From sceptic to superfan: Senator JD Vance's dramatic Trump turnabout

Simon J Levien

16 July

Senator JD Vance, who joined former President Donald J Trump’s 2024 ticket on Monday, once described his new running mate as a kind of “cultural heroin” — and privately feared that he could be “America’s Hitler.”

That was nearly a decade ago, when Trump’s political ascent coincided with Vance’s rise as the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” his memoir of growing up poor in  Ohio.

In a 2016 article in The Atlantic, “Opioid of the Masses,” Vance wrote: “During this election season, it appears that many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever.” He went on: “It enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump.”

Times change.

By 2018, Vance’s stance had softened, as he viewed Trump as speaking, if coarsely, to the frustrations of the people he had written about. By 2022, when Vance was running for Senate in Ohio, the self-described “Never Trump guy” from six years earlier received a race-changing Trump endorsement.

In a 2016 opinion column for USA Today, Vance wrote, “Trump’s actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd.” That year, Vance told NPR that Trump was the only presidential candidate who was trying to tap into rural frustrations but that he was “leading the white working class to a very dark place.”

In 2020, Vance supported Trump’s re-election bid, and the next year, he announced his campaign for Senate in Ohio. He apologized for having called Trump “reprehensible,” and he deleted his numerous critical social media posts.

“I regret being wrong about the guy,” he told Fox News in July 2021.

After Trump’s loss in 2020, Vance advanced his unsubstantiated claims about widespread election fraud. He told a Youngstown, Ohio, newspaper that there were “certainly people voting illegally on a large-scale basis,” and he has repeatedly said that the election was not free and fair.

After Vance supported Trump, the former president threw his valuable endorsement the other way. “Vance may have said some not-so-great things about me in the past, but he gets it now,” Trump said in his endorsement.

Vance, in response, posted on Twitter that he was “incredibly honored” and that he would support Trump’s agenda in office. “He was an incredible fighter for hard working Americans in the White House, he will be again,” he wrote.

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