The meeting got off to a bad start.
J.D. Vance walked into Donald J. 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 Mr. Vance’s copious broadsides against Mr. Trump. Mr. Vance’s past criticisms had included an essay in one of Mr. Trump’s least favorite magazines, The Atlantic, where Mr. Vance described Mr. Trump as “cultural heroin” — a purveyor of false promises to the white working class.
Mr. Trump, using an expletive, bluntly told Mr. 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.
Mr. Vance’s next move was crucial. This was the first time he was meeting Mr. Trump, and Mr. Vance needed the former president to like him or at least leave the meeting with an open mind. Mr. 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 U.S. Senate seat in Ohio as a Republican populist, a Never Trumper turned pro-Trumper.
Mr. Vance decided to immediately apologize. He told Mr. Trump that he had bought into what he described as media lies and that he was sorry he got it wrong. Of all people, Mr. Vance told Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance himself should have understood.
Mr. Trump agreed, telling Mr. Vance that he should have understood because Mr. Vance had written the “Hillbilly Elegy” book. His implication was that Mr. Vance should have supported him because Mr. Trump’s own base of non-college-educated voters angry about globalization, immigration and foreign wars were exactly the people Mr. Vance purported to represent.
At that point, Mr. 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 Mr. 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.
Mr. Trump closed the conversation by asking Mr. Vance what he wanted. Mr. Trump told him that everyone else had already been down to Mar-a-Lago begging for his endorsement — a reference to Mr. Vance’s potential opponents in the Ohio Senate primary.
Mr. Vance, who along with a spokesman for Mr. Trump declined to comment for this article, told the former president he wasn’t going to do that.
Mr. Trump, surprised, asked Mr. Vance if he wanted the endorsement.
Mr. Vance said that of course he wanted it, but that Mr. Trump should let him run his race, and see how he did. Mr. Vance said he would not be the type of candidate who would attack the former president when the media came after him.
Mr. Trump seemed intrigued. All right, Mr. Trump replied, telling Mr. Vance, whom he called J.D., to take care and check in from time to time.
Mr. Trump had relatively little personal contact with Mr. Vance after that first meeting, but he took note as Mr. 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.
Mr. Trump was impressed. He told allies he thought Mr. Vance was smart and handsome — “those beautiful blue eyes,” he’d say repeatedly — great on TV and a killer at the debates. Mr. Trump, who split with allies at the influential conservative group Club for Growth in backing Mr. Vance, felt validated when Mr. Vance won the general election against his Democratic rival, Representative Tim Ryan, and then immediately became one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporters in the Senate.
When Mr. Trump announced his third campaign for president, in November 2022, at a time when most Republicans wanted nothing to do with him, Mr. Vance distinguished himself by immediately signaling to Mr. Trump’s staff that Mr. Vance was all in.
Since then, Mr. Vance has played his cards nearly perfectly, making himself visible at key moments, promoting himself assertively but not too much, publicly backing Mr. 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, Mr. Vance was ushered into Mr. Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago by one of the most secretive donors in G.O.P. politics: Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal who broke with Silicon Valley to support Mr. Trump for president in 2016. Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was at the meeting, too.
Though initially skeptical of Mr. Vance’s loyalty, Donald Trump Jr. became close friends with him over the course of the Senate campaign. He became a huge asset when allies of Mr. Vance’s rivals for running mate tried desperately to undermine Mr. Vance with a pressure campaign aimed at changing the elder Mr. Trump’s mind.
Now, the 39-year-old Mr. Vance has become the party’s vice-presidential nominee.
An experienced fighter in the modern culture wars, Mr. Vance is in many ways a different type of running mate from the one Mr. 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 Mr. Vance, Mr. Trump is picking someone whose impulses for fighting against existing institutions and challenging global systems match his own.
Yet the arc of how Mr. Trump made his choices in 2016 and in 2024 had similarities. He had described both Mr. Pence and Mr. Vance as “out of central casting.” Then Mr. 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 Mr. Trump’s selection of Mr. Vance was even more chaotic than it was with Mr. 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.
