Few political reversals have been as dramatic and complete as the transformation of Senator JD Vance of Ohio from a self-proclaimed Never Trumper into former President Donald J. Trump’s new running mate.
Democrats have used Mr. Vance’s turnabout to paint him as untrustworthy, while Republicans have described his shift as another sign of Mr. Trump’s influence on the party. Whatever the case, Mr. Vance’s U-turn was a gradual one that played out in stages during the past eight years.
In many ways, Mr. Vance’s life has echoed the theme of change. He twice changed his name, a result of a tumultuous upbringing, and was baptized into the Catholic Church just five years ago. He has been unapologetic about his political change of heart, even weaponizing his flip-flop by blaming the news media for distorting voters’ views of Mr. Trump.
“I was critical of President Trump,” Mr. Vance said this week in Ohio. “But he cares about human beings. He is not the caricature or the lie that the media has told you that he is.”
But a review of Mr. Vance’s writings and interviews since 2016, when he first rose to fame as the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” reveals a more complicated process behind his political conversion than the “media lies” explanation he often uses.
A fierce Trump critic during the promotion of his memoir, Mr. Vance softened during Mr. Trump’s first two years in the White House. He actively began defending Mr. Trump during the second half of the president’s first term, before effectively apologizing for his own rebukes during his own Senate run. By the time he was mentioned as a potential running mate, Mr. Vance ranked as one of the most combative foot soldiers in the former president’s Make America Great Again movement.
Here’s a look at his step-by-step conversion:
At first, he was more sympathetic to Trump voters than to Trump.
In 2015, before the publication of his memoir, Mr. Vance told his book editor in an email that Mr. Trump’s rise in the Republican primary would be a lasting one. His editor, Mr. Vance said, replied that Mr. Trump would flame out as another conservative fringe candidate, but Mr. Vance pushed back.
“I said, ‘No, I don’t think that he is — there’s something different about this, there’s something substantively different,’” Mr. Vance would later recall.
By 2016, he excoriated Mr. Trump as “America’s Hitler” and said that he was “noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.” And although he ultimately voted for a third-party presidential candidate in 2016, he regularly voiced an understanding of why a former reality television show host like Mr. Trump inspired so much support.
In an interview with Charlie Rose, Mr. Vance suggested that casting judgment on Trump voters would only deepen their resolve for him.
“You’re playing into the very thing that gave rise to Trump in the first place,” Mr. Vance said, “which is a feeling that the elites think that they are smarter than you and just think you’re a bunch of idiots.”
Mr. Vance, who had once worked as an aide for Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said in 2017 that he was considering a future in politics during a podcast with David Axelrod, the director of the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and a former Democratic strategist.
Mr. Axelrod said in an interview that he had privately discussed with Mr. Vance the prospect of running for office, and that he had urged the author to consider becoming a Democrat. Mr. Axelrod recalled that Mr. Vance did not react to that advice.
“He brought up the prospect of running for office, and he was trying to figure out how and where,” Mr. Axelrod said. “He was thinking about the Republican Party, but was clearly troubled by the direction it was taking.”
Then he became, in a word, Trump-curious.
By 2018, Mr. Vance’s sensitivity toward Trump supporters shifted into more of a personal curiosity about the president.
In an updated version of his memoir that year, Mr. Vance wrote that he was intrigued by Mr. Trump’s “disdain for the elites and criticism of foreign policy blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan” and blamed Republicans for not adopting Mr. Trump’s “populist rhetoric” from the campaign trail.
In a February 2018 interview with The Financial Times, Mr. Vance called Mr. Trump the “least worrisome part of the Republican Party’s problem.”
“He is one of the few political leaders in America,” Mr. Vance said, “that recognizes the frustration that exists in large parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, eastern Kentucky.”
During a conference with business executives that year, Mr. Vance was shaken when the head of a hotel chain complained to him that anti-immigration laws had made it more difficult to hire workers and looked to the author for sympathy.
