How J.D. Vance Rocketed Onto Trump’s VP Shortlist
Bestselling author and former Trump critic has become the most articulate voice for a new brand of conservatism
Sen. J.D. Vance has been in office only since 2023 but is already a leader in the MAGA movement.
Sen. J.D. Vance has been in office only since 2023 but is already a leader in the MAGA movement. MARK PETERSON/PRESS POOL
By Molly BallFollow
July 8, 2024 5:00 am ET
The billionaires settled into their seats in the palatial San Francisco mansion, munching on waffle-cut potato chips topped with caviar and tiny sliders impaled with American flags. When it was time to begin, a bearded young senator quieted the crowd to introduce his friend, the former president.
The roomful of Silicon Valley grandees was an audience newly receptive to Donald Trump, including the homeowner and host, David Sacks, a venture capitalist and podcaster who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and didn’t back a candidate in 2020. Many others were current or former Democrats. But they came together one evening last month, as Trump noted in his opening remarks, thanks to Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who in less than two years in elected office has emerged as a leading light of the MAGA movement—and now a top contender for Trump’s running mate.
Some of MAGA-world’s biggest influencers are lobbying Trump to pick Vance, including the right-wing podcaster and current federal inmate Steve Bannon, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Carlson said that picking Vance would be “a sign of Trump’s commitment to his own voters,” whose views he said Vance uniquely understands. “Clearly, the leadership of the modern Republican Party is not equal to the most basic task, to represent its voters, and to the extent they don’t do that, they’re useless and deserve to die.”
The 39-year-old Vance owes his rapid rise to his unparalleled ability to articulate the tenets of a new conservative movement—often termed “national conservatives” or “the new right”—that channels Trump’s chaotic impulses into doctrine, and sometimes goes beyond them. Believers call on the GOP to abandon its old mainstays of free trade, fiscal restraint and internationalism in favor of tight borders, tariffs, muscular state intervention in the economy and a retreat from the world stage.
Former President Donald Trump endorsed Vance in his 2022 campaign for U.S. Senate from Ohio. PHOTO: GAELEN MORSE/REUTERS
Others said to be under consideration to be Trump’s running mate—including North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio—are Republicans from the traditional GOP mold, though both have pledged fealty to Trumpism as it has reshaped their party. Their selection, like that of Mike Pence in 2016, would show that Trump was committed to continuing to share the party with its old guard. A Vance pick would be different: a forceful statement that Trump plans to go all in on the populist nationalism with which he has infused the GOP.
“What’s at stake here is not the election—none of these people are going to affect the election,” said Robert Lighthizer, who served as U.S. Trade Representative in the Trump administration and views Vance as an avatar of the “working man’s Republican Party.”
“What’s at stake here is where the party and the country are going to go,” Lighthizer said. “J.D. Vance would be a person who would take us 20 years into the future.”
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From Trump critic to ally
Vance, who declined to be interviewed for this article, came to fame in 2016 as the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” a memoir of his hardscrabble upbringing that became a hit for the way it seemed to explain the Rust Belt’s unexpected swing to Trump. The book made him an elite darling, cited by Hillary Clinton and featured on CNN. In that first foray as a public intellectual, Vance was staunchly anti-Trump, at one point calling him “America’s Hitler.”
Much has been made of Vance’s reversal from Trump antagonist to fervent cheerleader. For his part, Vance has described his conversion as being “red-pilled,” indicating a sudden revelation of a different reality. But longtime acquaintances say Vance’s political preoccupations were largely consistent throughout. More than a decade ago, Vance was a lawyer in D.C. who fell in with a group of conservative reformers and occasionally wrote for National Review. “He was always, I would say, more of a populist than most of us,” said Yuval Levin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute whose latest book is about reinvigorating the Constitution. “What interested him was how to get the right more focused on working families.”
Vance was on the campaign trail in 2022 in Batavia, Ohio, for the Senate seat he would capture that year. PHOTO: DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
Levin, a Trump skeptic, said he respects Vance’s intellect but worries that he has put it to use in service of a dangerous agenda. “His original reaction to Trump was a fear that Trump would discredit all these ideas he was interested in,” Levin said. “I think that was right. But he came to the view that Trump would actually advance them, and formulated a set of arguments trying to give some intellectual coherence to populist conservatism.” Vance has endorsed Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election being “rigged” and has said that as vice president he wouldn’t have certified the election as Pence did on Jan. 6, 2021. Levin worries that Vance’s arguments have served to legitimize and justify some of Trump’s more radical impulses. “I worry about Trump in a way that he no longer does, so I certainly worry that that’s what he’s doing.”
Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, said Vance has personal experience with the hollowing out of Middle America that has led many conservatives to re-evaluate their priorities. “Where there is a seeming departure from conservatism is his very stark recognition that in 2024 we’re a lot weaker as a country than we were in 1984,” Roberts said. “I think he sees that more clearly than other conservatives because he is a child of the Rust Belt that has been ravaged by well intentioned, or not so well intentioned, policy choices.”
By 2022, the same political realignment Vance’s book helped to explain had created the conditions for his own political career. Ohio, a state President Barack Obama won twice, went for Trump by wide margins in 2016 and 2020. Vance went on Carlson’s show, at the time the top prime-time show on cable news, from his Senate campaign launch at an Ohio factory. He continued to court conservative media by leaning into the types of controversies that tended to galvanize the right online.
