Chapter 4
MAKING OF A PRESIDENT
Chapter Four — The Conversion and the Senate Seat
Draft 1. Approximate length: 4,000 words. Voice: continuous. The chapter does one thing: walk the reader through the Ohio Senate primary of 2022 and the conversion narrative that preceded it. By the end of the chapter the reader understands two things — what fifteen million dollars buys, and how a man rewrites his own public position on the most consequential political figure of his lifetime in the period of about four years, with the writing supervised by the men who will benefit from the rewrite.
Before I tell you about the Senate seat, I have to tell you about the texts.
In August of 2016, with Hillbilly Elegy on the bestseller list and Donald Trump the Republican nominee for president, JD Vance sent a series of private messages to a former Yale Law classmate of his named Josh McLaurin. McLaurin saved the messages. McLaurin was, at the time of the messages, a Democrat working as an attorney in Atlanta. He would later become a Georgia state senator. The messages remained private until 2022, when McLaurin, having watched his old classmate run for the Senate as a Trump ally, made the messages public.
In the messages, Vance describes Trump as “noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place,” questions whether Trump is a “cynical asshole” or “America’s Hitler,” and writes, “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?”
The messages are not ambiguous. They were not written for public consumption. They were written by a private citizen to a private friend at a moment when the man writing them believed the country was facing something genuinely dangerous. They are, as private political assessments go, fairly representative of what a great many educated Americans, on both sides of the aisle, said about Donald Trump in private in the summer of 2016.
What is interesting about the messages is not what they say. The messages are unremarkable. What is interesting about the messages is what JD Vance did, in public, in the six years between sending them and running for the Senate as Trump’s most prominent endorsee.
He converted.
The conversion is the subject of this chapter. The conversion is, in some ways, the most important single piece of the made-man story, because the conversion is the moment when the network’s investment in JD Vance became visible as something other than a friendly mentorship. The conversion is the moment the network told JD Vance what he needed to become, and JD Vance became it.
I am going to walk you through the conversion in five public steps. The steps are on the record. The dates are on the record. The reasoning, in some cases, is on the record. The frame I am going to ask you to hold while you read the steps is this: the conversion did not happen because JD Vance changed his mind about Donald Trump. The conversion happened because the men who were going to fund his Senate campaign would not fund him unless he changed his public position, and JD Vance changed his public position.
The first step was March of 2018. Vance, by this point back in Ohio after his stint in San Francisco, had been giving interviews and appearing on cable news as a kind of civilized Republican voice — the kind of Republican who could be invited onto MSNBC without making the host uncomfortable. In a March 2018 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Vance said that Trump “had done a much better job than I had expected” and that “I’m a Trump skeptic but he has been a far more effective president than I’d expected.”
This is the language of a man who is testing the water. The language is hedged. The language preserves the option of returning to the previous position. The language signals to the men who matter that Vance is willing to evolve.
The men who matter were watching.
The second step was the founding of Narya Capital in 2020. I told you about Narya in the previous chapter, but I want to tell you again because the founding is part of the conversion. Narya was funded with checks from Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Eric Schmidt. Schmidt is a different kind of donor than the others — he was, at the time, a Democrat — but the inclusion of Andreessen on the cap table was significant, because Andreessen was, in 2020, in the middle of his own conversion from Obama-era Democrat to Trump-era Republican. The men who funded Narya were the men who would, four years later, be the spine of the technology billionaire party I described in Chapter Two. By taking their money to start a venture firm, Vance entered into a financial relationship with the men whose political program he would soon be carrying.
The third step was 2020 and 2021, the period of the cultivated essays. In this period, Vance began publishing in venues that the network read and that signaled to the network the direction he was moving. He published in The American Conservative on the question of post-liberalism. He published in First Things on questions of religion and political community. He gave a speech at a Heritage Foundation event in which he described the federal civil service as “the regime” and called for its dismantling. He appeared on the All-In podcast with David Sacks and the cohort, where he tested out, in conversation, the formulations he would later use on the campaign trail.
The essays and speeches and appearances did two things. They signaled to the network that Vance was a serious person who was internalizing the network’s ideas. They also signaled to the conservative grassroots that Vance was a person who could speak the new language of the post-liberal right with fluency.
The fourth step was the Trump endorsement, which is worth its own paragraph.
