How J.D. Vance Won Over Donald Trump

The meeting got off to a bad start.

J.D. Vance walked into Donald J. Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago on a warm winter afternoon in February 2021. The former president had a thick stack of papers on his desk: printouts of Mr. Vance’s copious broadsides against Mr. Trump. Mr. Vance’s past criticisms had included an essay in one of Mr. Trump’s least favorite magazines, The Atlantic, where Mr. Vance described Mr. Trump as “cultural heroin” — a purveyor of false promises to the white working class.

Mr. Trump, using an expletive, bluntly told Mr. Vance: You said some nasty stuff about me. The discussion that followed was described in detail by two people with knowledge of the meeting who insisted on anonymity to talk about a private conversation.

Mr. Vance’s next move was crucial. This was the first time he was meeting Mr. Trump, and Mr. Vance needed the former president to like him or at least leave the meeting with an open mind. Mr. Vance — the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” a best-selling memoir about his troubled upbringing and the struggles and pathologies of the white working class — was running for the open U.S. Senate seat in Ohio as a Republican populist, a Never Trumper turned pro-Trumper.

Mr. Vance decided to immediately apologize. He told Mr. Trump that he had bought into what he described as media lies and that he was sorry he got it wrong. Of all people, Mr. Vance told Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance himself should have understood.

Mr. Trump agreed, telling Mr. Vance that he should have understood because Mr. Vance had written the “Hillbilly Elegy” book. His implication was that Mr. Vance should have supported him because Mr. Trump’s own base of non-college-educated voters angry about globalization, immigration and foreign wars were exactly the people Mr. Vance purported to represent.

At that point, Mr. Trump seemed disarmed, and the meeting went on for almost two hours. They discussed the 2020 election and the Ohio race, but mostly they talked about the difficulties of politics. It had been less than a month since Mr. Trump left the White House a pariah, in the wake of a pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol after the president had spent two months lying about a stolen election.