It started with a meeting at Mar-a-Lago more than three years ago. Later, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk and other key allies made direct appeals on his behalf.
The meeting got off to a bad start.
J.D. Vance walked into Donald Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago on a warm winter afternoon in February 2021. The former President had a thick stack of papers on his desk: printouts of Vance’s copious broadsides against Trump. Vance’s past criticisms had included an essay in one of Trump’s least-favourite magazines, The Atlantic, where Vance described Trump as “cultural heroin” – a purveyor of false promises to the white working class.
Trump, using an expletive, bluntly told Vance: “You said some nasty stuff about me.” The discussion that followed was described in detail by two people with knowledge of the meeting who insisted on anonymity to talk about a private conversation.
Vance’s next move was crucial. This was the first time he was meeting Trump, and Vance needed the former President to like him or at least leave the meeting with an open mind. Vance – the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a best-selling memoir about his troubled upbringing and the struggles and pathologies of the white working class – was running for the open US Senate seat in Ohio as a Republican populist, a Never Trumper turned pro-Trumper.
Vance decided to immediately apologise. He told Trump that he had bought into what he described as media lies and that he was sorry he got it wrong. Of all people, Vance told Trump, Vance himself should have understood.
Trump agreed, telling Vance that he should have understood because Vance had written the Hillbilly Elegy book. His implication was that Vance should have supported him because Trump’s own base of non-college-educated voters angry about globalisation, immigration and foreign wars were exactly the people Vance purported to represent.
At that point, Trump seemed disarmed, and the meeting went on for almost two hours. They discussed the 2020 election and the Ohio race, but mostly they talked about the difficulties of politics. It had been less than a month since Trump left the White House a pariah, in the wake of a pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol after the President had spent two months lying about a stolen election.
Trump closed the conversation by asking Vance what he wanted. Trump told him that everyone else had already been down to Mar-a-Lago begging for his endorsement – a reference to Vance’s potential opponents in the Ohio Senate primary.
Vance, who along with a spokesperson for Trump declined to comment for this article, told the former President he wasn’t going to do that.
Trump, surprised, asked Vance if he wanted the endorsement.
Vance said that of course he wanted it, but that Trump should let him run his race, and see how he did. Vance said he would not be the type of candidate who would attack the former President when the media came after him.
Trump seemed intrigued. All right, Trump replied, telling Vance, whom he called J.D., to take care and check in from time to time.
Trump had relatively little personal contact with Vance after that first meeting, but he took note as Vance kicked off his Senate campaign in July 2021, ran circles around his primary opponents in debates and became a frequent presence on Tucker Carlson Tonight, at the time the top-rated show on cable television.
Trump was impressed. He told allies he thought Vance was smart and handsome – “those beautiful blue eyes”, he’d say repeatedly – great on TV and a killer at the debates. Trump, who split with allies at the influential conservative group Club for Growth in backing Vance, felt validated when Vance won the general election against his Democratic rival, Representative Tim Ryan, and then immediately became one of Trump’s most vocal supporters in the Senate.
When Trump announced his third campaign for President, in November 2022, at a time when most Republicans wanted nothing to do with him, Vance distinguished himself by immediately signalling to Trump’s staff that Vance was all-in.
Since then, Vance has played his cards nearly perfectly, making himself visible at key moments, promoting himself assertively but not too much, publicly backing Trump during his Manhattan criminal trial and having the right people champion him to the former President at the right time.
That day in early 2021, Vance was ushered into Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago by one of the most secretive donors in GOP politics: Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal who broke with Silicon Valley to support Trump for president in 2016. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump jnr, was at the meeting, too.
Though initially sceptical of Vance’s loyalty, Donald Trump jnr became close friends with him over the course of the Senate campaign. He became a huge asset when allies of Vance’s rivals for running mate tried desperately to undermine Vance with a pressure campaign aimed at changing the elder Trump’s mind.
Now, the 39-year-old Vance has become the party’s vice-presidential nominee.
