Donald Trump has selected JD Vance, the junior senator of Ohio and author of the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, as his running mate in the presidential race.
The announcement, made on Monday during the first day of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, marked the culmination of Vance’s stunning political evolution over the past several years.
Vance was once an outspoken critic of Trump, mocking him as “America’s Hitler” and “a total fraud”. But Vance came to embrace Trump as he sought a Senate seat in 2022, and he eventually won the former president’s endorsement in a crowded Republican primary.
“He’s the guy that said some bad shit about me,” Trump said at a rally in 2022. “If I went by that standard, I don’t think I would have ever endorsed anybody in the country.”
Vance echoed that assessment, telling rally-goers, “The president is right. I wasn’t always nice, but the simple fact is, he’s the best president of my lifetime, and he revealed the corruption in this country like nobody else.”
Vance first rose to fame in 2016 following the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, which detailed his upbringing in south-western Ohio and his later ascension to Yale law school. The book was later adapted into a 2020 film starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.
In the months following Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, Vance’s account of his family’s experiences with poverty and drug addiction came to be viewed by some critics as a revealing portrait into the lives of Americans who helped determine the outcome of the election.
“It dropped into a national shouting match that has pitted a hazily defined entity called ‘the white working class’ against an equally hazy ‘coastal elite’ as the Sunni and Shia of the American political scene,” the author Hari Kunzru wrote for the Guardian in 2016. “Readers looking to understand the class fault lines within white America will be enlightened by Vance’s narrative of class mobility, but as a guide to the new political terrain Hillbilly Elegy is uneven, and frustratingly silent about the writer’s real commitments.”
Once Trump took office, Vance became an oft-cited conservative voice frequently called upon to explain the president’s political brand to baffled cable news viewers. Vance was initially viewed as an anti-Trump Republican, as a CNN analysis found that he liked many tweets that were harshly critical of the then president in 2016 and 2017.
But that tone sharply shifted once Vance entered the 2022 Senate race, as he shaped his campaign around hard-right proposals like finishing the wall along the US-Mexico border. During the election, Democrats accused Vance of endorsing the racist conspiracy theory known as “Great Replacement” after he suggested the opposing party was attempting to “transform the electorate” amid an immigrant “invasion”.
“You’re talking about a shift in the democratic makeup of this country that would mean we never win, meaning Republicans would never win a national election in this country ever again,” Vance told voters in 2022.
Vance’s hard-right tactics were ultimately successful, as he defeated Democrat representative Tim Ryan by six points in the election. In the year and a half since he joined Congress, Vance has served as one of Trump’s most vocal and aggressive supporters on Capitol Hill. After the assassination attempt against Trump on Saturday, Vance accused Joe Biden of inciting the attack.
“Today is not just some isolated incident,” Vance posted on X. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
As Trump’s running mate, Vance will now have a much larger platform to spread that message.
