The Reinvention of J.D. Vance

J.D. Vance looks annoyed. It’s a Tuesday afternoon in August, and we’re sitting near the front of his campaign plane, flying from a rally in Michigan to a fundraiser in Tennessee. Across the aisle is his mother Bev, whose role in Vance’s traumatic and disruptive childhood he chronicled in his best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. As flight attendants serve Chick-fil-A, Vance gripes about the ongoing controversy over his three-year-old comments complaining that the U.S. is being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs, and “childless cat ladies” who “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country’s future. As with his boss, Vance’s instincts are to punch back. “I think it’s a ­ridiculous thing to focus on,” he says, “instead of the underlying argument I was trying to make.”

Since being tapped by Donald Trump, Vance has been mired in a series of controversies like this. Some have been silly political attacks, like the baseless fabrication, spread widely on social media, that he committed a sexual act with a piece of furniture. Some have been cringey, like his response to white supremacists’ attacking his wife, the daughter of Indian immigrants. (“Obviously, she’s not a white person,” he replied, “but I just, I love Usha.”) Some have been substantive; he’s disparaged the millions of Americans who don’t have children. And some have had consequences: Vance’s willingness to spread the debunked claim—shot down by both local officials and the state’s Republican governor—that Haitian migrants in an Ohio city are eating people’s pets resulted in bomb threats and the harassment of legal immigrants by right-wing extremists. Surveys show public opinion of Vance has fallen since his debut as Trump’s VP.

Vance’s penchant for provocation has often obscured the set of ideas he’s seeking to advance. The Ohio Senator has positioned himself at the vanguard of an emerging ideology often described as the “New Right” or “National Conservatism.” The movement is socially conservative and economically populist. Vance argues that decades of unfettered trade, increased immigration, and market consolidation have led to a loss of jobs and opportunity, the disintegration of families, and widening regional inequality, vesting too much cultural power in the hands of liberal elites and too much economic power in corporate boardrooms. The political project aims to resolve a long-­standing issue for Republicans, whose need to win over heartland voters on cultural issues is in tension with an economic agenda that has benefited the wealthy over the working class.

To Vance’s allies, his elevation to Trump’s No. 2 was an indication their side has the upper hand in the looming battle over what the GOP should be after Trump exits the scene. “It was a very clear message and recognition that the Republican Party has been transformed,” says Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whom Vance edged out for the job. And it appeared to position Vance, at 40, as the heir apparent to the Make America Great Again movement, or at the very least one of the figures poised to define the party’s post-Trump future.

But for Vance’s ideas to carry the day, he has to survive the role. He has been a forceful tribune for much of Trump’s agenda, including restrictive immigration measures, across-the-board tariffs, and limiting foreign entanglements. But Trump is also running as a classic business-­friendly Republican who wants to cut taxes and regulations. He recently told some of the nation’s wealthiest donors that he would lower their tax burdens to make them even richer. Since locking up the GOP nomination, Trump has cozied up to billionaires such as Elon Musk and the libertarian financier Jeff Yass, who have made no secret of their desire to quash renewed antitrust efforts, dis­empower unions, and restore laissez-faire Reaganomics.

No running mate agrees with the top of the ticket on everything. ­Kamala ­Harris opposed Joe Biden’s record on busing. Biden, before becoming Vice President, supported the Iraq War, whereas Barack Obama did not. But Trump sees politics through the prism of power and loyalty, not ideology. His last Vice President, Mike Pence, was a faithful understudy until he followed his conscience and the Constitution on Jan. 6, 2021—at which point Trump appeared willing to sacrifice Pence to a braying mob chanting for Pence’s hanging. Vance has endeared himself to Trump through professions of ­unalloyed fealty; he has said he would have followed Trump’s scheme to decertify the 2020 election.

The partnership already shows some signs of strain. Trump has more than once distanced himself from Vance. He told an interviewer that VP picks have “virtually no impact” on elections. In the debate with Harris, he disavowed Vance’s claim that Trump would veto a national abortion ban. While Trump has professed satisfaction with his pick, some in his orbit believe he made a mistake. “Vance didn’t propel him forward. It kind of pulled him back,” says a close Trump ally. “There’s a lot of blowback on the J.D. pick.”