An experienced fighter in the modern culture wars, Vance is in many ways a different type of running mate from the one Trump selected in 2016: Mike Pence was a Ronald Reagan conservative and evangelical governor whose penchant for spontaneous prayer unnerved the man under whom he served. In Vance, Trump is picking someone whose impulses for fighting against existing institutions and challenging global systems match his own.
Yet the arc of how Trump made his choices in 2016 and in 2024 had similarities. He had described both Pence and Vance as “out of central casting”. Then Trump began to question his options and solicited the opinions of everyone he spoke to, before ultimately returning where he began.
But the lead-up to Trump’s selection of Vance was even more chaotic than it was with Pence. It was uncertain down to the final hours, with a frantic lobbying effort until the last possible moment by anti-Vance forces, including Rupert Murdoch and his allies, with some of it playing out in public.
Trump seemed uncertain right until the end, privately raising some of the negative comments Vance had made about him in the past. Allies of Vance, including Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, ran a counter-campaign to reassure Trump about the selection, with supportive calls to the former president continuing until the moment Trump finally told Vance of his decision, on Monday afternoon, less than half an hour before he announced his choice on social media.
The debate moment
Six months into his Senate campaign, Vance was seen by most as the walking dead.
Throughout the fall of 2021, he was savaged in the Ohio Republican Senate primary by television commercials that re-aired his past condemnations of Trump. Vance’s support fell precipitously in private polling, and even Trump privately voiced concerns about the impact the ads were having in the race. Many Republican operatives believed Vance’s chances of surviving the onslaught were close to zero.
He began his comeback on a debate stage.
At a March 2022 debate among the crowded Senate Republican field, Vance’s two main rivals – Josh Mandel, a former Ohio state representative and treasurer, and the businessman Mike Gibbons – nearly came to blows on the stage.
Vance seized the moment. He described their fight as “ridiculous” and confronted Mandel for using Mandel’s military service as a “political football” earlier in the debate, calling it “disgraceful”, setting off a burst of applause in the room. The moment presaged Vance as a deft performer on his feet, one who would eventually eviscerate his general election rival, Ryan, on the debate stage.
Trump relished that primary debate confrontation and felt that it showed Vance had what it took. Trump has always paid close attention to debate performances, crediting his own showing in the 2016 debates for his victory over Hillary Clinton. He told allies he liked what he’d seen from Vance. One month after the debate, Trump formally endorsed him.
Vance was also helped in that race by conservative media relationships that would prove not just durable but critical in helping him become Trump’s running mate.
The most important of those relationships have been with Carlson, the former Fox News host; the reporter Matthew Boyle at Breitbart; and the political activist Charlie Kirk. Their support meant that in the conservative media ecosystem – the arena that decides the political life span of the average Republican – Vance was a made man.
The East Palestine visit
Trump announced his own candidacy for President a week after the November 2022 midterms.
His campaign launch was a disaster.
High-profile Maga (Make America Great Again) candidates endorsed by Trump had lost midterm races they should have won. Trump was blamed for the disappointing results, and most Republican elected officials stayed away from his presidential kickoff event at Mar-a-Lago.
Shortly after he announced his campaign, Trump ignited a string of controversies, including calling for the termination of parts of the Constitution to overturn his 2020 defeat and dining with Kanye West, a rapper whose stream of vitriol against Jews stirred outrage, and Nick Fuentes, a notorious white supremacist.
Trump found himself abandoned by many in the Republican-leaning media, with Fox News extolling his main presidential primary rival, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, and his favourite newspaper, the New York Post, giving DeSantis the headline title: “DeFuture”. A chorus of prominent conservatives was saying it was time for fresh blood.
Vance was not among them.
He signalled privately to Trump’s team, shortly after the midterms, that he planned to endorse the former President. He said he wanted to make an intellectual argument for Trump that would resonate with the donor class and other elites, according to a person briefed on the exchanges. He ended up announcing his endorsement in late January 2023 in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, praising Trump’s foreign policy. The proactive support was reassuring to the Trump team amid so many threatened defections at a time when the campaign seemed rudderless.
