Trump VP pick JD Vance said a dinner with CEOs changed his approach to politics

A dinner meeting with a group of business executives in 2018 helped shape the political evolution of Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, the senator explained in an interview last month before he was chosen by former President Trump to serve as his running mate and vice presidential nominee.

In a lengthy interview with The New York Times published in June, Vance pointed to a dinner event hosted by the Business Roundtable, a group of leading CEOs, in 2018 that occurred two years after the publication of his bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” 

He explained that the event came against the backdrop of some people trying to understand Ohio and Appalachia amid the political realignment spurred by Trump’s election. Although, others “were looking for some interpretive lens for Trump’s voters that never really asked them to challenge their priors or to rethink what they felt about those people.

“And I realized that I was being used as this whisperer of a phenomenon that some people really did want to understand, but some people didn’t. And the more that I felt like, not an explainer and a defender, but part of what I thought was wrong about the liberal establishment, the more that I felt this need to go very strongly away from it,” Vance said in the Times interview.

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At the dinner event, Vance recounted that the CEO of a large global hotel chain was complaining about the labor market because, “What Trump has done at the border has completely forced me to change the way that I interact with my employees.”

Vance said the CEO told him, “Well, you understand this as well as anybody. These people just need to get off their asses, come to work and do their job. And now, because we can’t hire immigrants, or as many immigrants, we’ve got to hire these people at higher wages.”

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Vance said an executive’s comments about U.S. workers and immigration’s affect on the labor market contributed to the change in his thinking. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images / Getty Images)

“The fact that this guy saw me as sympathetic to his problem, and not the problem of the workers, made me realize that I’m on a train that has its own momentum, and I have to get off this train or I’m going to wake up in 10 years and really hate everything that I’ve become,” Vance said.

“And so I decided to get off that train, and I felt like the only way that I could do that was, in some ways, alienating and offending people who liked my book.”

Vance’s changing politics included his stance on former President Trump, who Vance had heavily criticized during his first run at the presidency, calling Trump “an idiot” as well as “noxious” and “reprehensible.”

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Former President Trump named Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, his running mate and vice presidential nominee Monday. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

In 2021, when Vance announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for an Ohio Senate seat that was being vacated by the retirement of GOP Sen. Rob Portman, he expressed his support for the former president and said he had been wrong in his past criticisms.

Vance explained his change of heart regarding former President Trump in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity Monday night.

“I was certainly skeptical of Donald Trump in 2016, but President Trump was a great president, and he changed my mind. And I think he changed the minds of a lot of Americans because, again, he delivered that peace and prosperity.

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“If you go back to what I thought in 2016, another thing that was going on, Sean, was that I bought into the media’s lies and distortions. I bought into this idea that somehow he was going to be so different, a terrible threat to democracy,” he explained.

“President Trump did a really good job, and I actually think it’s a good thing when you see somebody, you were wrong about them, you ought to admit the mistake and admit you were wrong.”