JD Vance’s critics thought he was a joke. His political ruthlessness was serious

He was written off as a drag on the presidential ticket, mocked by political opponents as “weird”, falsely rumored to have had sex with a couch, and pilloried as a misogynist for labelling women without children as “childless cat ladies”.

Now JD Vance – the butt of a spate of Democratic and liberal jokes for his awkward stump persona and much else – has turned the tables on his detractors.

Donald Trump’s emphatic election triumph is set to put the 40-year-old Ohio senator just a heartbeat away from the presidency, serving under a chief executive who is 78 and has been the target of two failed assassination attempts.

It is a dizzying rise for a man who was elected to the Senate just two years ago and now finds himself about to become the third-youngest person in US history to hold the office of vice-president.

While Trump’s opponents and many critics dread his return to the Oval Office and the levers of power, Vance waiting in the wings hardly gives them cause to feel reassured.

Indeed, the vice-president-elect’s Maga bona fides are deeper and more genuine than those of Mike Pence, who served as Trump’s loyal number two during his first presidency before breaking ranks and resisting entreaties to cooperate in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

It is hard to imagine Vance – once such a vocal Trump critic that he referred to him as “America’s Hitler” and “cultural heroin” – showing such insubordination to the boss.

So completely did Vance shed his previous criticism that his choice as running mate was promoted by the president-elect’s son, Don Jr, while also being championed by such pro-Trump stalwarts as the far-right broadcaster Tucker Carlson and the tech billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

The author of Hillbilly Elegy, a bestselling personal memoir of his upbringing in Ohio under the shadow of family drug addiction, Vance had come to be seen as a genuine embodiment and articulator of Trump’s economic and nationalist populism designed to appeal to a working-class constituency.

A demonstration of his hard-right ideological tendency comes in the shape of his close connections to the Heritage Foundation, the conservative Washington thinktank that oversaw the development of Project 2025, a radical blueprint for overhauling American government and society, which Trump disavowed last summer when it threatened to cost him votes.

Nevertheless, many of its ideas – namely radical limitations on reproductive rights – remain extant among Trump supporters, including Vance himself, who has previously said he would like to see abortion banned nationally.

Vance remains close to Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation’s president, for whose forthcoming book he wrote a pugnacious foreword.

In foreign policy, the future vice-president has ideas mirroring Trump’s that will worry allies – having previously told Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House counsellor, on his podcast: “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another” days before the country was invaded by Russia in 2022.

But it is not just in the realm of intellectual ideas that Vance has proved he is the real deal in Trump world.

Having initially settled slowly into the running mate’s slot and rattled by the mockery of his past statements that may have left the Republican nominee wondering if he had made the right choice, Vance was reportedly looking for an issue with which he could prove his worth.

He found it in the days before Trump’s debate with Harris in September – in the form of online rumours about Haitian immigrants eating family pets in the city of Springfield in his native Ohio. The story had been debunked by local officials but Vance pushed it nevertheless.

It reached the ear of Trump – ever-eager for a vehicle on which to push his anti-immigration platform – and he repeated it memorably in the debate, saying: “They’re eating the dogs; the people that came in, they’re eating the cats.”

Challenged on CNN for promoting a tale for which there was no evidence, Vance was unrepentant.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he said.

He had passed the Trump test of political ruthlessness.

As JD Vance prepares for life in the White House, whatever jokes his adversaries told about him are now surely on them.

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage