J.D Vance once told a friend he thought Trump could be America's Hitler - now he's Trump's running mate. Video edit by Alyse Wright. Video / NZ Herald, Getty Images
When Donald Trump first ran for President in 2016, one of his steadfast critics within the Republican Party was J.D. Vance – then a young lawyer and venture capitalist who in June of that year published a bestselling book about his upbringing in Appalachia and the Rust Belt.
“I can’t stomach Trump,” Vance told NPR that August. “I’m a ‘Never Trump’ guy. I never liked him,” he told Charlie Rose in October 2016, weeks before Trump was elected President. That same year, he compared Trump’s candidacy to cultural heroin and reportedly told a former roommate that Trump was either a “cynical asshole” or “America’s Hitler”.
By 2022, however, Vance ran for Senate and had changed his tune. He said he had been “wrong” for criticising Trump, who he defended as a “great” President. And on Monday, Vance’s about-face on Trump appeared to have paid off: in a post to his social media platform, Trump announced the 39-year-old Ohio Republican as his 2024 running mate, capping a meteoric rise for the GOP star.
“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice-President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
After breaking with his previous Vice-President, Mike Pence, over Pence’s refusal to overturn the 2020 election results, Trump’s selection of Vance brings the former President a No 2 who has in recent years demonstrated unflinching loyalty to him. Vance also could hold electoral strength for Trump, shoring up Republicans’ white working-class base in the Upper Midwest.
If voters choose the Trump ticket, Vance – who will turn 40 on August 2 – would become the third-youngest Vice President at the time of inauguration, as well as one with little political experience. Vance served in Iraq as a US Marine from 2003 to 2007, before studying political science and philosophy at Ohio State University and attending Yale Law School. He went on to work at a large corporate law firm and then as a principal at billionaire Peter Thiel’s investment firm in San Francisco.
He rose to fame in 2016 after the publication of his book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which chronicled his childhood in a steel mill community in Ohio in a family beset by drug addiction and poverty. Many touted Vance as an emerging spokesman for the struggles of white working-class Americans, and his book was later adapted into a 2020 Netflix movie directed by Ron Howard.
In 2019, after the success of his book, Vance returned to Ohio and founded a venture firm. Vance has hosted or helped organise high-dollar fundraisers for Trump, including one in June hosted by Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Sacks.
His evolution on Trump was perhaps not entirely unpredictable. Even in his 2016 interviews, social media posts and writings that were critical of Trump, Vance often followed up his sentiments by saying he nevertheless understood why white working-class voters would support him. To Rose in 2016, Vance said he felt “elites” directed an attitude of “we told you so” towards white working-class Trump supporters.
“The problem is if you take that attitude as sort of gloating... then you’re playing into the very thing that gave rise to Trump in the first place, which is a feeling that the elites think that they are smarter than you and just think you’re a bunch of idiots,” Vance said then.
Turning populist
In a 2018 print run of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance revealed he voted for a third-party candidate in 2016. But while he still had “reservations” about Trump two years into his term, Vance also wrote there were aspects of his candidacy that had appealed to him, including Trump’s “disdain for the ‘elites’ and criticism of foreign policy blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan” by previous administrations.
“For so many years, I and a few of my intellectual fellow travellers in the Republican Party were telling politicians to make precisely those sorts of arguments,” Vance wrote in 2018. “Yet the populist rhetoric of the campaign hasn’t informed the party’s approach to governing. Unless that changes, I suspect Republicans will pay a heavy political price.”
Trump endorsed Vance – a first-time candidate running in a crowded 2022 Republican primary for US Senate. He dismissed Vance’s past criticisms of him, saying in a statement at the time that the venture capitalist “gets it now, and I have seen that in spades”.
“He is our best chance for victory in what could be a very tough race,” Trump said.
Vance went on to win the primary and the general election, defeating former Democratic congressman Tim Ryan by more than 6 percentage points. During his term, the Ohio Republican has embraced a more populist direction for the GOP under Trump, vehemently criticising US aid to Ukraine and becoming one of the most ubiquitous defenders of the former President.
“I can’t stomach Trump,” J.D. Vance said of Donald Trump in August 2016. Vance would go on to become a senator and is now Trump's running mate. Photo / Sarah L. Voisin, The Washington Post
Vance showed his support outside the New York courthouse during Trump’s criminal trial this year, and boosted the presumptive GOP presidential nominee in frequent appearances defending him on cable TV. Vance also has grown close with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump jnr, despite a striking contrast in his hardscrabble upbringing to that of the wealthy New York real estate family.
Vance has also previously echoed Trump’s false claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 election, and has indicated he would have taken a different path on January 6, 2021, from that of Pence. Vance told ABC News in February that if he had been Vice President, he would have allowed Congress to consider fraudulent slates of pro-Trump electors.
“If I had been Vice President, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said. “That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020.”
Vance would not commit unequivocally to accepting the results of the 2024 election, telling NBC’s Meet the Press this month that he would do so “so long as it’s a free and fair election”. In the same interview, he vowed to work with Trump, even if he was not selected as his running mate.
“We’re just trying to work to elect Donald Trump. Whoever his Vice President is, he’s got a lot of good people he could choose from,” Vance said. “It’s the policies that worked and the leadership style that worked for the American people. I think we have to bring that back to the White House, and I’m fighting to try to do that.”