The Trump campaign found its direction a month later, in February. It started with a visit to a derailment site of a train that had been carrying hazardous chemicals through East Palestine, Ohio.
President Joe Biden and his advisers had been criticised for days for not visiting the site, and Vance was among the most vocal critics of the federal response. Biden’s administration blamed policy rollbacks from Trump’s era for the derailment.
Trump’s son Don jnr soon had a thought: what if his father visited the site? He ran the idea past both Vance and Trump’s top adviser, Susie Wiles, and a plan was soon in place. Flying aboard his plane, dubbed Trump Force One, from Florida to Ohio for the event, Trump was watching Fox News. Vance was on the air. The former President turned to his son and observed that Vance had been “incredible, hasn’t he?” – using an expletive to underscore the point.
When the plane landed, it was clear that Trump was stepping into a media vacuum created by Biden’s absence. Walking down the movable stairs from his plane on the tarmac, Trump appeared on the extensive television coverage as if he were still President.
He travelled in a motorcade, distributed red Maga caps to local residents and delivered water bottles to the community – all on TV. He bought burgers for first responders at a local McDonald’s.
Vance stood alongside him throughout the day, the two men condemning federal officials they said had left the region behind. It was an early test of what they might be like on a campaign trail together.
The decision
By the fall of 2023, chatter was growing that Vance was a top contender to be Trump’s running mate. But while advisers to both men had discussed the possibility informally, it had not become a topic of conversation between Trump and Vance.
Trump plainly liked Vance, according to people close to the former President. The chemistry between the two – one of the ingredients in a hire that Trump values most – was clear.
Vance had approached the relationship differently from a number of people who have grown close to Trump over the years. He valued scarcity. He did not call Trump constantly, and his list of requests was extremely limited. He sought help from Trump on only two matters: he asked him to endorse the businessman Bernie Moreno in his run for the Senate in Ohio, and he asked Trump to support a rail safety bill that Vance co-sponsored with the state’s Democratic senator, Sherrod Brown. Trump did both.
Vance was slow to believe Trump would actually pick him as a running mate, people close to him said. His view started to change around the New Hampshire presidential primary in late January, as he campaigned for Trump in the state and drew a warm response.
He also began to fit the part more visibly. Trump commented to allies on how good Vance was looking – how his beard appeared more groomed, how his suits fit better and how he’d lost weight. Vance had been working out and going for long runs.
Trump has also been solicitous of Vance’s wife, Usha. About a month ago, the Vances were at an event with Trump when he asked Usha how she liked political life. When Usha Vance gave an anodyne answer, Trump replied that his wife hated it, too, adding an expletive. Usha Vance laughed at Trump’s answer, according to a person briefed on the interaction.
Vance’s allies began an aggressive strategy to show he could be successful in two areas that preoccupied Trump: performing well in adversarial interviews on mainstream news channels, and bringing in new financial supporters.
Vance’s advisers booked him on a slew of shows on CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS, including one appearance that caught Trump’s eye, with the CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, shortly after Trump was convicted in his Manhattan criminal trial. Vance was the first vice-presidential hopeful to show up in court to support Trump, and he stepped up his aggressive televised defence of Trump after the conviction.
Vance helped pave the way for Trump with some Silicon Valley donors. He spent months working on David Sacks, an entrepreneur whom Vance has called “one of his closest confidants in politics”, to support Trump. That effort resulted in a US$12 million ($20m) event for the Trump campaign. Sacks said at the event that it “would never have happened” without Vance’s support, according to a person familiar with his remarks.
Musk, one of the world’s richest men and the owner of the website X (formerly Twitter), has emerged as a quiet ally of Vance’s, according to two people briefed on the relationship. Musk has viewed Biden’s re-election as an existential crisis for the nation and told Trump directly that he should choose Vance as his running mate, describing the Trump-Vance pairing as “beautiful”, according to one of the people with knowledge of their relationship. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Yet it was Don jnr and his allies who pushed Vance most insistently – publicly and privately.
