How JD Vance’s path from Hillbilly Elegy to Trump’s MAGA running mate passed through his wife, a Supreme Court justice, and Don Jr.

When Donald Trump named JD Vance as his vice presidential nominee, it marked the end of an extraordinary journey from former Marine and bestselling author with a knack for Never Trump rhetoric to the ultimate MAGA loyalist.

Things could have turned out very differently if his wife had not had a legal background.

Vance met Usha Chilukuri, the child of Indian immigrants, in 2013 at Yale Law School. His career took him into the venture capital world before he began work on the manuscript that would become Hillbilly Elegy, a cultural phenomenon that made sense of a forgotten America that mystified the country’s liberal elite as they sought federal clerkships.

She first worked in Kentucky, but then moved to a coveted position at the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, where she clerked for Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Friends say it was Kavanaugh’s stormy nomination to the Supreme Court in 2018, during which he had to weather multiple allegations of sexual assault, that pushed Vance into politics.

“For him, it was a political issue,” said one who knew Vance at the time. “The guy was a friend of the family.”

Vance himself has also indicated this.

“My wife worked for Kavanaugh, loved the guy — kind of a nerd,” he recently told the New York Times. “I never believed those stories.

“You start looking around and you wonder, ‘If they can do this to him, can they do this to us?’ It’s an incredible character assassination campaign.”

Friends say they thought he was long set on a career as a writer and venture capitalist. The former Marine could write for leading newspapers about politics and people, appear on TV to talk about Trump and the Midwest, and make a fortune from his financial firm in the process.

His book had painted a vivid portrait of a tough upbringing in a forgotten American. He was perfectly placed to explain why those rust belt towns had turned to Trump, while warning that the man himself was like an opioid, an “easy escape from the pain.”

It could have made him a permanent member of the chattering class of pundits, called upon to explain the appeal and meteoric political rise of a loudmouth New York developer who bewildered establishment figures left and right.

What changed, said a friend who knew the couple at Yale, was the way prestigious institutions turned against Kavanaugh during his confirmation and against Trump in the White House.

A former Yale student came forward and said Kavanaugh assaulted her when they were students in the 1980s. A second allegation was soon reported.

Kavanaugh denied the allegations and was eventually confirmed, but not without withering criticism from Yale alumni and others.

The hearings were dramatic. They included testimony from Christine Blasey Ford, who said the future judge had pinned her to a bed when they were teenagers, followed by Kavanaugh’s tearful rages as he fought the allegations.

A friend who knew Vance and his future wife in law school said it was one of the factors that pushed him toward Trump and politics, after previously being highly critical.

“There were two things that I think were frustrating for JD,” he said. “One was watching Yale, sort of our Yale community — professors, alumni — go after Brett Kavanaugh and the gross bias that was shown in that.”

Another point, he added, was the way the mainstream media, which had raved about his book, bashed the film when it came out. It felt like an attack on the America he had written about.

Vance was always conservative, but the story goes that his partisan stance led him to embrace Trump and his Republican movement.

His second big break came in 2020 when he ran for the Republican nomination for Senate in Ohio. During one of the primary debates, he opposed the idea of ​​a NATO-enforced no-fly zone over Ukraine.

His military service, including a stint in Iraq, had made him skeptical of foreign intervention, and he was the only one of the three Republicans on the debate stage to reject the idea of ​​a no-fly zone.

At the time, he was inundated with attack ads citing his previous anti-Trump comments, such as, “…I can’t stand Trump. I find him harmful.”

But that didn’t matter when the president’s eldest son saw his remarks. Donald Trump Jr. had read Hillbilly Elegy and was thrilled that the author was taking on interventionist neoconservative Republicans.

He tweeted his support and a few weeks later his father endorsed him as well, effectively ending the primary and catapulting Vance into the Senate.

As strategists, donors and advisers pressured Trump to choose their husband or wife as his running mate, it meant Vance also had a voice within the family.

Last week, Don Jr. explained why he supported the Ohio senator: “You make a lot of acquaintances in politics, but JD is a great and loyal man who has become a true friend.

His entire life story is the embodiment of the American dream, but he never forgets where he came from.

“He is also one of the few people I have seen in Washington who not only truly believes in my father’s agenda, but also has the courage and intelligence to effectively fight back against the Democrats and the left-wing media in defense of our healthy American values.”

He was also a big favorite with the MAGA base and was able to profit from his frequent TV appearances where he punched the former president.

When attendees at a Turning Point Action event in Detroit, drawn from the grassroots of the Trump movement, were asked who should join the ticket, they overwhelmingly chose Vance. He was 30 points ahead of the runner-up, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina.

That means Vance could be on the verge of becoming the first Marine veteran to serve as vice president, and the first bearded