Stephen King's New Post on Trump's Pick for Vice President Goes Viral

Author Stephen King suggested that former President Donald Trump was forced pick Senator JD Vance as his 2024 running mate because "his own supporters tried to kill" former Vice President Mike Pence.

King, a frequent critic of Trump, lashed out at the Vance pick in a viral image posted to social media on Wednesday. Trump announced Vance as his running mate on Monday while this year's Republican National Convention was beginning in Milwaukee. The former president survived an assassination attempt two days earlier in Butler, Pennsylvania.

In a post to X, formerly Twitter, King endorsed the idea that Vance would never have become Trump's running mate if the former president's supporters did not chant "hang Mike Pence" while storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump and Pence have been estranged since the former vice president refused overturn President Joe Biden's 2020 election win.

King's sentiments were shared on X via a doctored image of a character from the Netflix series Stranger Things. In the post, which had more than 1 million views at the time of publication, the character is holding a dry erase board with the message: "Just a reminder that the reason he has to pick a new VP is because his own supporters tried to kill the last one."

Newsweek reached out for comment to the Trump/Vance campaign and Pence's office via email on Wednesday.

King, the author of classic horror novels like The Shining and Pet Sematary, often draws significant attention from supporters and detractors over his X posts criticizing Trump.

On Sunday, King drew MAGA outrage after pointing out that the former president's would-be assassin used an AR-15-style rifle, writing that "these are the guns that the Republican party—and Trump—want to protect."

While Pence has yet to publicly weigh in on Trump's selection of Vance, the former vice president re-shared an X post on Tuesday that criticized the state of the Republican Party during the convention, which Pence is not attending this year.

The post from Tim Chapman, president of the conservative advocacy group Advancing American Freedom, argued that the first day of the convention "revealed the challenges ahead for conservatives" while denouncing the inclusion of speakers like model Amber Rose and Teamsters President Sean O'Brien.

Vance, best known for penning of the popular memoir Hillbilly Elegy before entering politics, told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday that Trump asked him to be his running mate over the phone just hours before the public announcement.

The Ohio Republican was previously a stanch Trump critic, declaring himself a "never Trumper" and pondering whether the then-future president was "America's Hitler" during the 2016 campaign.

Vance told Hannity that his past views on Trump were the result of "the media's lies and distortions" while praising the former president's time in the White House and asserting he had become "very, very close" with Trump after meeting him in 2021, around the time Vance launched his political career.