JD Vance’s journey from a ‘Never Trump’ guy to Trump’s running mate

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 military veteran, Yale Law School graduate and Silicon Valley venture capitalist who in June of that year published “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” 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,” Vance told Charlie Rose in October 2016, weeks before Trump was elected president.

In eight years, everything would change. The best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy” - which depicted Vance’s childhood in a steel mill community in Ohio in a family beset by drug addiction and poverty - became compulsory reading for many seeking to understand Trump’s appeal to the White working-class voters who had helped install him in the Oval Office.

Vance himself would eventually turn to politics, successfully running for Senate in 2022, a remarkable ascendancy for a political newcomer. By then, Vance had already walked back much of his criticism of Trump, defending him as a “great” president and echoing Trump’s false claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

And on Monday, the 39-year-old Vance was announced as Trump’s 2024 running mate, capping a meteoric rise for the GOP star and a complete transformation of the Ohio Republican from one of Trump’s fiercest critics to one of his most loyal allies. Vance strode onto the floor at the Republican National Convention to Merle Haggard’s “America First,” taking so long to shake hands with attendees that the song had to be played twice.

Introducing Vance at the convention, Ohio Lt. Gov. John Husted (R) described the vice-presidential pick as a man who would represent Americans with “moral courage, strength and honour.”

“J. D. is a living embodiment of the American Dream. He came from humble beginnings, and even as his life took him to places he might have never imagined, he never forgot where he came from. Ohio values are in his blood,” Husted said.

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, while Vance’s youth is a sharp contrast to the 78-year-old Trump in an election year where voters have voiced concerns about the ages of both President Biden and Trump.

If voters choose the Trump ticket, Vance - who will turn 40 on Aug. 2 - would become the third-youngest vice president at the time of inauguration, as well as one with very little political experience. Vance served as a U.S. Marine from 2003 to 2007 as a combat correspondent, where his responsibilities were akin to a public affairs specialist, gathering information and conducting interviews for the military’s news service.

In 2005, Vance deployed to Iraq for a six-month assignment, where he wrote about the work of fellow service members, like crews for ageing Huey helicopters, under the name James D. Hamel, taking the surname of his stepfather at the time. Vance left the Marine Corps as a corporal in September 2007. His awards, including an Iraq campaign medal, achievement and good conduct medals, are typical of enlisted service members at the time.

Vance went on to study political science and philosophy at Ohio State University and graduated from Yale Law School. Afterwards, he worked at a large corporate law firm and then as a principal at billionaire Peter Thiel’s investment firm in San Francisco. Vance is married to Usha Chilukuri, a former law school classmate and the daughter of Indian immigrants, and the couple have three children.

He rose to fame in 2016 after the publication of “Hillbilly Elegy,” which was later adapted into a 2020 Netflix movie directed by Ron Howard. As he promoted the book, Vance didn’t mince words about his distaste for Trump.

During his book tour, Vance compared Trump’s candidacy to cultural heroin and told a former roommate that Trump was either a “cynical asshole” or “America’s Hitler,” according to texts shared on social media by the roommate.

In 2019, after the success of his book, Vance returned to Ohio and founded a venture firm. Vance has hosted or helped organize 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” toward 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.

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 that 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 U.S. 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 added.

Vance went on to win the primary and the general election, defeating former Democratic congressman Tim Ryan by more than six percentage points. During his term, the Ohio Republican has embraced a more populist direction for the GOP under Trump, vehemently criticizing U.S. aid to Ukraine and becoming one of the most ubiquitous defenders of the former president.

Vance showed his support outside the New York courthouse during Trump’s criminal trial earlier 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 Jr., despite a striking contrast in his hardscrabble upbringing to that of the wealthy New York real estate family.

Soon after the July 13 shooting at a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pa., Vance promptly blamed President Biden’s campaign “rhetoric” for the incident, drawing criticism for escalating the situation before full details had emerged.

Vance has also echoed Trump’s false claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 election and has indicated that he would have taken a different path on Jan. 6, 2021, than 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.

Biden’s campaign immediately seized on Vance’s previous remarks to attack Trump’s running mate pick on Monday.

“Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people,” Biden campaign chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement.

Vance would not commit unequivocally to accepting the results of the 2024 election, telling NBC’s “Meet the Press” earlier 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.”

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Alex Horton and Maegan Vazquez contributed to this report.

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