The former President remains attracted to Vance’s bootstrap biography: the kid from a broken home who made it to Yale Law School via the Marines; who parlayed his fame as an author into founding a venture-­capital firm; and who evolved from a withering Trump critic into one of the former President’s most vehement boosters. “J.D. Vance is doing a wonderful job,” Trump said in a statement to TIME. “I could not be more pleased.”

During the final stretch of the campaign, Vance’s ideas and political instincts alike will be tested as he attempts to play the dual role of Trump’s pit bull and lapdog. At the vice-­presidential debate Oct. 1 with Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Vance will aim to prosecute the case against the Democrats without alienating either swing voters or his boss. To ideological fellow travelers, the larger task is to win the battle of ideas and ­reorient the GOP. Winning the election is just the first step. “There’s going to be a long debate,” Vance tells me. “It’s not going to happen overnight.”

A few months into Trump’s first term, in November 2017, Vance gave an address at Oberlin College in Ohio, one of the most liberal campuses in America. In an auditorium filled with the eager faces of literature professors and art-­history majors, Vance spoke of the disintegrating social fabric in blue ­collar America: fewer people joining churches, jobs shifting overseas, community structures collapsing. Many felt they no longer had a place in the American story. In that void, he argued, the Trump constituency emerged. Vance had recently published Hillbilly Elegy, which earned him a reputation as a MAGA whisperer—a public intellectual who could demystify the phenomenon for cosmopolitan audiences. “He became this kind of agent who would come and tell you from behind the lines what the enemy is thinking,” says Phil Longman, policy director of the anti­monopoly think tank Open Markets, who attended the speech.

Vance’s background was always more complicated—and more interesting—than that portrait suggested. He grew up in Middletown, Ohio, with a single mother who struggled with addiction. It was a childhood defined, in his own telling, by a perpetual effort to please the succession of father figures who cycled through his mother’s home. After high school, during which he sometimes lived with his grandparents, he joined the military and served as a combat correspondent in Iraq. From there, he attended Ohio State University and Yale Law School. In New Haven, he gained mentors such as Amy Chua, the original Tiger Mom, and right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, who hired him to work for one of his Silicon Valley venture-­capital firms after graduation.

At first, Vance was adamantly anti-Trump, calling him “cultural heroin” and “reprehensible.” In a 2016 text message to a former Yale roommate, Vance wrote: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a--hole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.” But as the success of Hillbilly Elegy gained him entry to more elite circles—from speaking at the Aspen Institute to writing a column for the New York Times—Vance says his views evolved. He noticed, he says, how the elite audiences he encountered looked down on the people he grew up with, and how they championed ideas that had benefited themselves at the expense of American workers.

Read More: How Far Trump Would Go.

Gradually, Vance says, he came to rebel against the policy orthodoxies that had prevailed for decades. Before Trump came along, both parties broadly supported free-trade agreements, increased immigration, economic deregulation, and muscular interventionism abroad. Vance was part of a generation skeptical of the effects of such policies. He grew up amid a confluence of crises: the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; the Great Recession; the opioid ­epidemic. He believed the highest levels of economic concentration since the Gilded Age had ravaged Middle America. “There’s a geographic element to economic growth that didn’t exist before,” he says, describing an economy controlled by fewer and fewer companies, concentrated in fewer and fewer places. As a venture capitalist, Vance recalls seeing biotech startups trying to cure Alzheimer’s disease struggle to recruit neuroscientists because so many were gobbled up by Facebook.

“After Trump won, there was this rethinking going on both on the right and the left about neoliberalism—about unfettered trade, about market consolidation, about immigration, about unionization,” says Matt Stoller, research director for the American Economic Liberties Project. “He’s part of that Republican realignment.” The core assumption of Reaganism—that government is the problem—was challenged by the realization that unconstrained corporate power was threatening Americans’ liberty. For Vance, Trump came to represent an opportunity. It wasn’t just their areas of policy alignment; Trump was waging war against the political establishment, creating the space for new ideological movements to emerge.

Another factor in Vance’s evolution was his conversion to Catholicism in 2019. Vance, who had never been baptized, came to the church through an uncle by marriage and the influence of intellectual heroes like René Girard. It was appealing not only for its social traditionalism but also for its vision of political economy. One of the forebears of Catholic social thought, Pope Leo XIII, published an encyclical in 1891 that outlined the deleterious effects of unregulated markets on family and community. Allies say Vance’s Catholic faith helped to transform a conviction reflected in Hillbilly Elegy that blamed the people he grew up with for their own misfortune, rather than recognizing the systemic forces grinding them down. “I think that over the years,” says Sohrab Ahmari, a friend and leading voice of the New Right, “he’s reached the truer conclusion of his own book.”

