Sen. J.D. Vance’s political transformation reflects a shift in the broader Republican Party.
A man who considered himself a typical Republican and once labeled candidate Donald Trump “America’s Hitler” accepted his offer this week to be vice president in the next administration if Mr. Trump recaptures the White House.
Mr. Vance says his mistake was simple.
“I bought into the media’s lies and distortions,” Mr. Vance told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Monday, just hours after he was officially nominated as the vice presidential candidate. “I bought into this idea that somehow he was going to be so different, a terrible threat to democracy. It was a joke. Joe Biden is the one who’s trying to throw his political opposition in jail. Joe Biden is the one who’s trying to undermine American law and order.”
What changed was also simple.
“We saw the results of the Trump presidency,” he said. “I think I can make a good case to the American people, people who may have been skeptical of the president back in 2016 — who can be skeptical now that we’ve seen the results?”
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This is like Saul’s biblical conversion on the road to Damascus. Like the Apostle Paul, Mr. Vance, 40, will spread the gospel of MAGA for Mr. Trump.
Jeff Ryer, a Trump delegate to the convention and chairman of the Republican Party in the 1st Congressional District of Virginia, said Mr. Vance is Mr. Trump’s voice to a new generation of voters.
“He clearly sees an opportunity with the generation his own children — and it’s a generation that frankly we’ve been challenged with — and J.D. Vance has the ability to communicate with that generation directly, as one of them,” Mr. Ryer said.
He said the choice of Mr. Vance suggests Mr. Trump is more confident than he was in 2016 when he named Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate.
The Pence pick was about “reassurance” to wary Republicans that Mr. Trump was one of them, Mr. Ryer said.
“Trump no longer needs to prove that,” Mr. Ryer said. “He had four years in office. They saw that he shared their values and achieved for them a variety of things that they had hoped for a long time.”
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Democrats also seized on the Pence-Vance comparison, though in worrying terms.
Sen. Cory A. Booker, New Jersey Democrat, said Mr. Pence “did the right thing for our democracy” by refusing to abide by Mr. Trump’s demands to upend the results of the 2020 election.
“Now he’s chosen a vice president who said that he would not have done that. If he was the vice president, then he would have lurched our country, perhaps into its worst constitutional crisis in my lifetime and generations before. This is a stark choice,” Mr. Booker said on a Biden campaign call with reporters.
Mr. Vance brings a vigorous gift of communication to go along with a fabulous life story.
In “Hillbilly Elegy,” his story of growing up in Appalachia, he recounts that his grandmother had to wheedle with the Meals on Wheels truck for a bit of extra food on some days so both of them could eat. He then seamlessly transitions into why Republicans, Mr. Trump in particular, offer answers to those same people today.
“I actually understand a little bit what people are going through,” he told Mr. Hannity.
He said his mother has been sober for 10 years after the fentanyl epidemic snared her and millions of other Americans.
Mr. Vance’s policy views align with Mr. Trump’s in many areas. The first-term senator says he wants “a large number” of deportations of illegal immigrants, starting with “violent criminals.” He said denying jobs to illegal immigrants will help push others to leave on their own.
The senator is skeptical of the expansive U.S. spending to support Ukraine’s war with Russia.
Mr. Vance says he is a committed pro-lifer who feels Mr. Trump’s view on abortion — arguing for restrictions with exceptions while allowing states to set laws — will govern the party’s position.
He also shares Mr. Trump’s view of the limitations of his first term, when he met with resistance from some of those around him. Mr. Vance said that can’t happen in a second Trump term.
“As successful as he was politically, even after he was elected, certain R’s didn’t want to actually enact the America First agenda. You’ve got to have leaders in Washington who are supporting him, not fighting him,” he said.
Gene Truono, 66, treasurer of the Delaware Republican Party, said Mr. Vance is like most other Republicans in his slow-rolling embrace of Mr. Trump.
“The party has changed and coalesced more around Trump — 2016 was a very different time. Trump was new to the scene,” Mr. Truono said. “People didn’t think he could win. And when he did win, people’s hearts and minds changed.
“Donald Trump, I don’t want to say single-handedly, but primarily drove a real change in the Republican Party and its base,” he said. “We went from what was perceived to be or believed to be — I don’t know if it is true — what was perceived to be a party of rich, White old men. He has opened the door to the broad-based Reagan coalition of the party, allowing it to accept everybody.”
Mr. Vance’s political maturation wasn’t his only conversion.
He grew up loosely evangelical Christian but considered himself largely atheist by 2010 when he entered Yale Law School. While at school, he began to encounter Catholics and Mormons and by 2016 was attending church and pondering converting to Catholicism.
He was baptized and confirmed into the Catholic faith in 2019.
“When I looked at the people who meant the most to me, they were Catholic,” Mr. Vance told The American Conservative on the day he converted.
He said he might have taken the leap earlier but was pondering the headlines about the church’s sex abuse scandal. In the end, he said, he took “a longer view” of the Catholic Church and its work throughout history.
“The hope of the Christian faith is not rooted in any short-term conquest of the material world, but in the fact that it is true, and over the long term, with various fits and starts, things will work out,” he said.
Yale is also where Mr. Vance met his wife, Ushu Vance, a first-generation American whose parents are from India and are Hindu.
Mrs. Vance clerked for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.
On Monday, as Mr. Vance accepted the Republican vice presidential nomination, she resigned from her job at law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson.
They have three children together.
Mr. Vance told Fox News that when the call came from Mr. Trump selecting him as his running mate, his 7-year-old son was making noise in the background. The former president asked Mr. Vance to put the boy on the phone.
“Think about this: Everything that’s happened, the guy just got shot at a couple days ago, and he takes the time to talk to my 7-year-old. It’s a moment I’ll never forget,” Mr. Vance said.
• Dave Boyer contributed to this report.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
• S.A. Miller can be reached at smiller@washingtontimes.com.
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