J.D. Vance And Donald Trump's Complicated History Explained

On July 15, 2024, former U.S. president Donald Trump, who is hoping to return to the White House, announced his choice for vice president. His pick, J.D. Vance, a first-term Republican senator from Ohio, had gone from calling his running mate "cultural heroin" and pondering whether he might be "America's Hitler" to becoming one of his most strident supporters. Trump made the announcement on Truth Social: "As Vice President, J.D. will continue to fight for our Constitution, stand with our Troops, and will do everything he can to help me MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN." But just a few years ago, Trump believed Vance's political chances were "dead as a dog," according to Politico.

Trump and his vice presidential pick's complicated history began in 2016 when Vance rose to national prominence with the publication of his non-fiction book "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis." The work explored not only Vance's childhood growing up poor in Appalachia, an often misunderstood region of the Southeastern U.S., but also its opioid and economic issues, and political disenfranchisement. Back when Trump was running for U.S. president in 2016 and Vance was on the talk show circuit promoting his book, he was strident in his opposition to the controversial candidate. In August 2016, he told ABC News that he didn't see him "offering many solutions" to the white working-class.

The next month, in September 2016, J.D. Vance's criticism of Donald Trump was even harsher. He told interviewer Charlie Rose on his PBS show that he didn't believe Trump was "the right candidate" for the white working-class. "I'm a Never Trump guy," he said. "I never liked him." He also mused in private messages with his former Yale roommate Josh McLaurin (now a Democratic Georgia state senator) in February 2016 whether Trump was cynical like Richard Nixon or "America's Hitler" (via the Ohio Capital Journal).

By July 2021, when Vance entered the U.S. Senate race, he had completely changed his tune. He echoed Trump's 2020 stolen election lies and whitewashed the seriousness of the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by the president's supporters in the final days of his presidency. Most recently, Vance blamed Democrats for Thomas Matthew Crooks' assassination attempt on Trump. "Today is not just some isolated incident," Vance wrote on X. "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." The 20-year-old gunman was a registered Republican who also donated a small amount of money to a left-leaning organization. Still, as of this writing the FBI has been unable to pin down a political motive behind the attack.

In December 2021, J.D. Vance was running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, just one of many Republican candidates vying for the spot. Donald Trump was trying to decide who to endorse during a meeting with his advisors. "I like J.D. [Vance] but they tell me he is dead as a dog," Trump told his team (via Politico). He went on to grumble that Vance had said "some nasty stuff" about him in the past. After Trump met with Vance, who he called "handsome," he eventually backed the Senate hopeful, who won the seat in 2022.

"Like some others, J.D. Vance may have said some not-so-great things about me in the past, but he gets it now, and I have seen that in spades," Trump said in his public endorsement of the senator (per CNN). After picking Vance as his running mate, though, reports suggested the former president was wavering on that decision in light of President Joseph Biden dropping out of the race. Atlantic writer Tim Alberta wrote on X on July 22, 2024 that he'd recently "heard from Trump allies" that they were "second-guessing" picking JD Vance, calling it "a selection ... that was borne of cockiness, meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter."

Learn more about the harsh reality of J.D. Vance.