What we know about JD Vance, the next US vice-president

“I’m a 'never Trump' guy. I never liked him.”

“My god what an idiot.”

“I find him reprehensible.”

That was from JD Vance in interviews and on Twitter in 2016, when the publication of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy catapulted him to fame.

In the same year, he wrote privately on Facebook to Josh McLaurin, his former law school roommate, now a state Senator in Georgia: "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole... or that he's America's Hitler."

"To go from those texts... to being Trump's biggest cheerleader, it's just kind of unbelievable," McLaurin, who is a member of the Democratic Party, told BBC Newshour.

In just a few years, Vance has transformed himself from "never Trump" into one of the former president's most steadfast allies - soon to be his second-in-command.

The 40-year-old first-term senator from Ohio is now about to take office as vice-president following Trump's re-election as president in the 2024 election.

The post and his position as a loyalist also makes him the early frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028, when Trump will no longer be able to run under the US Constitution.

On the trail he established himself as an "attack dog", relentlessly criticising the opposition, but also engaging with reporters in combative Q-and-A sessions at rallies and on cable TV shows.

The Trump campaign contrasted his approach with the more cautious media strategy of the Harris campaign.

But his hardline views on immigrants attracted controversy, as have his calls to end military support for Ukraine and his comments about US allies, including the UK.

He repeated dubious rumours about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, then doubled down in the face of debunking and criticism, including from other Republicans.

Remarks from past interviews and speeches resurfaced, including Vance voicing support for a nationwide ban on abortion and calling the UK an "Islamist country".

He was forced to defend a remark he made on Fox News three years ago about "a bunch of childless cat ladies", including Vice-President Harris.

Vance has long held conservative views - that much is clear from his best-selling memoir. Vance's reliably conservative voting record, relative youth and Midwestern roots were all seen as positives by the Trump campaign.

But his friends say his focus has shifted over time.

McLaurin said that his former roommate previously felt like the Republican Party needed to give working people hope as well as economic opportunities. If unsuccessful in doing so, Vance believed a "demagogue" would fill that vacancy, he said.

According to McLaurin, Vance saw Trump as the demagogue - but clearly changed his mind.

Vance was born James Donald Bowman in Middletown, Ohio, to a mother who struggled with addiction and a father who left the family when JD was a toddler.

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

A revolving cast of father figures - he changed his surname several times - and his mother's substance abuse issues resulted in a chaotic childhood, and he regularly found refuge in Mamaw's house.

When he married, both JD and his wife Usha took the last name of Vance to honour his maternal grandparents' family name - leading to his current name: James David Vance.

Middletown is located in rust-belt Ohio, but Vance identified closely with his extended family’s roots to the south in Appalachia, the vast mountainous inland region that stretches from the Deep South to the fringes of the industrial Midwest and north-east. Largely but not exclusively white, it includes some of the country’s poorest areas, where jobs are scarce and drugs and violence are abundant.

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance painted a personal portrait of the trials, travails and bad decisions of family members, neighbours and friends. While criticising outsiders for looking down on Appalachia's hillbillies, he took a distinctly conservative view, describing his people as chronic spendthrifts, dependent on government welfare payments and mostly failing to work hard and pull themselves up by their tattered bootstraps.

He wrote that he saw Appalachians “reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible” and that they were products of “a culture that encourages social decay instead of counteracting it”.

“The truth is hard,” he wrote, “and the hardest truths for hill people are the ones they must tell about themselves.”

By the time the book came out, Vance’s own bootstrap-tugging had slung him far away from Middletown: first to the US Marines and a tour of duty in Iraq, and later to Ohio State University, Yale Law School and a job as a venture capitalist in California.

Hillbilly Elegy not only made him into a bestselling author, but a sought-after commentator who was frequently called upon to explain Donald Trump’s appeal to white, working-class voters.

He rarely missed an opportunity to criticise the then-Republican nominee.

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

"What it’s doing is giving people an excuse to point the finger at someone else, point the finger at Mexican immigrants, or Chinese trade or the Democratic elites or whatever else.”

Ironically, those are exactly some of the themes that he himself regularly raised during the election campaign.

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

In contrast to her husband, Usha Vance had a posher upbringing, growing up in a suburb of San Diego as the child of Indian immigrant academics. In addition to her Yale history and law degrees, she has a master's from the University of Cambridge.