In April of 2022, with the Ohio Senate primary approaching, Vance traveled to Mar-a-Lago to seek Donald Trump’s endorsement. Trump was, at this point, considering several candidates. Vance was not the front-runner. The front-runner was a man named Josh Mandel, the former state treasurer, who had been a Trump-aligned Republican for several years and whose loyalty was not in question.
Peter Thiel was the person who arranged the Mar-a-Lago meeting. Thiel had known Trump since 2016, when Thiel had spoken at the Republican National Convention in support of Trump’s first nomination. Thiel was, in 2022, in a position to ask Trump for things and to be heard. Thiel asked Trump to endorse Vance.
The endorsement came on April 15, 2022, three weeks before the primary. Trump’s endorsement was, at that moment in the Republican Party, decisive. Polls that had shown Mandel ahead immediately reversed. Vance won the primary on May 3 with thirty-two percent of the vote in a seven-candidate field. He went on to win the general election in November of 2022 against Tim Ryan, a Democratic congressman who had spent three decades representing northeastern Ohio.
The fifth step was the apologia. After the texts to Josh McLaurin became public in 2022, Vance was asked, repeatedly, by reporters, by interviewers, by debate moderators, what he had to say about having called Donald Trump America’s Hitler. His answer evolved over the course of the campaign into a stable formulation that he repeated in essentially the same words on every subsequent occasion.
The formulation, paraphrased: I was wrong about Trump. I had been misled by the media. When I saw Trump’s record as president — the appointment of conservative judges, the renegotiation of trade deals, the standing up to China — I realized that I had been wrong, and that Trump had been right, and that the country was better off with Trump in office than it would have been with Hillary Clinton.
This is the language of a public conversion. It is also the language that the men who were funding the campaign needed Vance to speak, because the campaign could not be won unless the texts were neutralized, and the texts could only be neutralized by a public account that placed the responsibility for the texts on Vance’s prior bad information rather than on Trump’s character.
JD Vance gave the men what they needed. The men gave JD Vance the Senate seat.
I want to spend the rest of this chapter on what fifteen million dollars buys.
Peter Thiel’s contribution to Protect Ohio Values, the super PAC supporting Vance’s primary campaign, was fifteen million dollars. Some additional money came in from other donors — by the close of the primary, the super PAC had raised approximately twenty million dollars total — but the great majority of the money was Thiel’s, and the strategic decisions were made by people Thiel had hired or approved.
Twenty million dollars, spent in a single state, in a single primary, over the course of approximately ten months, buys a number of things. I am going to walk you through what it bought.
It bought television. Approximately twelve million dollars of the super PAC’s spending went to television advertising in the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Toledo, Dayton, and Akron media markets. The television buy began in November of 2021 and continued, with brief gaps, through the May primary. The advertisements introduced JD Vance to Republican primary voters in Ohio as a man who had grown up in Middletown, served his country in the Marines, gone to Yale Law School on his own merits, written a bestselling book about his upbringing, started a business, and now wanted to fight for working Ohioans against the elites who had abandoned them. The advertisements did not mention his work at Mithril Capital. The advertisements did not mention his time in San Francisco. The advertisements did not mention the funders behind the campaign. The advertisements presented Vance as a self-made Ohioan returning home to serve.
It bought digital. Approximately three million dollars went to digital advertising on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and search engines. The digital advertising was targeted at Republican primary voters in Ohio with messages calibrated to the specific concerns the campaign’s polling identified as moving them — immigration, trade, the cultural decline of the country, the elite contempt for working people. The digital advertising was, like the television advertising, presentational rather than dialogic. It did not invite voters to engage with Vance. It told voters who Vance was.
It bought consultants. The senior staff of the super PAC included veterans of multiple previous Republican Senate campaigns, polling firms with long track records, opposition research operations, and a number of younger operatives recruited from the network’s broader orbit. The consultants were paid market rates, which in a Senate primary of this scale meant several hundred thousand dollars each over the course of the campaign.
It bought research. Polling, focus groups, opposition research on the other candidates in the primary, and the deep file on Vance himself that any well-run campaign maintains on its own candidate. The polling was the most consequential of these. The polling told the campaign, week by week, which messages were working, which were not, and which audiences were responding to which arguments. The polling allowed the campaign to adjust its advertising in close to real time.
