Columbus, Ohio — It was March 2022, and Senate candidate J.D. Vance stood under bright lights in a Cleveland television studio, debating with four party members about whether the U.S. should support a no-fly zone over Ukraine. It was less than a month ago that the US was at war with Russia.
“Absolutely not,” Vance said.
“I’m in the minority here,” the Marine veteran added, “because ultimately we can accept as individuals: Look, it’s tragic, it’s terrible. What Vladimir Putin did was wrong by invading a sovereign country on his border. But we have our own problems in the United States that we need to focus on.”
Vance “put America’s priorities first,” his campaign said, catching Donald Trump’s attention.
Within 25 days, the former president had endorsed Vance, which the Author of “Hillbilly Elegy” and a Yale-educated venture capitalist from Silicon Valley defeating a crowded Republican field and finally winning Ohio’s open Senate seat.
A relationship was born that has now placed Vance, 39, on Trump’s vice presidential shortlist. Trump has boosted Vance’s career, and Vance has returned the favor by relentlessly defending Trump’s policies and behaviourAccording to those familiar with the selection process, Vance’s debate skills, his ability to articulate Trump’s views and his fundraising skills are all potential assets.
It’s a far cry from where Vance’s relationship with Trump began. His best-selling book earned Vance a reputation as a “Trump whisperer” who helped explain the maverick New York businessman’s appeal in Middle America, but Vance was a never-Trumper in 2016. He called Trump “dangerous” and “unfit” for office. Vance, whose wife, attorney Usha Chilukuri Vance, is Indian-American and the mother of their three children, also criticized Trump’s racist rhetoric and said he could be “America’s Hitler.”
After Trump won, Vance returned to his birthplace of Ohio and founded an anti-opioid charity. He went to the lecture circuit and was a favorite guest at Republican Lincoln Day dinners. His sought-after appearances were less signings than opportunities to sell his ideas for the country’s recovery—an approach that detractors would see as too easy a basic exercise for enter politics in 2021.
Former Ohio Republican Senate President Larry Obhof, a fellow Yale graduate, often shared the stage with Vance at the time. He said Vance’s story, the hardships and heartbreak caused by his mother’s drug addiction, resonated. The opioid epidemic that ravaged Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia when he was growing up killed an average of a dozen Ohioans a day in 2016.
“The problems he is talking about are the problems that many people can identify with,” Obhof said.
Vance’s family left the Middletown home where he grew up, but a fan still lives there. Standing on the porch one recent morning, her six teenagers’ shoes strewn beneath a hammock, 35-year-old Amanda Bailey said she thought “Hillbilly Elegy” was doing well, and that Trump and Vance had “a great team would form’.
“I grew up here my whole life; I left, and I came back. I think he did a really good job of portraying Middletown,” she said. “Everything. The struggle, the economic aspect of it, the cultural aspect of it. Just all of it. I think it was pretty good.”
But not everyone sees the book — later made into a film by Ron Howard, starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams — that way. It prompted criticism from scholars across Appalachia, many of whom said the book deployed cheap stereotypes and failed to diagnose the roots of the region’s troubled history or offer workable policy solutions.
Some city officials in Middletown still cringe at the mention of it, fearing their city has been forever branded as an abandoned backwater, even as investments are made in local manufacturing, infrastructure and recreational opportunities.
The Senate office that Vance set up in the city sits unnoticed behind a locked door.
“So many people in Appalachia were upset about it, because he’s not telling his own story. About halfway through the book, he shifts from ‘I’ to ‘we,’” said Meredith McCarroll, co-author of the 2019 book “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy.” “Appalachia is a 13-state region that is far from monolithic, and he not only represents it as a single place, but he represents it in a very negative and victim-blaming way.”
Vance has acknowledged some criticism, recently telling The New York Times that he distanced himself from “Hillbilly Elegy” so as not to “wake up in 10 years and really hate everything I’ve become.”
Still, it introduced him to the Trump family. Don Jr. loved the book and knew Vance when he went to launch his political career. The two hit it off and have remained friends. The Ohioan’s populist rhetoric seemed Trumpian.
When Vance met Trump in 2021, he had already changed his mind and pointed to Trump’s accomplishments as president.
McCarroll said of Vance’s evolution in his book and Trump shows that he is “really willing to do and say what he needs to do and say to put himself in a position of power.”
Once elected, Vance became a fierce ally of Trump on Capitol Hill. Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, said he is now a leading voice for a conservative movement on important issues including a shift away from interventionist foreign policy, free market economics and “American culture writ large.” .
“Given his upbringing, he not only overcame that, but used that to become a great patriot serving in the United States Marines, to have a great career in business, and now to serve in the Senate ” said Roberts.
Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative activist group Turning Point USA, said Vance convincingly articulates the America First worldview and could help Trump as a running mate in states that share similar values, demographics and economics as Ohio.
“I often say that J.D. Vance’s superpower is his ability to go into hostile media environments, be calm, cool and collected and say things that are very persuasive without raising his voice,” Kirk said.
Vance’s political views are difficult to categorize.
Democrats call him an extremist, citing provocative positions Vance has taken but sometimes later changed. Vance indicated support for a national ban on abortion after 15 weeks during his Senate campaign, for example, and then softened that position once Ohio voters overwhelmingly supported an abortion rights amendment in 2023. Regarding the 2020 election, he said he would not have immediately certified the results if he had been vice president and that Trump had “a very legitimate complaint.” He has imposed conditions on honoring the results of the 2024 election that echo Trumps.
“A Trump-Vance ticket would sink the Republican Party into new depths of extremism,” Democratic National Committee spokesman Alex Floyd said in a statement.
In the Senate, Vance sometimes embraces bipartisanship. He and Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio was co-initiator of a bill on railway safety after a A fiery train derailment in the Ohio village of East PalestineHe has sponsored legislation that expands and increases funding for Great Lakes restoration and supported bipartisan legislation that gives workers and families a boost.
Chris Tape, his high school science teacher, remembers Vance as an engaging, fun 17-year-old. Vance never talked about his difficult upbringing, Tape said.
When Vance told him he was joining the Marines, Tape expressed surprise — telling him he was talented enough to write his own ticket. Vance said he loved his country and if he wasn’t willing to serve it, “it’s all talk.”
“So I know at least one thing about him,” Tape said. “He believes in his country, he believes in serving it, and he’s willing to take a harder path to do that.”