A match made in MAGA
How a friendship got JD Vance on Trump’s VP list
It was just 43 days before the 2022 Republican primary in Ohio, and former President Donald Trump had yet to throw his weight behind a Senate candidate. JD Vance, a political novice competing in a packed field, had a huge problem.
He had publicly called Trump “loathsome” and an “idiot.” Once, he described Trump as “cultural heroin.”
Then came a lifeline. “Enough with the lies being told about this guy,” Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s son, wrote on social media, assuring followers Vance had become a fan of his father. A month later, encouraged by his son, the elder Trump endorsed Vance.
Today, Vance is one of the former president’s most reliable allies and a leader of a band of Republicans pushing Senate Republicans to the right. And his star has only continued to rise: Vance is on the list of Trump’s possible running mates, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
In no small part, Vance owes his quick ascent into the Trump orbit to his unlikely friendship and ideological kinship with the former president’s oldest son. They text or talk nearly daily and try to meet up if they are in the same city, according to people who know them both. They are a social media tag team, often reposting each other’s messages.
Although he has stressed that the choice of a running mate is his father’s decision alone, Trump has said he would be happy with Vance on the GOP ticket.
The friendship is among the MAGA movement’s more unusual pairings. Vance, 39, is a self-made man who had a fatherless childhood. Trump, 46, has been at the right hand of his billionaire father his whole life.
Vance is wonky and well-spoken, a Yale Law School graduate and memoirist regarded as an intellectual standard-bearer for Trumpism. The former president’s son is sarcastic and foul-mouthed, a sharper reader of people than of policy papers and a political weather vane for his father.
But the men share rightwing, nationalist politics and a vision for how the Republican Party should root out vestiges of old elites. In some ways, they represent the ego and id of the MAGA movement and, some Republican strategists argue, its next wave of insurgency.
Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said that for voters seeking a next-generation leader, there was virtually “no one like Sen. Vance.” Those same voters look up to Donald Trump Jr., he said. “They know both men.”
Vance declined to be interviewed for this article. The younger Trump said in a statement, “In the world of politics you make a lot of acquaintances, but there are very few actual friends. JD has become a close friend of mine, and I’m a big supporter of everything he’s been doing policywise to put America First in the Senate.”
As the former president narrows his list of running mates, with his eldest son as an informal adviser, personal loyalty is surely a factor. Trump has insisted that his former vice president, Mike Pence, betrayed him by refusing to allow him and his allies to manipulate the results of the 2020 election in his favor.
Vance has made clear he is no Pence. He has claimed the 2020 election was blighted by widespread fraud, an allegation that has been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked.
He told ABC News in February that had he been vice president in January 2021, he would have allowed Congress to consider fraudulent slates of pro-Trump electors before certifying the election, a scheme meant to disrupt the transfer of power after Joe Biden won the presidency.
Vance’s allegiance to the former president is relatively new, but friends say it is deep. In his memoir, Vance wrote that his upbringing taught him to value “loyalty, honor and toughness.”
The former president helped him edge out his primary opponents, when he could have stood aside. The senator “is an intensely, personally loyal guy,” said Luke Thompson, a close friend who ran the super political action committee that backed Vance’s campaign.