JD Vance's critics thought he was a joke. His political recklessness was serious US elections 2024

He was dismissed as a stumbling block to running for president, ridiculed as “weird” by political opponents, falsely claimed to have had sex with a couch, and pilloried as a misogynist for calling women without children “childless cat ladies.”

Now JD Vance — the butt of a barrage of Democratic and liberal jokes about his bumbling, blunt persona and more — has turned the tables on his critics.

Donald Trump's emphatic election victory is likely to leave the 40-year-old senator from Ohio a heartbeat away from the presidency, serving under a 78-year-old chief executive who was the target of two failed assassination attempts.

It's a dizzying rise for a man who was elected to the Senate just two years ago and is now poised to become the third youngest person in U.S. history to hold the office of vice president.

While Trump's opponents and many critics fear his return to the Oval Office and the levers of power, Vance's wait in the wings gives them little cause for reassurance.

In fact, the vice president-elect's “maga bona fides” are deeper and more sincere than those of Mike Pence, who was Trump's loyal number two during his first presidency before breaking ranks and defying pleas in efforts to overturn the 2020 election to fall, to work together.

It's hard to imagine Vance – once such a vocal Trump critic that he called him “America's Hitler” and a “cultural hero” – showing such disobedience to the boss.

Vance has so completely abandoned his earlier criticisms that his choice as vice presidential candidate was endorsed by the president-elect's son, Don Jr., while also receiving support from supporters of Trump supporters such as far-right broadcaster Tucker Carlson and tech billionaire Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” a best-selling memoir of his childhood in Ohio in the shadow of family drug addiction, was seen as a true embodiment and articulator of Trump's economic and nationalist populism, aimed at appealing to a working-class electorate.

Evidence of his far-right ideological leanings are his close ties to the Heritage Foundation, the conservative Washington think tank that oversaw the development of Project 2025, a radical blueprint for reshaping American government and society that Trump rejected last summer and threatened to vote for to cost.

Still, many of his ideas — particularly radical restrictions on reproductive rights — remain among Trump supporters, including Vance himself, who has previously said he would like to see a nationwide ban on abortion.

Vance remains close to Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, for whose upcoming book he wrote a combative foreword.

On foreign policy, the incoming vice president has similar ideas to Trump and will worry his allies – having previously told Steve Bannon, Trump's former White House adviser, on his podcast: “I don't really care one way or the other happened with Ukraine.” Days before the country was invaded by Russia in 2022.

But it's not just in the realm of intellectual ideas that Vance has proven that he's the real deal in Trump world.

Vance had initially been slowly acclimating to the vice presidential seat and was shaken by the ridicule over his previous comments, which may have led the Republican nominee to question whether he had made the right choice. Vance was reportedly looking for a topic where he could prove his worth.

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

It reached the ears of Trump – always looking for a vehicle with which to advance his anti-immigration policies – and he memorably repeated it in the debate, saying: “They eat the dogs; The people who came in are eating the cats.”

Vance was challenged on CNN for promoting a story that had no evidence and showed no remorse.

“If I have to make up stories so that the American media will draw attention to the suffering of the American people, then I will do that,” he said.

He had passed the Trump test of political recklessness.

As JD Vance prepares for life in the White House, the jokes his opponents have told about him are certainly on them now.

Read more of the Guardian's coverage of the 2024 US election