Around this time, Vance met Tucker Carlson at a conference. The then Fox host was struck by how Vance voiced hostility to a class that still saw him as a cultural conduit. “He was talking about what he had learned from growing up in southern Ohio, going to Yale Law School, being welcomed into this new world, being thrilled by it, and then discovering,” Carlson says, “that a lot of these people were just careerist frauds.”

Vance’s antipathy for them hardened during the pandemic. He had come to believe the government should incentivize the formation of families and promote child-­rearing. In his view, COVID-19 mitigation measures, like keeping kids out of school, revealed how policymakers were doing the opposite. “I was kind of astonished at how little real reflection there was about all of the COVID policies,” he says. “There’s a certain segment of America’s leadership class that I think really has become explicitly antifamily and explicitly antichild.”

After the pandemic, Vance became a regular on Carlson’s show, then the most-­watched program on cable news. Often the segments focused on the culture war or on Big Tech, which both Vance and Carlson accuse of censoring conservative speech. “The problem with Google is not just its market power,” Vance tells me. “It’s the way that it uses its market power to influence politics.” The former President saw Vance on Carlson’s show and was impressed. In February 2021, when Trump was in exile after the Jan. 6 attack and Vance was eyeing a run for an open Ohio Senate seat, the pair met for the first time at Mar-a-Lago at the suggestion of Carlson, Trump’s eldest son Don Jr., and the financier Omeed Malik, who all urged the ex-President to give one of his former critics a chance. For Vance, much was on the line; receiving Trump’s backing was the easiest path to rise in the modern GOP.

Read More: Breakfast With J.D. Vance.

When Vance walked into Trump’s private office, there were printouts on the desk of Vance’s past salvos, according to a source familiar with the meeting. “You said some nasty sh-t about me,” Trump said. Vance apologized, saying he had bought into media misrepresentations. Over time, he told Trump, he came to realize that the policies Trump championed would help the people he wrote about in Hillbilly Elegy. Trump was pleased. They left the ­meeting ­agreeing to stay in touch. Vance told Trump he wanted to earn his support.

For much of the Ohio Senate ­primary, Vance trailed in the polls despite the largesse of Thiel, the explicitly pro-­monopoly libertarian who poured $15 million into a super PAC supporting him. But in April 2022, less than a month before GOP primary voters cast ballots, Trump delivered an endorsement that lifted Vance to victory.

By the time J.D. Vance got to Capitol Hill, he no longer had the boyish face from his book’s jacket. He grew a beard and slimmed down. He came to Washington ready to fight the governing class.

In some ways, Vance’s Senate tenure was an audition for his current role. He has backed Trump’s election lies and expansive vision of presidential power, as well as draconian immigration laws, protectionist trade policies, and limited American involvement overseas, including ending U.S. support for Ukraine. The month Vance took office, he became one of the first GOP officials to endorse Trump for President, at a moment when his dominant victory in the 2024 primary was far from assured. He quickly became one of Trump’s most vociferous defenders in Congress.

At the same time, he proposed legislation that can fairly be described as progressive. He introduced bills with Democrats to beef up regulations on railways and CEO pay, and to eliminate tax breaks for large corporate mergers. He called for raising the minimum wage and worked on a bill to prevent insurance companies from charging new mothers co-pays. He proposed legislation to crack down on the Visa-­MasterCard duopoly and praised Biden’s trust-­busting Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan.

This agenda reflects a changing Republican Party. In the Bush years, Thomas Frank wrote What’s the Matter With Kansas?, which argued Americans voted for presidential candidates with whom they culturally identify instead of those who would better serve their economic interests. Wealthy Manhattanites routinely voted for Democrats (who wanted to raise their taxes), while rural Kansans routinely voted for Republicans (who wanted to erode the social safety net). By tacking to the right on culture but to the left on economics, the New Right argues Republicans can chip away at the Democrats’ coalition.

Read More: How Kamala Harris Knocked Donald Trump Off Course.

