalds, Ron DeSantis, Glenn Youngkin, and many others true MAGA patriots waiting in the wings.