Who is JD Vance, Trump’s pick for vice president?

“I’m a ‘never Trumper.’ I never liked him.”

“Oh my god, what an idiot.”

“I find him reprehensible.”

This quote was shared by JD Vance in interviews and on Twitter in 2016, when his memoir Hillbilly Elegy was published and catapulted him to fame.

That same year, he privately wrote to an associate on Facebook: “I wonder if Trump is a cynical asshole… or if he is America’s Hitler.”

Just a few years later, Mr. Vance became one of Trump’s staunch allies.

And a few years later, the first-term senator from Ohio is now Trump’s vice presidential running mate — and thus a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028 — with a solid conservative voting record and Midwestern roots that are sure to help boost his turnout.

In fact, Mr. Vance has made a habit of transformation. How did he escape a tough upbringing to reach the highest levels of American politics?

Mr. Vance, whose real name is James David Bowman, was born in Middletown, Ohio, to a mother who struggled with addiction and a father who abandoned the family when JD was a toddler.

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

Although Middletown is located in Ohio’s rust belt, Mr. Vance is deeply rooted in his family’s roots in southern Appalachia, the vast, mountainous interior that stretches from the Deep South to the edge of the industrial Midwest, including some of the poorest areas of the country.

Mr. Vance paints an honest portrait of the trials, tribulations, and bad decisions of his family members and friends. And his book also has a distinctly conservative perspective—describing them as chronically wasteful, dependent on welfare, and largely unable to get ahead on their own.

He wrote that he saw Appalachian people “reacting to bad circumstances in the worst possible way” and that they were the product of “a culture that encourages social decline rather than combats it.”

“Truths are hard,” he wrote, “and the hardest truths for highlanders are the ones they have to tell about themselves.”

While he despised the “elites” and exclusive society, he saw himself as a contrast to the persistent failure of the people he grew up with.

By the time the book came out, Mr. Vance’s own struggles had taken him far from Middletown: first to the U.S. Marine Corps and military service in Iraq, then to Ohio State University, Yale Law School and work as a venture capitalist in California.

Hillbilly Elegy made him not only a best-selling author but also a sought-after commentator, who was frequently called upon to explain Donald Trump’s appeal to working-class white voters, and he rarely missed an opportunity to criticize the then-Republican candidate.

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

“This creates an excuse for people to blame others, like Mexican immigrants or Chinese trade or Democratic elites or whatever.”

In 2017, Mr. Vance returned to Ohio and continued working in venture capital. He and his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, whom he met at Yale, have three children — Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel.

The child of Indian immigrants who grew up in San Diego, Usha Vance has a very different background than her husband. She also attended Yale as an undergraduate and received her master’s degree from the University of Cambridge. She clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after law school and is now an attorney.

Mr. Vance has long been rumored as a political candidate, and he saw an opportunity when Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio decided not to seek re-election in 2022.

Although his campaign initially faltered, he was given a head start by a $10m (£7.7m) donation from his former boss, Silicon Valley powerbroker Peter Thiel. But the real obstacle to his victory in increasingly Republican Ohio was his previous criticism of Trump.

He apologized for his past remarks and tried to mend the relationship and win Trump’s support, propelling him to the top of the Republican Party and eventually to the Senate.

In the process, Mr. Vance has become an increasingly important figure in the political world of the Make America Great Again movement — and has come to embrace Trump’s agenda almost entirely.

In the Senate, he was a reliable conservative, supporting populist economic policies and emerging as one of the most skeptical in Congress about aid to Ukraine.

Because of his short tenure in the Democratic-led body, the bills he sponsored rarely passed, and they tended to convey messages more than change policy.

In recent months, Mr. Vance has introduced bills that would withhold federal funds from universities that host refugee camps or protest the Gaza-Israel war, and from universities that hire undocumented immigrants, for example.

Demonstrating his hardline foreign policy and financial background, Mr. Vance sponsored legislation in March to cut off the Chinese government’s access to U.S. capital markets if it fails to comply with international trade laws.

Mr. Vance, who was baptized a Catholic in 2019, is opposed to abortion, but has recently backed Trump’s view that the issue should be decided by individual states.

When his Hitler comments were first reported in 2022, a spokesman did not dispute them but said they no longer represented Mr Vance’s views.