Mr. Trump seemed uncertain right until the end, privately raising some of the negative comments Mr. Vance had made about him in the past. Allies of Mr. Vance, including Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, ran a counter campaign to reassure Mr. Trump about the selection, with supportive calls to the former president continuing until the moment Mr. Trump finally told Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Trump. Mr. Vance’s support fell precipitously in private polling, and even Mr. Trump privately voiced concerns about the impact the ads were having in the race. Many Republican operatives believed Mr. 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, Mr. 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.
Mr. Vance seized the moment. He described their fight as “ridiculous” and confronted Mr. Mandel for using Mr. 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 Mr. Vance as a deft performer on his feet, one who would eventually eviscerate his general election rival, Mr. Ryan, on the debate stage.
Mr. Trump relished that primary debate confrontation and felt that it showed Mr. Vance had what it took. Mr. 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 Mr. Vance. One month after the debate, Mr. Trump formally endorsed him.
Mr. Vance was helped in that race also by conservative media relationships that would prove not just durable but critical in helping him become Mr. Trump’s running mate.
The most important of those relationships have been with Mr. 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 — Mr. Vance was a made man.
The East Palestine Visit
Mr. Trump announced his own candidacy for president a week after the November 2022 midterms.
His campaign launch was a disaster.
High-profile MAGA candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump had lost midterm races they should have won. Mr. 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, Mr. 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.
Mr. Trump found himself abandoned by many in the Republican-leaning media, with Fox News extolling his main presidential primary rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, and his favorite newspaper, The New York Post, giving Mr. DeSantis the headline title: “DeFuture.” A chorus of prominent conservatives was saying it was time for fresh blood.
Mr. Vance was not among them.
He signaled privately to Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Biden and his advisers had been criticized for days for not visiting the site, and Mr. Vance was among the most vocal critics of the federal response. Mr. Biden’s administration blamed policy rollbacks from Mr. Trump’s era for the derailment.
Mr. Trump’s son Don Jr. soon had a thought: What if his father visited the site? He ran the idea past both Mr. Vance and Mr. 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, Mr. Trump was watching Fox News. Mr. Vance was on the air. The former president turned to his son and observed that Mr. Vance had been “incredible, hasn’t he?” — using an expletive to underscore the point.
When the plane landed, it was clear that Mr. Trump was stepping into a media vacuum created by Mr. Biden’s absence. Walking down the movable stairs from his plane on the tarmac, Mr. Trump appeared on the extensive television coverage as if he were still president.
He traveled 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.
Mr. 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 Mr. Vance was a top contender to be Mr. Trump’s running mate. But while advisers to both men had discussed the possibility informally, it had not become a topic of conversation between Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance.
Mr. Trump plainly liked Mr. Vance, according to people close to the former president. The chemistry between the two — one of the ingredients in a hire that Mr. Trump values most — was clear.
Mr. Vance had approached the relationship differently from a number of people who have grown close to Mr. Trump over the years. He valued scarcity. He did not call Mr. Trump constantly, and his list of requests was extremely limited. He sought help from Mr. 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 Mr. Trump to support a rail safety bill that Mr. Vance cosponsored with the state’s Democratic senator, Sherrod Brown. Mr. Trump did both.
Mr. Vance was slow to believe Mr. 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 Mr. Trump in the state and drew a warm response.
He also began to fit the part more visibly. Mr. Trump commented to allies on how good Mr. Vance was looking — how his beard appeared more groomed, how his suits fit better and how he’d lost weight. Mr. Vance had been working out and going for long runs.
Mr. Trump has also been solicitous of Mr. Vance’s wife, Usha. About a month ago, the Vances were at an event with Mr. Trump when he asked Usha how she liked political life. When Ms. Vance gave an anodyne answer, Mr. Trump replied that his wife hated it, too, adding an expletive. Ms. Vance laughed at Mr. Trump’s answer, according to a person briefed on the interaction.
Mr. Vance’s allies began an aggressive strategy to show he could be successful in two areas that preoccupied Mr. Trump: performing well in adversarial interviews on mainstream news channels, and bringing in new financial supporters.
Mr. Vance’s advisers booked him on a slew of shows on CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS, including one appearance that caught Mr. Trump’s eye, with the CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, shortly after Mr. Trump was convicted in his Manhattan criminal trial. Mr. Vance was the first vice-presidential hopeful to show up in court to support Mr. Trump, and he stepped up his aggressive televised defense of Mr. Trump after the conviction.
