I’m from the same place as JD Vance and there will be nothing to celebrate if he becomes Trump’s VP

Like so many millions of my fellow citizens, I watched in horror on Saturday as a would-be assassin came perilously close to murdering former president Donald Trump. This was not just an attack on him and those innocent people simply exercising their First Amendment right to attend a political rally. It was not just an attack on the Republican Party.

It was an attack on the very fabric of American democracy.

Political violence has become a norm in our divided and beleaguered nation. From the 2011 attack on Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to the 2017 shooting of Republican Steve Scalise to the attack last year on Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, to this weekend’s horrific attack which left one of our fellow citizens dead, we are increasingly solving our differences not with ballots and votes, but bullets and violence.

Neither side in this cold civil war, now cataclysmically close to boiling point, can claim the moral high ground. Would that someone told my fellow Appalachian, JD Vance.

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” the junior senator from Ohio tweeted last night following the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

JD Vance is a Republican. I am a Democrat. He is anti-abortion; I am pro-choice. He supports the MAGA movement; I do not. He is currently the favorite to be announced as Trump’s running mate for the 2024 election; I am a freelance writer who studies Appalachian Studies at a small local university. We are different, he and I.

We are also eerily similar. Vance was born in 1984 and grew up in Middletown, Ohio. I was