It bought a ground game. Field organizers in each of Ohio’s eighty-eight counties. Phone banks. Door-knocking operations. Voter targeting. Get-out-the-vote operations. The ground game was modest by general election standards but substantial for a primary, and it was, like everything else, professional.
It bought, in the final weeks of the campaign, the most expensive single decision a Senate primary super PAC can make: a saturation buy in the closing days. The campaign closed with a wall of television in the markets where its polling showed the race tightening. The wall of television was what voters who were still making up their minds saw in the last seventy-two hours before they voted. The wall of television was the difference between a five-point loss and a seven-point win.
This is what fifteen million dollars buys, when it is spent by professionals in a single primary in a single state. It buys the manufacturing of a candidate. The manufacturing is not invisible. The manufacturing is on the FEC reports. The manufacturing is on the television in the Cleveland media market for six months. The manufacturing is on the Facebook feed of every Republican voter in Ohio for a year.
The manufacturing also requires a particular kind of cooperation from the candidate. The candidate has to say what the manufacturing requires the candidate to say. The candidate has to convert publicly when the manufacturing requires it. The candidate has to suppress the parts of his biography that contradict the manufacturing. The candidate has to be willing to be made.
JD Vance was willing to be made. He was, by all accounts, an enthusiastic and disciplined participant in his own manufacturing. He showed up where he was supposed to show up. He said what he was supposed to say. He converted on the schedule the campaign required. He walked into Mar-a-Lago and got the endorsement that Thiel had arranged for him to receive.
He won.
I want to give you one more detail about the campaign, because the detail tells you something important about how the men in the network think about the people whose votes they are buying.
In the closing weeks of the primary, with the polls tightening, the super PAC ran a series of advertisements attacking Vance’s principal opponent, Josh Mandel, on the grounds that Mandel was insufficiently committed to America First principles. The advertisements were aggressive. They suggested that Mandel, despite his long record of supporting Trump and his publicly stated commitment to Trump’s agenda, was actually a creature of the Republican establishment who could not be trusted.
This was not true. Mandel was, by any reasonable measure, a more conventional Trump-aligned Republican than Vance. Mandel had been on Trump’s team since 2016. Vance, until eighteen months before, had been calling Trump America’s Hitler in private text messages.
The advertisements ran anyway. The advertisements ran because the campaign’s research indicated that the advertisements would work, and the advertisements did work. Mandel’s poll numbers dropped. Vance’s poll numbers rose. The voters who watched the advertisements did not have access to the private text messages. The voters who watched the advertisements did not have access to Mandel’s full record. The voters who watched the advertisements had access to the advertisements, and the advertisements told them what to think, and they thought it.
This is what manufacturing a candidate looks like. It looks like a thirty-second television spot, repeated several thousand times, in a media market in which the average viewer watches several hours of local broadcast television a day. It looks like the construction of a reality, by men with money, in the heads of voters who do not know who the men with money are.
The voters who voted for JD Vance in the May 2022 Republican primary in Ohio were not stupid. They were not lazy. They were not uninformed in any sense that they could have remedied with reasonable effort. They were people who, in the period from November of 2021 through May of 2022, had been the targets of a sustained, professional, well-funded operation designed to convince them that JD Vance was the man Donald Trump wanted them to send to the Senate. The operation succeeded. The voters did what the operation was designed to make them do.
This is what twenty million dollars buys, in 2022, in a Senate primary in the United States.
It buys an outcome.
In the next chapter, I am going to walk you through the selection of JD Vance as the Republican vice presidential nominee in the summer of 2024. The selection was, in some ways, a smaller decision than the Senate primary. By the time it happened, the network had already invested several hundred million dollars in the man who was being selected. The selection was the network’s investment paying out.
The selection also involved, for the first time, a degree of public visibility on the network’s role that the network had not previously courted. Elon Musk, in the days after the selection, posted on X with a frequency and an enthusiasm that was, even by Musk’s standards, unusual. Sacks held the fundraiser. Andreessen and Horowitz released the podcast. The network did not hide. The network announced.
The announcement is what I want to walk you through next. I want to show you what it looks like when a network of billionaires goes public with its preferred ticket. I want to show you what they got, in the months that followed the election, and what they expected to get.
I will see you in Chapter Five.
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