How JD Vance Won Over Donald Trump

The meeting got off to a bad start. JD Vance walked into Donald 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 Vance's copious broadsides against Trump. Vance's past criticisms had included an essay in one of Trump's least favorite magazines, The Atlantic, where Vance described Trump as cultural heroin - a purveyor of false promises to the white working class. Trump, using an expletive, bluntl