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JD Vance’s mother explained the moment her son changed his heart from an ardent critic of former President Donald Trump to a vociferous supporter and running mate.
Beverly Aikins told The New York Times that she’s “probably not the best person to answer” how her son went from a critic to Trump’s running mate.
“But I do think that JD saw, when he was in office, that things for people in our area got better. I think that’s why he changed his mind,” she added.
Aikins told The Times that she doesn’t worry about the fate of Trump’s last running mate and vice president, Mike Pence, who was the subject of chants to hang him when he refused to do the then-president’s bidding on January 6, to overturn the 2020 election results.
“I think that JD is probably the smartest, most amazing young man, and everything he touches turns to gold,” she told the paper.
“JD will be president one day. You know how I know that?” she asked.
“He used to watch all these political shows” as a child. “I would say, ‘Why do you watch that?’ He would say, ‘Mom, this is about our country. I need information.’ I would just think, ‘What a nerd.’”
Aikins’s parents were Democrats – her own mother liked former President Bill Clinton – but nowadays Aikins is a registered Republican,
“I don’t vote the party. I vote the person,” she told the paper and said she voted for Trump in 2016. “Nobody can buy him.”
She alos revealed how she met the former president for the first time during this year’s Republican National Convention: “He was just very humble and very nice to me, and told me I had a great kid.”
Aikins told the paper about the first time Vance told her about the book he wrote that would go on to become a bestseller and a film – Hillbilly Elegy. The book grew popular among some as a guide for understanding places such as Middletown, Ohio, and its residents. At the time, Vance believed Trump was unethically using the suffering of the white working class to get himself to the White House, describing him as “cultural heroin.”
“He said, ‘Mom, I wrote a book, and there’s probably some things in it that aren’t very favorable,’” Aikins told the paper. “I just said, ‘Will it help you heal?’ He said, ‘I think it will.’”
“It was heartbreaking in some parts,” she added. “But it helped us grow as a family, and it opened up a line of communication that we never really had. Addiction in our house was like the elephant in the room. Nobody ever said anything about it. We do now.”
Aikins has now been sober from alcohol, heroin and other drugs for nearly a decade.
“I want people to know to reach out, to try to get help and that recovery is hard but it’s so worth it,” she told The Times.
Aikins initially became addicted to heroin after losing her nursing license after taking prescription pills such as Vicodin and Percocet.
“For years, I had made excuses for Mom,” Vance wrote in Hillbilly Elegy. “I had tried to help manage her drug problem, read those stupid books about addiction, and accompanied her to NA meetings. I had endured, never complaining, a parade of father figures, all of whom left me feeling empty and mistrustful of men.”