Vance had both critics and boosters when Trump set to the task of finding a running mate. Trump liked the way he performed in television interviews and admired his résumé. “President Trump is a big fan of credentials,” says his confidante Kellyanne Conway. On July 12, Trump met with advisers and suggested he was leaning toward Vance. The next day, just hours before he was the target of an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, Trump met with Vance at Mar-a-Lago, but didn’t offer him the position. After the shooting, Trump had just two days before delegates at the Republican National ­Convention would meet to formally nominate his running mate. A battery of ­advisers and GOP officials begged him to choose someone other than Vance. In Vance’s corner were Carlson, Don Jr., and Malik, among others. Internal polling showed that neither Vance nor the alternatives moved the needle, according to a source familiar with the surveys, so Vance’s allies argued Trump might as well pick the running mate he preferred, and with whom he felt most aligned.

Vance missed Trump’s call offering him the position on the morning of July 15. When Vance called back, Trump ribbed him: “Maybe I should have picked Marco.” Trump hard-liners were thrilled at the choice. Says Charlie Kirk, head of the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA: “It represents MAGA having staying power.”

I joined Vance at the rally in Big Rapids, Mich., where a China-based manufacturer is building an electric-­vehicle battery plant—a development that captured a mix of Trumpian grievances. Speaking to a crowd of supporters in red MAGA hats, Vance argued that Democrats eased border restrictions to allow more immigrants likely to vote for them into the country, and that corporate titans supported the moves to gain low-skilled workers. The speech reflected his role in the campaign: an attack dog deployed most often to the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, where the campaign believes its apostate of elite culture connects with the white working-class voters who may decide the election. “That’s where J.D. plays really well,” says Malik.

Back on the plane, I asked Vance about the immigration claim. You think it’s bad when politicians thwart tougher immigration policy to benefit themselves, I say, but didn’t Trump do just that with the bipartisan bill he persuaded Republicans to block, which would have funded thousands of new border agents, allocated $650 million for the border wall, and expedited deportations? “Oh, no, no, no, no,” Vance replies. The bill “was a disaster.” But Republican critics, including GOP Senators, say Trump torpedoed it to prevent Biden from notching a political win before the election.

The exchange is emblematic of Vance’s campaign challenge. He must simultaneously reconcile the contradictions of his past and present stances, while juggling the desire to advance a post-­neoliberal future with the hard-edged pugilistic style that pleases his boss. The task will require a daunting level of political acrobatics and acumen. It’s not clear Vance—or anyone else—has the agility to pull it off.

In the past, Vance has supported abortion bans with no exceptions for rape and incest; now he has adopted Trump’s stance that abortion should be a states’-rights issue. Vance has said people with children should pay lower taxes, saying in 2021 that the government should “reward the things that we think are good” and “punish the things that we think are bad.” The point Vance was trying to make with his comments, he says now, was that policymakers should promote nuclear families that can stave off the trauma and dysfunction he endured as a child. “I think ­everybody’s viewpoints are influenced by how they grew up and their perspective and their life experiences,” he says. “I’m no different.”

Critics like Sarah Longwell, the GOP strategist who runs Republican Voters Against Trump, say Vance’s hard-line social views are deeply unpopular with most voters in her focus groups. She is also skeptical that Vance’s MAGA pivot is fully genuine. “I think he has something in mind right now that he views as an ideological lodestar,” she says. “I wouldn’t say that I think he’s got a core that’s driven by something other than the pursuit of power. He figures out who the richest or most powerful alpha in a room is, and then he sucks up to them and adopts their project. It’s what he did with Thiel. It’s what he did with Tucker. It’s what he did with Trump.”

On his plane plastered with Trump­ian epigrams, Vance makes the case for Trump’s second-term vision of enhanced executive power. After Trump said he wanted to have a say over the Federal Reserve—eroding a division of power that prevents Presidents with political motives from determining monetary policy—Vance endorsed the idea. “In a democracy, you should ask yourself why it’s not ideal for the political leadership to have control over most of the questions in the country,” he tells me. When I ask whether that means Harris should gain the same powers as President, he takes issue with the question, before conceding that, according to his own argument, the answer has to be yes. “I think it would be a disaster,” Vance adds.

As the jet makes its final descent into Tennessee, an aide tells me I have to return to my seat in the back. Before I do, I ask Vance whether he thinks that Trumpism, as a set of ideas, will outlast Trump himself. Vance recognizes the verdict is still out. “I’m going to try to make sure that happens,” Vance says. “But a lot depends on this election, and a lot depends on how our party ­responds to it.”—With reporting by Brian ­Bennett