Ohio Senator JD Vance once described Donald Trump as “America’s Hitler”.
Now, he will fight for Trump to win another term in office.
The former president named Vance as his running mate on Tuesday (AEST), meaning Vance will be vice president if Trump wins the November election.
Vance joined Trump and his family at the Republican National Convention, where he was formally nominated by Republican delegates to rapturous applause.
He told Fox News he was only asked to be Trump’s running mate on Tuesday.
“He just said ‘Look, I’ve gotta go save this country. I think you’re the guy who could help me in the best way. You can help me govern. You can help me win’,” Vance said.
He also noted the pair had been close for a while, and Trump’s endorsement had been critical for Vance’s Senate bid in 2022.
Who is he?
Born James David Bowman in Middletown, Ohio, Vance was primarily raised by his grandparents after his parents divorced and as his mother struggled with addiction; he later adopted his grandparents’ surname.
After high school, he joined the Marines and served in Iraq before earning degrees from Ohio State University and Yale Law School; he met his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, while both were at Yale.
In 2015, Vance joined a venture capital firm run by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who later donated more than $US10 million ($14.8 million) to get Vance elected to the US Senate in 2022.
Vance gained fame in 2016 thanks to the release of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which chronicled his poverty-stricken childhood and earned praise for insight into the socioeconomic issues facing working-class white Americans.
“There is a lack of agency here [in Middletown] – a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself,” Vance wrote.
The book was later turned into a Netflix film with the same name.
Released as Trump’s (eventually successful) 2016 presidential campaign was ramping up, Hillbilly Elegy was looked to by both sides as an explainer on why Trump was proving so popular.
But Vance was staunchly opposed to Trump, labelling himself a “Never Trump guy” that year.
Instead of Trump or Hillary Clinton, he voted for independent candidate Evan McMullin in 2020.
“I think most people are not very ideological, and Trump, while I find him loathsome, touches a legitimate nerve,” he wrote in a Facebook message to his old Yale Law School roommate in 2016.
“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”
Vance also liked tweets that said Trump committed “serial sexual assault”, criticised the then-president’s response to the deadly 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and accused him of stoking racial and religious tensions.
Transformation into Trump supporter
Some time during Trump’s presidency, Vance changed his tune.
In a statement to CNN in June, Vance said his views on Trump changed after the latter’s “many successes in office” and his observation of the “corporate media and Deep State’s” co-ordinated efforts to undermine Trump.
“I allowed myself to focus so much on the stylistic element of Trump that I completely ignored the way in which he substantively was offering something very different on foreign policy, on trade, on immigration,” Vance told The New York Times.
Ahead of the 2020 election, he publicly pledged his vote to Trump and following Trump’s defeat, Vance echoed accusations that the election was “stolen”.
The turnaround (and his close friendship with Donald Trump Jr) paid off for Vance in 2022, when he won the election for the Ohio seat in the US Senate with the older Trump’s endorsement.
What to expect from Vance
If Joe Biden represents the elites and career politicians and Donald Trump’s brash approach resonates with the working class, Vance could be seen as the middle ground.
At the relatively young age of 39, Vance’s poverty and addiction-stricken beginnings combined with his Ivy League education and upper-crust career could help Trump appeal to a wider set of voters.
“I think we need more people like [Vance] in politics, who are energetic, dynamic, clear-headed about their ideology,” said Vivek Ramaswamy, who ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in January.
Since entering the Senate, Vance has proved willing to partner with Democrats on certain platforms, including an unsuccessful railway safety reform bill and a similarly unsuccessful push to hit executives of failed banks with sharper penalties.
But his Trump-like policy stances have sparked concern from the left.
These include cutting funding for Ukraine’s fight against Russia while continuing to send money to Israel, criminalising gender-affirming care for transgender children, banning federal mask mandates, and supporting a 15-week cutoff for abortions, even in cases of rape or incest.
Vance has suggested the Biden administration is allowing fentanyl into the US as part of a deliberate plan to kill Republican voters, saying, “It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him.”
Since the shooting at Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania, Vance said Biden could be blamed for the violence.
Despite previously criticising Trump for exploiting racial and religious tensions for political gain, Vance is now supportive of his anti-immigrant policies, such as the completion of the US-Mexico border wall.
He also blasted the UK’s new Labour government as heralding the “first truly Islamist country” with a nuclear bomb.
After Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate, Biden described him as a “clone of Trump on the issues”.