She served as a clerk to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and most recently worked for Munger, Tolles & Olson, a firm that a leading legal journal described as "progressive" and "woke". Mrs Vance resigned shortly after her husband was selected by Trump.

While the Vances worked in law and finance and lived in San Francisco and Washington DC, whispers about a possible foray into politics grew. Mr Vance saw an opportunity when Ohio’s Republican Senator Rob Portman decided not to run for re-election in 2022.

Although his campaign was initially slow to get going, he got a kick-start via a $10m (£7.7m) donation from his former boss, Silicon Valley powerbroker Peter Thiel.

His rhetoric shifted, and he spent less time talking about the failures of hillbillies and more about those of elites and Democrats. He began appearing on Fox News but also on fringier political outlets - the right-wing Newsmax network and niche podcasts and YouTube channels. Many of the controversial clips which would later resurface during the 2024 presidential campaign date from around the time his Senate campaign was starting to gain traction.

But the real hurdle stopping him from getting elected in increasingly Republican Ohio was his past criticism of Trump.

Vance remained a Trump sceptic as late as 2020, according to text messages obtained by the Washington Post. Then, he wrote that the president had "thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy)". And he correctly predicted that Trump would lose the presidency - although he would later endorse the Maga world's false claims that Trump actually beat Joe Biden.

During the 2022 Senate campaign, Vance apologised for his previous public remarks and earned Trump’s endorsement, pushing him to the top of the Republican field and eventually into Congress.

In the process, Vance became an important player in the world of Make America Great Again politics – and signed up almost completely to Trump’s agenda.

In the Senate he was a reliable conservative vote, backing populist economic policies and emerging as one of the biggest congressional sceptics of aid to Ukraine.

His short tenure in a Democratic-led chamber meant the bills he sponsored rarely moved forward, and were often about sending messages rather than changing policy.

He proposed legislation to withhold federal funds from colleges where there are protests against Israel's war in Gaza, and from colleges that employ undocumented immigrants.

Vance also sponsored legislation in March that would cut the Chinese government off from US capital markets if it did not follow international trade law.

He hit some of these themes at a speech in July at the National Conservatism Conference, saying: "The real threat to American democracy is that American voters keep on voting for less immigration and our politicians keep on rewarding us with more."

He argued the idea of the American Dream – "This very basic idea that you should be able to build a good life for yourself and your family in the country you call home" - was "under siege by the left".

And he said that American involvement in Ukraine had "no obvious conclusion or even objective that we’re close to getting accomplished".

At the same conference, he said the UK was "not doing so good" because of immigration and claimed that under a Labour government, the country would become the “first truly Islamist country” with a nuclear bomb.

He received a rapturous welcome when he entered the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July, shortly after his selection as Trump's running mate was announced, appearing slightly in awe as he was greeted by the party faithful.

But after that, the headlines often focused more on his controversies than his folksy appeal.

Vance's comments about Haitian immigrants eating pets, based on unsubstantiated internet rumours, were repeated by Trump during the September presidential debate and caused huge upheaval in Springfield, a city not far from Vance's hometown in Ohio.

During a CNN interview Vance said he felt the need to "create stories so that the... media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people”.

He insisted that constituents have told him stories of pet-eating by immigrants, even though his Senate office did not respond to the BBC's requests for details.

Vance also moderated his views on the issue of abortion. The vice-president elect was baptised as a Catholic in 2019 and once expressed support for a nationwide abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

But more recently he backed Trump's view that the matter was for states to decide.

A more moderate Vance was on display during the only vice-presidential debate during the campaign, when many pundits agreed he performed well against his Democratic opponent, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

Now that Republicans are about to take power, the extent of his influence in the next administration is yet to be fully hashed out.

The office of US vice-president is much-maligned - one former occupant, John Nance Garner, likened it to a "pitcher of warm piss". More practically, there is the growing power of Elon Musk, whom political observers and comedians have dubbed the "real vice-president".

Trump's last vice-president, Mike Pence, broke with him over those false statements about the 2020 election, and now finds little support in a Republican establishment that remains largely loyal to Trump.

The vice-presidency is still seen as a key launching pad to the White House itself.

But it's not exactly a sure-fire deal - just ask Kamala Harris.