“The fact that this guy saw me as sympathetic to his problem, and not the problem of the workers, made me realize that I’m on a train that has its own momentum and I have to get off this train, or I’m going to wake up in 10 years and really hate everything that I’ve become,” Mr. Vance said in an interview last month with Ross Douthat, a New York Times columnist. “And so I decided to get off that train, and I felt like the only way that I could do that was, in some ways, alienating and offending people who liked my book.”
Mr. Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in July 2018, which started a bitter partisan fight in Washington, also resonated with Mr. Vance. His wife, Usha, had clerked for Mr. Kavanaugh when he was a circuit court judge in Washington.
“Trump’s popularity in the Vance household went up pretty substantially during the Kavanaugh fight,” Mr. Vance later said.
His praise for Trump broadened.
By 2019, Mr. Vance had started appearing as a guest on Tucker Carlson’s prime-time show on Fox News. The two bonded over a similar brand of economic populism, and Mr. Vance continued shifting his criticism away from Mr. Trump and instead targeting the Republican Party.
In May 2019, at the annual gala for The American Conservative, a Washington-based magazine, Mr. Vance said Mr. Trump had proved to be “a wild success” in transforming U.S. policy on China and by not starting a new war in the Middle East.
“He’s been more of a success than I thought he would be,” Mr. Vance said.
In 2020, his defense of Mr. Trump deepened after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“One of the core arguments of the Trump 2016 campaign is that in our supply chains, in our manufacturing economy, we had become too dependent on a globalized world, especially China,” Mr. Vance said on NPR in April 2020. “It turns out that if you want to have an economy that can weather a crisis, you actually have to be able to make some core things for yourself, whether it’s wireless technology, whether it’s pharmaceutical products, whether it’s ventilators and hospital masks.”
Mr. Vance voted for Mr. Trump in 2020, he later said. By the time he opened his Senate campaign in Ohio in July 2021, he had deleted posts on social media that were critical of Mr. Trump.
“I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016,” he said on Fox News. “I regret being wrong about the guy. He was a good president. I think he made a lot of good decisions for people.”
Early in his Senate run, he had a “just suck it up” phase.
The day after he announced his Senate bid in 2021, Mr. Vance told Time that he had understood Mr. Trump’s appeal, but that he had viewed him as someone who “was not serious and was not going to be able to really make progress on the issues I cared about.”
He added, “If I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him.”
Later in his Senate campaign, he tried to sand down his past criticisms, suggesting that those rebukes had been rooted more in a broader disdain for politics and that he had come to view Mr. Trump as a successful president.
“I assumed that everybody who ran was basically a scumbag so I had a certain mistrust that any politician would deliver on his promises, and Trump actually did a good job,” he told the Vindicator newspaper in Youngstown, Ohio. “So one of the important things is when the facts change, you change your mind. The facts to me were he actually honored his promises.”
Mr. Vance spent much of his campaign sharpening his attacks on the news media to explain away his Never-Trump past, and his praise for Mr. Trump proved effective. He won the former president’s endorsement, which helped seal the party’s nomination and, eventually, the general election.
Finally, he more fully embraced an “I was wrong” mantra.
Mr. Vance became one of Mr. Trump’s fiercest defenders in the Senate, where his political pivot remained a point of fascination as he was increasingly mentioned as a potential running mate for the former president.
“He proved me wrong,” Mr. Vance said in February 2024 during in an interview on ABC’s “This Week.” “He also proved a lot of other people wrong, which is why I think he’s doing so well in the polls these days.”
In June, he said his opposition to the former president was focused “on the stylistic element,” ignoring the substance of Mr. Trump’s policy proposals. In his interview with Mr. Douthat, Mr. Vance said that he had been “confronted with the reality that part of the reason the anti-Trump conservatives hated Donald Trump was that he represented a threat to a way of doing things in this country that has been very good for them.”
Mr. Vance suggested that the process of becoming a Trump supporter was a piecemeal one, and he paused as he seemed to struggle to put it into words.
“This is why I say it’s hard to reconstruct this stuff,” he said, “it’s so gradual.”
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