The connections that catapulted JD Vance from Trump critic to running-mate
The journey from the foothills of Appalachia to the halls of Congress proved one thing: JD Vance understands how to accumulate power in American politics.
Less than two years after being elected to Congress for the first time, he has officially climbed further than anyone expected for such a short time — and could end up being springboarded to even greater heights.
Let’s call Monday’s announcement what it is: a massive coup by the freshest of freshman senators. The 39-year-old Vance would already raise eyebrows as a running-mate pick, considering he is one of the Senate’s youngest members. Add in the fact that he’s also in the most recent class of Republican senators to join the chamber and, on top of that, currently serving in his very first elected position, and you have something really different.
Those who know him, having run against him, are well aware of how it happened. For all his political inexperience, Vance remains a shrewd, calculating operative who was able to mold himself into a near-perfect champion for Trumpworld, despite his own long history of derision and criticism aimed at the former president before he jumped into the race. By 2022, the man who had called Trump an “idiot” and called his movement damaging to the country had completed his evolution into an effective and media-savvy cheerleader for Donald Trump.
‘’You remember in our Senate race, Trump got up onstage and insulted him. And he got back up there and smiled and shook his hand,” observed Tim Ryan, the Democrat who ran against Vance for the Senate seat Vance won in Ohio in 2022.
Ryan, who spoke to The Independent days before Vance would be selected as Trump’s running mate, described his former foe as calculating and ambitious to the point where he would change any position to be in line with Trump’s, if need be.
But Vance, he argued, cares little for the day-to-day work in DC that holding the office entails.
“l don’t think he ever really wanted to be in the Senate,” Ryan said.
Long critical of his own party’s refusal to invest in close races like his when they play out in purple-red states, Ryan complained that Vance pulled out ahead in November of 2022 thanks to a surge of cash from national Republicans while he, the Democrat and an incumbent congressman, was hung out to dry.
Very few people expected Vance’s political rise. But the Hillbilly Elegy author stormed into the general election in 2022 having already beaten a state senator, the state’s treasurer, and a former local Republican Party chair in a close primary where he was able to ride the coattails of Donald Trump past the finish line. By becoming Trump’s running mate on Monday, the senator with just a year and a half’s worth of experience has now also beaten out two other senators, including one who once ran for president himself, as well as two incumbent Republican governors (Glenn Youngkin and Doug Burgum).
After winning that April 2022 endorsement from Trump, Vance got in good with one of the most important figures with access to the former president: his son, Donald Jr, who hit the campaign trail for Vance immediately.
“Guess who else didn’t like Trump in 2016? Everybody,” Don Jr said at an event that same month. “Some of our greatest allies now and the people that have fought hardest for my father and for his agenda were not exactly fans.”
That’s a bit of a tell. Trumpworld has always been eager to embrace Republicans who bent the knee — it doesn’t matter how long it takes, the only thing that matters is to never challenge the man himself directly. Vance joins a number of other Republicans who have acted similarly, like Nancy Mace and Marco Rubio (another contender to be Trump’s running mate in 2024.) But Vance’s advantage lies in the entirety of his Trump criticism having been made before he entered politics. He completed his “evolution” before he was ever in the race for Senate, and understood from the beginning that usurping the Trumpworld mantle would be the only way to win a GOP primary in a state like Ohio, where the Republican base is fervently pro-Trump.
And it’s his work to make other connections in Trumpworld — beyond Trump himself —which has now served him in two consecutive election cycles.
“He will say whatever needs to be said to achieve power,” Ryan said of his one-time opponent. “I guess that means going through Trump’s kids.”
Also serving him well: Vance made clear in February of this year that he will be Trump’s man when it comes to issues of his election denialism conspiracies, something other mainstream Republicans have tried to shy away from. Vance said in an interview earlier in 2024 that he would not have voted to certify the 2020 election until alternate (false) slates of electors were submitted by Republican-led state legislatures around the country, who sought to ignore the voting results and submit slates of Trump-voting electors in states where he had lost to Joe Biden.
Vance’s ascension to the role of vice presidential nominee is a clear sign of one thing, beyond the senator’s own schmoozing skills. It’s an indication that, beyond the brown-nosing, Trump continues to value those who can enunciate a MAGA-fied brand of national conservatism — the right-wing populism mixed with anti-immigrant fervor which many old-school conservatives balked at when it first came on the scene.
And of course, he recognizes this. Addressing a crowd of voters after receiving Trump’s endorsement in 2022, Vance explained that the former president, in his core, was serious about an ideological reboot of the GOP. And then-candidate Vance was all on board.
“For all the crap that people give Trump, he’s actually a pretty ideological person,” Vance said that year. “He really cares about this stuff.”
“And I think that eventually, he recognized that Ohio is an important state and he doesn’t want to have a terrible senator from Ohio — like, even a Republican who wins is not good unless it’s aligned with him,” he added.
