In 2016. James David (JD) Vance was riding high in life after four years as a military journalist in the U.S. Marine Corps, degrees from The Ohio State University and Yale Law School, a short stint as a corporate attorney, success as a venture capitalist, writing a best-selling autobiography, “Hillbilly Elergy,” and worth an estimated $10 million.

Not bad for a 40-year-old whose childhood was spent in poverty in Middletown, Ohio.

It was the time also when, 652 miles away, Donald John Trump, a New Yorker who made a fortune with the help of millions of dollars from his wealthy real estate-developer father and had carved out a lucrative side gig as host of the astonishingly successful “The Apprentice” television show on NBC, entered politics and was elected president.

Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin recounted the Ohioan’s comments about the New Yorker in 2016 and 2017: “a cynical asshole;” “America’s Hitler;” “one of USA’s most hated, villainous, douchey celebs;” “unfit for our nation’s highest office;” “I don’t think he actually cares about folks;” “obnoxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place;” “a cultural heroin;” “never liked him;” “makes people I care about afraid, immigrants, Muslims, etc. … reprehensible. God wants better of us;” “an idiot;” “a moral disaster.”

Then Vance met Trump, visiting him at his Mar-a-Lago resort in February 2021 to seek his coveted endorsement for a U.S. Senate bid. It was not an auspicious beginning.

As New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman recounted, Trump had “a thick stack of papers on his desk,” printouts of Vance’s comments. “Mr. Trump, using an expletive, bluntly told Mr. Vance: ‘You said some nasty stuff about me.’”

Vance’s response was “to immediately apologize,” telling Trump “that he had bought into what he described as media lies and that he was sorry he got it wrong.” Vance did get the endorsement and won the Senate race. Trump eventually warmed up to him enough to pick him for his running mate in his third campaign for the presidency.

During his debate with Minnesota’s Gov. Tim Walz, whom Vice President Kamala, the Democratic candidate, chose for her ticket, Vance, who had written a book “about his troubled upbringing and the struggles and pathologies of the white working class,” as The Times reporters put it, glorified Trump before 41 million television viewers.

Earlier, while addressing the Republican National Convention in July, Vance described Trump as “one of the most successful businessmen in the world. He had everything anyone could ever want in a life. And yet, instead of choosing the easy path, he chose to endure abuse, slander and persecution. And he did it because he loves this country. I want all Americans to watch the video of a would-be assassin coming a quarter of an inch from taking his life. Consider the lies they told you about Donald Trump. And then look at that photo of him defiant — fist in the air. When Donald Trump rose to his feet in that Pennsylvania field — all of America stood with him. And what did he call for us to do for his country? To fight. To fight for America.

“Even in his most perilous moment we were on his mind. His instinct was for us, for our country. To call us to something higher. To something greater. To once again be citizens who ask what our country needs of us. Now consider what they said. They said he was a tyrant. They said he must be stopped at all costs. But how did he respond? He called for national unity, for national calm literally right after an assassin nearly took his life.”

Trump, Vance said, is “the man who’s feared by America’s adversaries, but two nights ago, and I’ll share a moment, said good night to his two boys, told them he loved them, and made sure to give each of them a kiss on the cheek. And I will say, Don and Eric squirmed the same way my 4-year-old does when his daddy tries to give him a kiss on the cheek.”

Yes, Vance did say that about Trump.

But The New Yorker magazine painted a different portrait of Trump as its editors endorsed Harris: Trump “has represented an ongoing assault on the stability, the nerves, and the nature of the United States. As President, he amplified some of the ugliest currents in our political culture: nativism, racism, misogyny, indifference to the disadvantaged, amoral isolationism. His narcissism and casual cruelty, his contempt for the truth, have contaminated public life. As Commander-in-Chief, he ridiculed the valor of fallen soldiers, he threatened to unravel the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and he emboldened autocrats everywhere … in 2020, he tried every means possible to deny the will of the electorate and helped incite a violent insurrection on Capitol Hill.”

Vance must know about this other Trump and he has a good reason for embracing the other version. By successfully angling to be Trump’s vicepresidential candidate, he has positioned himself to become his heir and run for president in 2028. He has very specific ideas of what he wants America to become, thanks to the ideology which he started to embrace after hearing a lecture at Yale by Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who would become his mentor. Thiel, Vance wrote, saw the trend of “professionals trapped in hyper-competitive jobs, and the technological stagnation of society—as connected. If technological innovation were actually driving real prosperity, our elites wouldn’t feel increasingly competitive with one another over a dwindling number of prestigious outcomes.”

Vance was drifting towards national conservatism (NatCon), of which Thiel is an “eminence” and which, Simon van Zuylen-Wood wrote in January 2022 in The Washington Post Magazine, is “the intellectual version of Trumpism, committed to the populist reorienting of the GOP away from free markets and interventionist foreign policy.” The “key factions” of NatCon agree that “classical liberalism – one of the sort embraced by previous generations of conservatives – has a big hole in the middle of it where a substantive concept of the Good should be.”

The embrace of NatCon is not unique to Vance but, to him, van Zuylen-Wood, wrote, “the story of the past decades is the social permissiveness of the left fused with the freemarket creed to the right to create the soulless ethic known as neoliberalism. It’s also why Vance will decry unregulated capitalism in one breath and porn in the next.”

According to van Zuylen-Wood, Vance’s “solution is economic and spiritual nationalism” which, van Zuylen-Wood wrote, can be traced back to Pat Buchanan, who worked in the Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan administrations and twice campaigned for the presidency. Buchanan, now 85, is a paleoconservative — described in a Wikipedia listing as a political philosophy that supports “restrictions on immigration, decentralization, trade tariffs and protectionism, economic nationalism, isolationism, and a return to traditional conservative ideals relating to gender, race, sexuality, culture, and society.” Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Mitt Romney of Utah are among its adherents, van Zuylen-Wood wrote.

Vance also told van Zuylen-Wood in an interview, “What social progressives have accomplished over the last couple of decades is to deprive our country of any shared – any real shared anything, right? We don’t have a shared sense of our own history. We don’t have a shared sense of our own monuments and figures. We do not have a shared religion.”

Vance added, “You look into some of the social justice people, [and] you realize what they’re doing is responding to a world without norms and without borders. And they’re trying to reconstruct this stuff from nothing. And I sometimes want to shake them and say, ‘There is a philosophy out there that worked pretty good for Western civilization at erecting social barriers. Maybe you should try that out.’”

Yes, back to good old “Western civilization.”