Inside the Republican National Convention: A front-row seat to Trump's VP pick - by Emily Maitlis

Despite the myriad checkpoints, secret service agents, sniffer dogs and high wire fencing, by some weird quirk of fate we end up eating lunch on day one of the Republican convention about ten feet away from Eric Trump. I am lost in menu thoughts when Rory - my eagle eyed cameraman says ‘So funny, for a moment I thought that bearded bloke twirling spaghetti in the corner was Eric Trump’. I snort, but don't look up. I'm facially blind so the chances are it wont make much difference even if I do.

A few moments later a special agent approaches our table. I blanch as I fear we are about to get thrown out. And I am already emotionally invested in the burger I’ve just ordered. He asks which media organisation we are with and then looks apologetic. He tells us Doug Burgum - North Dakota Governor - is about to sit down next to us with his kids. And could we, erm, basically leave him alone. We promise. But it’s at this point it starts to dawn on us, I think, that we have entered VIP city central and everywhere we look we now see key Trump figureheads. At our left, is Bertie Moreno, the Republican candidate for senate in Ohio. At the bar we see Trump’s attorney Alina Habba - the legal mouthpiece for Trump’s multiple legal woes. And then we are approached by Florida congressman, Byron Donalds, a close friend of Trump, who has exchanged messages with the former president overnight.

There is an expectant feeling in the air. Something is about to happen. And then we learn that That Something is Trump’s VP announcement. Coming at 3:30 that afternoon. We have studied the shortlist - and now we look between Burgum, Moreno, Donalds, trying to find clues in their actions, their faces. We are approached by a diplomat who confirms what we have heard - that at the ridiculously precise time of 15:37 - the news will be broken on the convention hall floor.

In the end, in a rogue piece of news mismanagement, the VP announcement comes too quickly - almost accidentally - much earlier at around 2:15pm. It is released so flimsily, so clumsily that most people in the hall who have come - with the express intention of hearing the VP pick -manage to miss it and we end up explaining it to them. Unusually for Team Trump, they botch the big moment.

We see the delegates send Trump ‘over the top’ - by reaching 1215 votes - the number that clears him as the official candidate for the Republican Party. There are wild cheers in the hall as if it hadn’t been set in stone almost a full 7 months ago. And then over an hour later, JD Vance is given his moment - announced to rapturous applause to a packed convention floor. Delegates are holding up Trump signs with ‘Vance’ scribbled in lipstick underneath. They are embracing the man who - a decade earlier - had called Trump ‘America’s Hitler’. Who had referred to him as an asshole and ‘cultural heroin’. I am wondering what contortions the Trump surrogates will have to go through to explain why he’s now the man a heart beat away from Trump’s presidency

In the media hall we interview Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville who tells us he received the call from Trump at 7am, warning him that he would ‘have to find a new Ohio senator’. Tuberville believes the choice of JD Vance is a good one - he likes the idea that Trump has picked someone who dared to criticise him. But - he confesses - they are both strong willed. "JD will have an agenda.. He knows what he wants". There will, he suggests, be working tensions between the two men at the top of the ticket. Recently JD Vance has been keen to show there isn’t a cigarette paper between them. It was Vance who tweeted - in the hours after the assassination attempt on Trump - that Biden’s rhetoric was to blame. Where others were looking to calm, to lower the temperature, he went forth with a firecracker.

One of Vance’s first acts as VP has been to slander the UK’s ‘islamist’ Labour government. A country and a party he clearly understands little. At home, he’s a proud supporter of a national ban on abortion, he’s voted against IVF access and against no fault divorce. He will make Trump’s ‘abortion problem’ deeper. Push women voters further away. Because Vance is a conundrum. A man who started off one thing and became another.

Vance is the author of a best selling memoir - Hillbilly Elegy. It’s the story of his escape from a childhood of poverty and abuse to the brilliance of a Yale degree and the determination to escape his struggle. He set forth a template for how to lift the white working classes without resorting to the empty populism of Trumpism. Until suddenly, he chucked all that away. Deciding possibly that Trumpism could after all offer more ease, more power, more opportunity - to him at least - to rise to places in the Republican Party he could only imagine.

He is the first millennial VP pick - and the first with a beard for over a hundred years. He offers Trump youth, Ohio and loyalty. In whichever order Trump decides they matter. The former president reportedly only made his choice in the last 24 hours. And, whether Trump knows it or not, it is possible that in the hours after a bullet skimmed past his brain - the question of mortality was playing on his mind.

Trump has - in this VP choice - completed the remaking of the Republican Party in his own image. Trump is an old man. It’s no coincidence he appears to have picked someone half his age.

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