A lot can change in eight years. In the summer of 2016, J. D. Vance, writing in this magazine, characterized Donald Trump as “cultural heroin.” On Sunday morning in Michigan, Vance made his pitch to be Trump’s next vice president—by showing his fealty to the former president and sounding as much like him as possible …

Andrew Kolvet, a Turning Point spokesperson, told me that Vance is proving to be one of the Trump campaign’s most effective and articulate surrogates—specifically in speaking to Rust Belt voters. As someone who grew up in poverty and then went to Yale Law School before becoming an Ohio senator, “he’s kind of a class traitor like Trump,” Kolvet said. He went on: “He’s one of those guys that you can put on CNN, MSNBC, and he can chop it up with really adversarial interviewers and come out getting the better end of the deal.”