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“The decline of universities, attacks on the court, gender ideology, he was talking about a lot of this stuff well before it was in the mainstream,” said an Ohio Republican who knows Vance. “I thought it was nuts at first, but he really had his finger on the pulse.”
His taste for provocation was evident in his first campaign ad, which advisers said Vance wrote himself. “Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans?” Vance asked in the ad. “The media calls us racists for wanting to build Trump’s wall.” The text on-screen identified him as an “America First Conservative.”
A crowd in Vandalia, Ohio cheered for Vance shortly before Election Day in 2022. PHOTO: JOSHUA A. BICKEL/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Vance also began courting Trump, beginning with a spring 2021 meeting at Mar-a-Lago accompanied by the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who Vance once worked for and who pumped tens of millions of dollars into his candidacy. The breakthrough came during a primary debate when Vance’s opponents came out in favor of a no-fly zone in Ukraine enforced by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Vance alone opposed it, and his comments caught the eye of Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr., according to a friend of both men.
Seeing how Vance was being attacked by the party’s “neocon” wing, Trump Jr. began defending him in public and advocating for him behind the scenes, including with his father. Within a few weeks, Trump Sr. had endorsed Vance, ensuring his victory in the May 2022 primary. Trump Jr. and Vance have become close personal friends, both men have said.
Vance went on to win the November election against Democratic congressman Tim Ryan by a healthy margin—a bright spot in a midterm cycle that was otherwise disappointing for Republicans, as numerous other unconventional Trump-backed Senate candidates lost.
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A Senate populist
As a senator, Vance quickly carved out a distinctive profile, beginning with the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment that occurred just a month after he was sworn in. He worked with Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown to craft rail-safety legislation and helped orchestrate Trump’s visit to the site at a time when the former president’s hopes for recapturing the leadership of the party were still in question.
It wasn’t the only unlikely bipartisan pairing for Vance, whose critique of the effects of modern capitalism resembles that of some liberals. He has praised Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, whose crusades against corporate consolidation have made her a Wall Street bête noire. And following the March 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, he teamed up with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) on legislation to claw back the salaries of executives of failed banks. Neither that measure nor the rail-safety legislation has reached the floor of the Senate, in part because in both cases many Republicans oppose what they see as unwarranted interventions in markets.
In the Senate, Vance has reached across the aisle, including to fellow Ohioan Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown on rail-safety legislation. PHOTO: KEVIN WOLF/ASSOCIATED PRESS
But Vance has most made his mark in the Senate with his work on the Ukraine issue, where he has been the ringleader of opposition to further U.S. funding. In closed-door Republican caucus meetings, the freshman senator held his own in debates with pro-Ukraine counterparts such as Sen. Mitt Romney (R., Utah). Vance’s dogged and relentless agitation against the funding came as an unpleasant surprise to GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), who strongly supported it and appeared to view Vance’s opposition as ungrateful.
“J.D. Vance and I obviously are on opposite sides on Ukraine. We spent $35 million” to get him elected, McConnell noted dryly in a November interview with The Wall Street Journal, referring to spending by his super PAC in the Ohio race. Vance, he said, “wouldn’t be here but for my efforts.” McConnell made a similar jab at a GOP lunch just last month, Senate sources said.
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Vance, who was deployed to Iraq as a young member of the Marine Corps, has said the experience soured him on what he regards as unnecessary foreign entanglements. “Have we learned nothing?” he asked in one Senate floor speech. His office issued a flurry of memos making the case against the aid. In February, he joined the U.S. delegation to the annual Munich Security Conference, a hotbed of pro-Ukraine sentiment and a testament to his zeal for taking the argument to hostile venues.
An aide to a pro-Ukraine GOP senator said Vance’s advocacy was frustrating because his arguments tended to shift and didn’t always line up with the facts. In Munich, he skipped some of the delegation’s meetings and refused to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Vance has sharply opposed further U.S. funding to Ukraine in its war against Russia. PHOTO: J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Despite Vance’s memos, the Ukraine aid passed the Senate twice, with an increasing number of Republican votes. His hard-line position against it seemed to exceed that of Trump, who never explicitly came out against U.S. funding despite repeatedly expressing skepticism of it. Some Vance critics say a Vice President Vance’s devotion to intellectualizing Trumpism could put him at odds with the actual Trump’s famous inconsistency.
An example of that malleability came at the end of the Vance-orchestrated Silicon Valley fundraiser, which raised $12 million for Trump’s campaign. The former president joined Sacks on his popular “All In” podcast for a wide-ranging conversation. Asked about immigration, Trump took a stance seemingly at odds with the restrictionist agenda both he and Vance have espoused, saying, “If you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country.” (A few hours later, a spokeswoman walked back the comments.)
Yet the event also typified Vance’s chameleonic talent. “There isn’t a candidate that I think straddles both the tech and venture capital community and plays as well as Vance does to working class Americans,” said Omeed Malik, founder and president of venture-capital firm 1789 Capital.
Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA president, said Vance, like Trump, is a traitor to his class, having been welcomed into elite society and then turned his back on it. “Selecting J.D. would be a signal to the neocons in D.C. that era of endless war is coming to an end,” he said. “And you can’t backdoor me through the vice president anymore, because he has the same worldview as Trump.”
