MILWAUKEE – It was not so long ago that JD Vance had some pretty unpleasant things to say about Donald Trump.
Back when Trump was first running in 2016, the Yale Law School graduate who grew up in Appalachia, said he would rather write the name of his dog on the ballot than vote for either him or Democrat Hillary Clinton.
“I think I’m going to vote third party because I can’t stomach Trump,” he told one interviewer. “I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”
How things have changed. At the Republican National Convention (RNC) on Wednesday, the 39-year-old author of Hillbilly Elegy accepted the party’s nomination to be its vice presidential candidate and Trump’s running mate.
“President Trump’s vision is simple – we won’t cater to Wall Street, we’ll commit to the working man,” he said to loud cheers. “We won’t import foreign labour, we’ll fight for American citizens.”
He said the country needed leaders “who would put America first”.
The transformation from Trump critic to Trump loyalist hardly makes Mr Vance unique. Indeed, the RNC has been filled with Republicans such as Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and even Nikki Haley, who previously had plenty of harsh words about the former president but have now fallen into line.
What is different in the case of Mr Vance, who joined the Marine Corps in the aftermath of 9/11, is that somehow Trump has forgiven him, choosing to select him as his running mate over a host of other contenders, among them Mr Rubio, Doug Burgum and Tim Scott.
Perhaps Trump and his advisers were moved by Mr Vance’s story about a difficult childhood, during which his parents divorced and his mother, Beverly Vance, was a drug addict.
She was in the audience on Wednesday, along with his grandmother – or “Mamaw”. His grandparents had raised him. He paid tribute to his mother and said she had been free of addiction for ten years.
“My fellow Americans… this moment is not about me, it’s about all of us, and who we’re fighting for,” Mr Vance said. “It’s about single moms like mine, who struggled with money and addiction but never gave up.”
Mr Vance told his mother he loved her and the crowd started chanting: “JD’s Mum.”
Mr Vance was introduced to the convention by his wife, Usha Vance, who was raised in San Diego by Indian immigrants. Her mother is a biologist and provost at the University of California at San Diego and her father is an engineer.
“We were friends first,” she said. “He was then, as now, the most interesting person I knew — a working class guy who had overcome childhood traumas that I could barely fathom to end up at Yale Law School, a tough marine who had served in Iraq, but whose idea of a good time was playing with puppies and watching the movie Babe.
Ms Vance, a lawyer, once clerked for Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he served as an appeals court judge in Washington, followed by a year as a law clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts. Reports suggest Mr Vance started feeling more sympathetic to Republicans after Mr Kavanaugh was forced to endure a tough confirmation hearing led by a Democratic-controlled committee.
Mr Kavanaugh had been accused of sexually abusing a young woman when he was a student at high school. He denied the claims.
In 2022, Mr Vance told New York magazine he had changed his mind about Trump and that had led him to run for the Senate to represent Ohio. He ran in 2022 and won, helped by large donations from PayPal founder Peter Thiel.
“I think there are so many reasons I was wrong about Trump, but I’m happy that I was wrong about Trump,” he said.
On Wednesday night, the crowd gave both Mr Vance and his wife rapturous applause, and most said they were pleased with the choice.
John Dennis, a delegate from California, said he believed Mr Vance would help both win in November and in governing. “Donald Trump’s got excellent instincts on a number of issues but sometimes instincts aren’t enough,” he told i. “You need a more of a philosophical basis. I think JD is more grounded in what makes government work, what’s appropriate, what’s inappropriate, and I think he’s going to also help him in his personnel decisions.”