Who is Trump’s vice presidential pick J.D. Vance?

“I’m a ‘Never Trump’ person. I’ve never liked him.

“Oh my God, what an idiot.”

“I think he should be condemned.”

That’s what J.D. Vance said in interviews and on Twitter in 2016, before the publication of his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” catapulted him to fame.

In just a few years, Mr. Vance has transformed himself into one of Mr. Trump’s staunch allies.

Years later, the first-term senator from Ohio is now siding with Trump as his vice presidential running mate — and by extension an early front-runner for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination — with a solid conservative voting record and a moderate Western roots, sure to help boost numbers at the ballot box.

In fact, Mr. Vance has made a habit of changing. How did he rise from a difficult upbringing to the highest levels of American politics?

Vance was born James David Bowman in Middletown, Ohio, to a drug-addicted mother and a father who left the family when JD was a toddler.

He was raised by his grandparents, “Grandma” and “Grandpa,” whom he sympathetically portrayed in his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Although Middletown is located in Ohio’s Rust Belt, Mr. Vance is closely tied to his family’s roots in Appalachia, the vast mountainous interior that stretches from the Deep South to the fringes of the industrial Midwest. It includes some of the most deprived areas in the country.

Mr. Vance writes honestly about the trials, pain, and bad decisions of his family and friends. His book also takes a distinctly conservative view – describing them as chronic spendthrifts, dependent on welfare payments and mostly unable to fend for themselves.

He wrote that he saw Appalachians “responding to a harsh environment in the worst possible way” and that they were the product of “a culture that encouraged social decline rather than resisted it.”

“The truth is harsh,” he wrote, “and for mountain people the cruelest truth is that they have to tell their own truth.”

While he scorned “elites” and exclusive society, he painted himself as the chronically failing antithesis of those he grew up with.

By the time the book was published, Mr. Vance’s own self-reliance had taken him far away from Middletown: first into the U.S. Marine Corps and serving in Iraq, then to Ohio State University, Yale Law School and a residency at a Business found a job.

“Hillbilly Elegy” made him not only a best-selling author but also a popular commentator who was often asked to explain Donald Trump’s appeal to white working-class voters and who rarely missed criticizing the then-Republican nominee Opportunities for people.

“I think this election did have a negative impact, especially on the white working class,” he told an interviewer in October 2016.

“What it does is give people an excuse to blame someone else, blame Mexican immigrants, Chinese trade, Democratic elites or whatever.”

In 2017, Mr. Vance returned to Ohio to continue working in venture capital. He has three children with his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, whom he met at Yale University.

His name has long been bandied about as a political candidate, and when Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman decided not to run for re-election in 2022, he saw his opportunity.

Although his campaign initially made slow progress, he got a head start with a $10m (£7.7m) donation from his former boss, Silicon Valley power broker Peter Thiel. But the real obstacle to his electability in increasingly Republican Ohio is his past criticism of Trump.

He apologized for his previous remarks and sought to repair relations and win Trump’s support, propelling him to the top of the Republican Party and ultimately the Senate.

In the process, Mr. Vance has become an increasingly important player in the political world of “Make America Great Again” and has become almost entirely sympathetic to Trump’s agenda.

In the Senate, he has been a reliably conservative constituency, supporting populist economic policies and becoming one of Congress’s biggest skeptics of aid to Ukraine.

Given his short tenure in the Democratic-led House, few of the bills he introduced moved forward, and they often sent more information than changed policy.

In recent months, Mr. Vance has introduced a bill that would have withheld federal funds from universities with encampments or Gaza-Israel war protests and those that employ undocumented immigrants.

Showing his foreign policy hawkishness and financial background, Mr. Vance sponsored legislation in March that would cut off the Chinese government from U.S. capital markets if it failed to comply with international trade laws.

Mr. Vance, who was baptized a Catholic in 2019, opposes abortion but has recently supported Trump’s view that the matter should be left up to states.