The Senate newcomer and author of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ was once an acerbic Trump critic.
Former President Donald J. Trump has chosen Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio to be his running mate, wagering that the young senator will bring fresh energy to the Republican ticket and ensure that the movement Mr. Trump began nearly a decade ago can live on after him.
Mr. Vance, 39, is a political newcomer who entered the Senate only last year, but he has spent that time methodically ascending the conservative firmament. Once an acerbic Trump critic — attacking Mr. Trump as “reprehensible” and calling him “cultural heroin” — he won Mr. Trump’s backing in his 2022 Senate race by wholly embracing his politics and his lies about a stolen election. The endorsement lifted him above a crowded field, and ultimately to the Senate.
Mr. Vance, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who became best known for writing the memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” did not forget it. He quickly emerged as a top defender of the former president in the halls of Congress and on television, taking his cues from Mr. Trump while frequently bucking the priorities of Senator Mitch McConnell, the chamber’s longtime Republican leader.
Mr. Trump’s announcement came just days after he survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania, an episode that underlined the significance of his selecting a running mate who might be in line as Mr. Trump’s successor.
Mr. Vance, an ardent and vocal defender of Mr. Trump, went further than many of his allies, directly attributing the shooting to the rhetoric of President Biden and his campaign, even as Mr. Trump and his campaign called for unity.
“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,” Mr. Vance wrote on X.
In Mr. Vance, Mr. Trump has tapped an ambitious ideologue who relishes the spotlight and has already shown he can energize donors on behalf of the presumptive nominee. His youth — there are nearly 40 years separating them, and Mr. Vance is the first millennial nominated to a major-party ticket — could prove a boon to the ticket, as voters have expressed concern over both Mr. Trump’s and President Biden’s ages. And the choice positions Mr. Vance, intentionally or not, as the likeliest Republican yet to carry Mr. Trump’s ideological legacy beyond a potential second term in the White House.
Mr. Vance achieved renown after the publication in 2016 of “Hillbilly Elegy,” about growing up poor in Ohio and Kentucky. The timing dovetailed with Mr. Trump’s political rise, and Mr. Vance, then a “Never Trump” conservative, became sought out for his perspective on what fueled Mr. Trump’s popularity among white working-class voters.
At the time, Mr. Vance argued that Mr. Trump was guiding “the white working class to a very dark place,” particularly over his offensive remarks about immigration and his efforts to blame immigrants for economic woes. But Mr. Vance said his views shifted during the Trump presidency. And by the time he entered the Republican primary for a Senate seat in Ohio in 2021, he had adopted Mr. Trump’s hard-right messaging and renounced his previous views about immigration and trade.
Three weeks before the primary, Mr. Trump rewarded his conversion with an endorsement that carried Mr. Vance to victory in a crowded primary. And in the Senate, Mr. Vance’s adherence to Trumpism stood out among his peers.
Yet the two men’s similarities could prove a drawback. Mr. Vance has rooted his career in speaking for the working class against elites, but in aligning himself so squarely with Mr. Trump, it is unclear whether he can bring voters to the table who are not already on board. Mr. Vance is in lock step with Mr. Trump on nearly every issue, and he may not have much to offer more moderate or independent voters unenthusiastic about Mr. Trump’s policies or turned off by his actions leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 election results.
His choice of Mr. Vance capped months of feverish running-mate speculation — and follows an intense anti-Vance lobbying effort that tried to get the former president to pick other top contenders such as Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota or Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. Some of those pressuring Mr. Trump to not select Mr. Vance included major Republican donors and Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire media mogul.
All the politicians considered in the top tier of candidates for Mr. Trump’s running mate had competed against him in Republican presidential primaries: Mr. Rubio ran against him in 2016, and Mr. Burgum and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, another name long in the mix, both ran in the primary this year.
Compared with other possible selections, Mr. Vance has relatively little governing experience should he ascend to the presidency. But he has never directly competed against Mr. Trump, and his political career exemplifies how devotion to Mr. Trump has practically become a precondition in Republican politics.
Embracing Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud in 2020, similarly, proved a key loyalty litmus test for any candidate angling for the vice-presidential slot. More than any other top contender for a spot on the ticket, Mr. Vance has endorsed and promoted Mr. Trump’s lies that the election was stolen. Unlike Mr. Rubio or Mr. Scott, who both voted to certify Mr. Biden’s victory after the police had managed to clear the Capitol of rioters on Jan. 6, Mr. Vance was not in the Senate then and did not have to put his position on the record.
Mr. Vance is part of a group of roughly a dozen Republican senators who have tried to push the Senate toward Mr. Trump’s MAGA ideology, particularly with isolationist views on foreign policy. He unsuccessfully clashed with Mr. McConnell to block a foreign aid package that provided $61 billion to Ukraine and repeatedly opposed efforts to avert a government shutdown.
During his frequent television interviews this year, and as he has hit the campaign trail for Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance has echoed the former president’s hard-line views on immigration and his stance on trade.
In addition to his news media appearances defending Mr. Trump, which The New York Times has reported played a role in the selection process, Mr. Vance also notably joined Mr. Trump’s entourage during his criminal trial in Manhattan in May. Outside the courthouse, he held a news conference attacking the prosecution’s star witness, Michael D. Cohen, while Mr. Trump was bound by a gag order that prohibited him from doing so.
Raised largely by his maternal grandparents, Mr. Vance, whose mother battled drug addiction, grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a steel mill town which saw its fortunes decline as blue-collar jobs disappeared. After enlisting in the Marines and doing public affairs work in Iraq, Mr. Vance graduated summa cum laude from Ohio State University, then went on to Yale Law School.
Mr. Vance met his wife, Usha Vance, at Yale, and the two have three children. After time working in corporate law, Mr. Vance went to San Francisco, where he worked as a venture capitalist for Peter Thiel, a well-known conservative donor who influenced Mr. Vance’s politics and who helped support his Senate race.
Democrats are likely to attack Mr. Vance over previous comments on abortion, one of the few places where he and Mr. Trump have diverged. Mr. Vance, during his Senate run, suggested he did not believe in exceptions to abortion restrictions in cases of rape or incest and said he would support a 15-week federal abortion ban that had been proposed by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
Mr. Vance has more recently taken a softer stance, echoing Mr. Trump’s belief that abortion decisions must be left to the states, and that Republicans must soften their demands for abortion restrictions in order to win elections.
And though Mr. Vance’s fealty to Mr. Trump may have been an asset in the race for running mate — loyalty is a quality Mr. Trump values above most others — it could pose a political threat in November. Mr. Biden and his campaign have been attacking Mr. Trump as a threat to democracy and are eager to remind voters about his 2020 election lies and his role in spurring supporters to storm the Capitol to overturn the election.
In news media appearances, Mr. Vance has echoed Mr. Trump’s widely debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen. In an interview with ABC News this year, he backed schemes to create alternative slates of electors in key battleground states that Mr. Trump lost, saying, “We needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there.”
More recently, Mr. Vance has maintained that Mr. Trump had legitimate grievances over how the election was conducted, even as most of Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud have been debunked. And he has said that if he had been vice president on Jan. 6, 2021, he would have encouraged Congress to consider false slates of pro-Trump electors before certifying the election.
Mr. Trump’s vice president at the time, Mike Pence, bucked Mr. Trump’s calls to reject Mr. Biden’s victory in 2020. After Mr. Trump publicly criticized his vice president’s refusal as disloyal, some Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol chanted threats to hang Mr. Pence, who was forced to flee the mob, which had come within 40 feet of him.
But Mr. Vance told CNN this year that he was “extremely skeptical that Mike Pence’s life was ever in danger.”
