Donald Trump announced Monday that Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, a former critic who has emerged a stalwart defender of the MAGA movement, will be his Vice Presidential pick.

“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” Trump said on Truth Social. “As Vice President, J.D. will continue to fight for our Constitution, stand with our Troops, and will do everything he can to help me MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

Vance was formally nominated hours later at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where he drew cheers from the party faithful. The pick comes just two days Trump survived an assassination attempt and ahead of his own appearance at the convention.

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The duo, one a septuagenarian on his third presidential campaign, and the other, a 39-year-old senator, present a cross-generational ticket. It’s been a remarkable political trajectory for Vance, who achieved literary fame with his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and first ran for office in 2022. Despite his past criticism of Trump, Vance landed an endorsement in that Senate race and has become one of Trump’s biggest boosters.

He’s also taken on the role of attack dog. Following the failed assassination attempt on Trump at his political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—which resulted in the deaths of an attendee and the suspected gunman—Vance blamed the shooting on President Joe Biden and Democrats even before a suspect was identified or motive determined. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance wrote on X. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.”

Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, presumably referring to Vance’s past remarks about whether he’d accept the presidential election results, said in a statement that Trump picked “Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people.”

Just a couple of presidential election cycles ago, in 2016, Vance joked that he would rather write in his dog than vote for Donald Trump. “I might write in my dog because that's about as good as it seems,” he said in a 2016 NPR interview. “But, you know, I think there's a chance, if I feel like Trump has a really good chance of winning, that I might have to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton.”

“I can't stomach Trump,” Vance, who was on to promote his book, continued. That October, Vance told Charlie Rose that he was “a ‘Never Trump’ guy. I never liked him.” “Trump is cultural heroin,” he wrote in a story in The Atlantic.

And, on the campaign trail in 2022, just a week after securing Trump’s endorsement, Vance’s old roommate, now-Georgia State Senator Josh McLaurin, shared an apparent screenshot of a conversation they had in February of 2016.

“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?” Vance wrote in the message.

At the time, his team dismissed the screenshot. “It’s laughable that the media treats J.D. not liking Trump six years ago as some sort of breaking news, his campaign manager Jordan Wiggins said, adding, “clearly, President Trump trusts that J.D. is a genuine convert, as out of all the Republican candidates running, he endorsed J.D. and concluded that he is the strongest America First conservative in the race.”

Prior to running getting into politics, Vance was best known as the author of the bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy. It spent 49 weeks on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list. Netflix released a movie inspired by the memoir in 2020.

Vance’s memoir is based on his experiences growing up in Middletown, Ohio, and the emotional and financial realities of his early childhood into adulthood. From 2003 to 2007, Vance served in Iraq as a U.S. Marine. He then went on to study at Ohio State University before attending Yale Law School. After graduating he joined Mithril Capital, a venture capital firm run by the Silicon Valley scion Peter Thiel.

In a 2017 lecture to a full crowd at the Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale, Vance spoke about his experience growing up and how being around violence informed how he acted in an early relationship. “The first person I was truly in love with, I treated her just as badly as I was treated as a kid,” Vance said. “It’s not easy to acquire some elite credential and just turn off everything you learned as a child.”

Vance has said that his history, as he described it in his book, on the campaign trail, and throughout his political career, has informed the way he views government and his role in crafting policies.

As James Pogue wrote in 2022 for Vanity Fair:

Vance believes that a well-educated and culturally liberal American elite has greatly benefited from globalization, the financialization of our economy, and the growing power of big tech. This has led an Ivy League intellectual and management class—a quasi-aristocracy he calls “the regime”—to adopt a set of economic and cultural interests that directly oppose those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up. In the Vancian view, this class has no stake in what people on the New Right often call the “real economy”—the farm and factory jobs that once sustained middle-class life in Middle America. This is a fundamental difference between New Right figures like Vance and the Reaganite right-wingers of their parents’ generation. To Vance—and he’s said this—culture war is class warfare.

According to Politico, Vance is regarded as a “standard-bearer of the ‘New Right,’ a loose movement of young conservatives trying to push the Republican Party in a more populist, nationalist and culturally conservative direction.”

Politico also noted that, “his culture war initiatives include a bill criminalizing gender-affirming care for transgender kids, a ban on federal mask mandates, and crack-down on affirmative action policies at colleges and universities.” And he has also been staunchly anti-abortion for years.

In 2021, after the Texas legislature passed their near-total abortion ban, Vance said, “my view on this has been very clear,” he said, “it’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term” but “whether a child should be allowed to live even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to society.” He has said that there was “something sociopathic about a political movement that tells young women (and men) that it is liberating to murder their own children.”

As Trump, who has bragged about appointing the conservative justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, tries to appear more moderate on abortion, Vance has struck a different tone as of late. “On the question of the abortion pill,” Vance said on Meet the Press earlier this month, “the Supreme Court made a decision in saying that the American people should have access to that medication, Donald Trump has supported that opinion, I support that opinion.”

Vance has come a long way since being a self proclaimed “‘Never Trump’ guy.” He now has a lot of allies in the MAGA world, including Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr.

“I think it’s an incredible pick," Trump Jr. told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on the RNC floor. “I’ve seen him on TV, I’ve seen him prosecute the case against the Democrats. I think no one is more articulate than that, and I think his story, his background, really helps us a lot in the places you are going to need from the Electoral College standpoint."

Trump has acknowledged that Vance used to be a critic. “He’s the guy that said some bad shit about me,” Trump said during a 2022 rally. “If I went by that standard, I don’t think I would have ever endorsed anybody in the country.”

“The president is right,” Vance began as he took the stage. “I wasn’t always nice, but the simple fact is, he’s the best president of my lifetime.”