NYT’s Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan Reveal How JD Vance Crawled Back Into Trump’s Good Graces After Calling Him Hitler

Back in 2016, then-senate candidate J.D. Vance didn’t think too highly of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. But fast forward to 2024 and things have changed — and now Vance is Trump’s running mate.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of The New York Times went through the timeline of Vance’s change of heart over the man he once called “America’s Hitler” to provide some context to the odd ascendancy of a tech bro/author-turned-U.S. Senator/right-wing darling and how he learned to stop worrying and love Donald Trump.

Haberman and Swan went back to 2021, after Trump lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden but in a position to provide endorsements for the midterms. Vance was running for a Senate seat in Ohio, and he took a meeting with Trump more than a year before the election in 2022. But despite his prior criticisms of Trump, the ex-president was urged to take the meeting by PayPal founder Peter Theil, who supported Trump in 2016.

According to Haberman and Swan, Trump confronted Vance with printouts of his past comments, then put the ball in Vance’s court:

Mr. Vance’s next move was crucial. This was the first time he was meeting Mr. Trump, and Mr. Vance needed the former president to like him or at least leave the meeting with an open mind. Mr. Vance — the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” a best-selling memoir about his troubled upbringing and the struggles and pathologies of the white working class — was running for the open U.S. Senate seat in Ohio as a Republican populist, a Never Trumper turned pro-Trumper.

Mr. Vance decided to immediately apologize. He told Mr. Trump that he had bought into what he described as media lies and that he was sorry he got it wrong. Of all people, Mr. Vance told Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance himself should have understood.

Mr. Trump agreed, telling Mr. Vance that he should have understood because Mr. Vance had written the “Hillbilly Elegy” book. His implication was that Mr. Vance should have supported him because Mr. Trump’s own base of non-college-educated voters angry about globalization, immigration and foreign wars were exactly the people Mr. Vance purported to represent.

Then they broached the subject of Trump endorsing Vance in the midterms:

Mr. Trump closed the conversation by asking Mr. Vance what he wanted. Mr. Trump told him that everyone else had already been down to Mar-a-Lago begging for his endorsement — a reference to Mr. Vance’s potential opponents in the Ohio Senate primary.

Mr. Vance, who along with a spokesman for Mr. Trump declined to comment for this article, told the former president he wasn’t going to do that.

Mr. Trump, surprised, asked Mr. Vance if he wanted the endorsement.

Mr. Vance said that of course he wanted it, but that Mr. Trump should let him run his race, and see how he did. Mr. Vance said he would not be the type of candidate who would attack the former president when the media came after him.

From there, Trump was “intrigued” by Vance and they agreed to check in with each other. Vance’s star rose as he became more visible, regularly appearing on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show before the former host was fired. Trump was “impressed” by Vance, even noting “those beautiful blue eyes.” By the time the 2022 midterm elections arrived, Vance was all in on Trump’s backing when other Republicans kept their distance:

Since then, Mr. Vance has played his cards nearly perfectly, making himself visible at key moments, promoting himself assertively but not too much, publicly backing Mr. Trump during his Manhattan criminal trial and having the right people champion him to the former president at the right time.

Now, Vance is second on Trump’s presidential ticket, a fully converted Trump loyalist.

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