For most of the year, Trump’s associates have said that the former president was not especially enamoured of any of his VP choices, doubtful that any of them would make much of a difference to his chances in November. And yet in recent weeks, he told people that he liked the idea of someone who could carry on his Maga legacy, something Trump believed the two other top contenders – Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota – were not as well positioned as Vance to accomplish.
Trump continued playing Hamlet of sorts, polling nearly everyone he encountered about what they thought he should do.
That was reminiscent of 2016, when Trump had told everyone for weeks that Pence was “out of central casting” but still insisted he hadn’t made up his mind and was receptive to last-minute pitches from allies of Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie. He ultimately offered the job to Pence while telling Christie that he hadn’t done so, before finally making the choice public.
Trump listened to a number of last-minute efforts to block Vance’s selection.
The anti-Vance campaign was intense, widespread and carried right up until the final hours before Trump announced his choice. Several major Republican donors, including the hedge fund magnate Ken Griffin, as well as the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, tried to persuade Trump not to choose Vance. (A Griffin spokesperson wouldn’t address what he told Trump, saying only that there were a number of good options and that Trump and his team had been “thoughtful”.)
Murdoch even went so far as to dispatch senior executives and columnists at the New York Post to meet with Trump and dissuade him from picking Vance. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager who is also close to Melania Trump, argued privately that other options, such as Rubio, were better, according to several people with knowledge of her outreach effort.
The Murdoch crowd lobbied aggressively for Burgum, in private and in editorials in the New York Post. When the anti-Vance forces made their arguments to Trump, they focused on Vance’s prior criticisms of the former President and on Vance’s youth and inexperience. But in many cases, these GOP donors were motivated because they loathed Vance’s ideology and policy positions, especially his staunch opposition to US support for Ukraine against Russia.
Old comments made by Vance about Trump began to circulate on social media, and were put in front of the former President, who indicated to associates that they had given him pause.
But Trump was repelled by a Daily Mail article describing Burgum weeping at various moments. “When I see a man cry, I view it as a weakness,” he once said. Allies also brought to Trump’s attention the fact that Burgum had signed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, a point that could become a liability in a general election.
Trump told associates that he viewed Rubio as disloyal for having campaigned in 2016 against Rubio’s friend and mentor, Jeb Bush, and wondered whether he could be trusted.
In the final days, all three leading candidates made direct pitches to Trump.
Burgum let it be known that he had no interest in serving in another role in the Trump administration, a stance that did not play well with Trump, who had mused about making him the Secretary of Energy, according to two people briefed on the matter.
Vance was flown to Mar-a-Lago late last week aboard the plane of Steve Witkoff, a real estate investor and one of Trump’s few close friends.
When word got back to Tucker Carlson a few weeks ago that Trump might be wavering on Vance, he intervened. Carlson, who was visiting Australia on a speaking tour, phoned Trump and delivered an apocalyptic warning, according to two people briefed on their conversation. He told Trump that Rubio could not be trusted – that he would work against him and would try to lead America into nuclear war. Carlson, who declined to comment for this article, told Trump that Burgum could not be trusted, either.
Carlson told Trump in that June phone call that he believed that if he chose a “neo-con” as his VP – an abbreviation for Republicans who favour using US power to implant democracy abroad – then the US intelligence agencies would have every incentive to assassinate Trump in order to get their preferred president.
He also warned against listening to the advice of allies of Carlson’s former employer, Murdoch. “When your enemies are pushing a running mate on you,” Carlson told Trump, referring to the Murdoch empire, “it’s a pretty good sign you should ignore them.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
Written by: Jonathan Swan, Nic Antaya and Maggie Haberman
Photographs by: Haiyun Jiang and Maddie McGarvey
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
