MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin—It’s just before 4 p.m. and everyone at the Republican National Convention is jockeying for a glimpse of Senator J.D. Vance. A woman kicks off her bedazzled heels, then stands on her seat barefoot to get a better view. A delegate tells me he just borrowed a woman’s lipstick to scrawl “VANCE” in capital letters on a white Trump sign.
Everyone is craning their necks toward the Ohio delegation, where Vance is shaking hands, posing for selfies, and gleefully fist-bumping attendees who pull away with a bewildered look, as if they can’t believe they just crossed paths with the future vice president of the United States.
“We love you, J.D.,” a man bellows through a rolled-up “Trump 2024” poster.
Vance—the man of the evening—pulls back for a second, as if to process the surreality of the moment, then shouts back: “I love you too, man.”
On Monday, Vance continued his ascent as the wunderkind of the Republican Party by becoming Trump’s 2024 running mate. In a statement released on Truth Social, the former president—and recent survivor of an assassination attempt—announced that 39-year-old Vance, who was elected senator of Ohio only two years ago, was “the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States.”
Standing before dozens of cameras, a spotlight in his face, Vance beams as his home state’s lieutenant governor introduces him as “a man who loves America.” His hand never strays from the lower back of his wife Usha Chilukuri Vance, a former classmate at Yale Law School who once clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. Dressed in a dark suit, crisp white button-down, and silk blue tie—and many pounds lighter than when he first announced his bid for the Senate in 2021—he seems a little dumbfounded, scanning the crowd with his big, blue eyes.
“It’s energizing,” a delegate from outside Akron shouts over the honky-tonk music. “They’ve turned this into a battle of the old men, so having a VP pick who’s young and dynamic is a game-changer.”
It’s hard to imagine Vance drawing this reaction a few years ago, in 2016, when he was still building a brand around his best-selling autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy. At the time, coastal elites embraced the memoir, a retelling of his hard-knocks childhood in Appalachia, for its ability to decode the blue-collar voters who had helped put Trump into the White House. And while he understood and empathized with Trump’s base, he made it clear he loathed the man himself.
Right as Trump was on the ascent, clinching support and reshaping the Republican Party in his image, Vance reportedly mused in a text to a friend that he couldn’t decide if the billionaire from Queens was “a cynical asshole like Nixon” or “America’s Hitler.”
He made his distaste for the candidate known in op-eds for The New York Times—where he wrote “Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office”—and The Atlantic, in which he declared Trump “cultural heroin” with a campaign that promises “the needle in America’s collective vein.”
He even told NPR he might “have to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton,” or would vote for a third party because he couldn’t “stomach” Trump.
But by 2020, he began his political makeover by casting his ballot for Trump. The following year, he began two campaigns at once: his Senate bid and a cleanup effort to undo his years of blasting the billionaire from Queens.
He announced his race for Senate from a steel factory in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, pouncing onstage to John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses.” Wearing blue jeans, Vance sounded positively Trumpian when he proclaimed that “what we need in Washington is people who understand how the elites plunder this country and then blame us in the process.”
A week after that, he made clear what a lot of onlookers already suspected: he was squarely on Team Trump. “I obviously didn’t fully appreciate the president’s appeal in 2016,” he told Fox News. He added: “So many people think that Trump was all about personality. I don’t think they give the president or the broader movement enough credit, because it’s not just about personality. It’s about the ideas.”
Eric MacGilvray, an Ohio State professor who once wrote a letter of recommendation for Vance’s law school applications, remembers watching Vance’s pivot at the time and wondering what happened to the “very thoughtful, level-headed” undergraduate student he had taught.
“I understood the political calculation he was making, but it didn’t feel like the person I had known,” MacGilvray told me.
But the calculation was a smart one. Having successfully cast himself as the face of the GOP’s new populist movement, Vance went on to beat veteran Democratic politician Tim Ryan by seven percentage points. During his two years in office, he has become known for working across the aisle rather than torching his opponents. In the wake of the chemical explosion on a railway in East Palestine, Ohio, in February last year, for example, he has pushed for railway safety legislation alongside Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown.
Like the attendees at the Republican National Convention, the people who know Vance from his youth and college years weren’t surprised by his ascent. When Vance came to him to ask for a letter of recommendation for his law school application, Brad Nelson, who also taught Vance at Ohio State, tells me he encouraged the then-undergraduate student to shoot for the Ivy League.
“He was the finest student I had had at that point,” Nelson said, adding that he suggested he “aim higher” than state schools—or even the profession of law itself.
“I was someone who encouraged him to run for office one day because I thought he would get elected.”
Once at Yale Law, which he attended on a scholarship, he studied under professor Amy Chua, who recalled, “There must have been a hundred students in the class, but he came to my office hours early on, and for some reason we connected—hard to explain, but I really related to him.”
She says he ended up turning in “one of the top exams in the class.” There was, however, one student who scored higher than him on the exam: his now-wife Usha, who “got the single highest score.” (Usha, with whom Vance shares three young children, stepped down from her law firm job soon after her husband was announced as Trump’s VP pick.)
After Yale, Vance briefly worked for a law firm and then moved into venture capital—where he worked for billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel in San Francisco before writing the book that catapulted him to fame. Once in the Senate, he quickly blossomed into a captivating politician, says Jai Chabria, a longtime adviser to former Ohio governor John Kasich.
“The first time I saw him in front of a crowd, that’s when I saw the sparks,” Chabria told me. “People actually want to be around him. They want to know him. Because he’s exceedingly brilliant but also able to speak to broad audiences, too, in a way that everyone gets.”
The people of the Republican National Convention got it. Even though he issued no formal remarks on Monday afternoon, the crowd hung over the railing, stacked four or five people deep, hoping to shake his hand, or to just catch a glimpse of the GOP’s veep nominee. Next to me, I spot a gray-haired woman with her hands raised to her cheeks, as if holding back tears.
“I’m hoping this is an aligning moment,” she whispers. “We have to make changes and go back to the way this country used to be.”
Olivia Reingold is a reporter for The Free Press. Follow her on X @Olivia_Reingold and read her piece, “Why America’s Zoomers Are Turning MAGA.”
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