Mr. Vance helped pave the way for Mr. Trump with some Silicon Valley donors. He spent months working on David Sacks, an entrepreneur whom Mr. Vance has called “one of his closest confidants in politics,” to support Mr. Trump. That effort resulted in a $12 million event for the Trump campaign. Mr. Sacks said at the event that it “would never have happened” without Mr. Vance’s support, according to a person familiar with his remarks.
Mr. Musk, one of the world’s richest men and the owner of the website X, has emerged as a quiet ally of Mr. Vance’s, according to two people briefed on the relationship. Mr. Musk has viewed Mr. Biden’s re-election as an existential crisis for the nation and told Mr. Trump directly that he should choose Mr. Vance as his running mate, describing the Trump-Vance pairing as “beautiful,” according to one of the people with knowledge of their relationship. Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Yet it was Don Jr. and his allies who pushed Mr. Vance most insistently — publicly and privately.
For most of the year, Mr. Trump’s associates have said that the former president was not especially enamored of any of his V.P. 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 Mr. Trump believed the two other top contenders — Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota — were not as well positioned as Mr. Vance to accomplish.
Mr. Trump continued playing Hamlet of sorts, polling nearly everyone he encountered about what they thought he should do.
That was reminiscent of 2016, when Mr. Trump had told everyone for weeks that Mr. 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 Mr. Pence while telling Mr. Christie that he hadn’t done so, before finally making the choice public.
Mr. Trump listened to a number of last-minute efforts to block Mr. Vance’s selection.
The anti-Vance campaign was intense, widespread and carried right up until the final hours before Mr. 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 Mr. Trump not to choose Mr. Vance. (A Griffin spokesman wouldn’t address what he told Mr. Trump, saying only that there were a number of good options and that Mr. Trump and his team had been “thoughtful.”)
Mr. Murdoch even went so far as to dispatch senior executives and columnists at The New York Post to meet with Mr. Trump and dissuade him from picking Mr. Vance. Kellyanne Conway, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager who is also close to Melania Trump, argued privately that other options, such as Mr. Rubio, were better, according to several people with knowledge of her outreach effort.
The Murdoch crowd lobbied aggressively for Mr. Burgum, in private and in editorials in The New York Post. When the anti-Vance forces made their arguments to Mr. Trump, they focused on Mr. Vance’s prior criticisms of the former president and on Mr. Vance’s youth and inexperience. But in many cases, these G.O.P. donors were motivated because they loathed Mr. Vance’s ideology and policy positions, especially his staunch opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine against Russia.
Old comments made by Mr. Vance about Mr. 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 Mr. Trump was repelled by a Daily Mail article describing Mr. Burgum weeping at various moments — “When I see a man cry I view it as a weakness,” he once said. Allies also brought to Mr. Trump’s attention the fact that Mr. Burgum had signed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, a point that could become a liability in a general election.
Mr. Trump told associates that he viewed Mr. Rubio as disloyal for having campaigned in 2016 against Mr. 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 Mr. Trump.
Mr. 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 Mr. Trump, who had mused about making him the secretary of energy, according to two people briefed on the matter.
Mr. Vance was flown to Mar-a-Lago late last week aboard the plane of Steve Witkoff, a real estate investor and one of Mr. Trump’s few close friends.
When word got back to Tucker Carlson a few weeks ago that Mr. Trump might be wavering on Mr. Vance, he intervened. Mr. Carlson, who was visiting Australia on a speaking tour, phoned Mr. Trump and delivered an apocalyptic warning, according to two people briefed on their conversation. He told Mr. Trump that Mr. Rubio could not be trusted — that he would work against him and would try to lead America into nuclear war. Mr. Carlson, who declined to comment for this article, told Mr. Trump that Mr. Burgum could not be trusted, either.
Mr. Carlson told Mr. Trump in that June phone call that he believed that if he chose a “neocon” as his V.P. — an abbreviation for Republicans who favor using U.S. power to implant democracy abroad — then the U.S. intelligence agencies would have every incentive to assassinate Mr. Trump in order to get their preferred president.
He also warned against listening to the advice of allies of Mr. Carlson’s former employer, Mr. Murdoch. “When your enemies are pushing a running mate on you,” Mr. Carlson told Mr. Trump, referring to the Murdoch empire, “it’s a pretty good sign you should ignore them.”
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