Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) will be Donald Trump’s running mate for the 2024 presidential race, the former president announced Monday. The move completes Vance’s dizzying transformation — overseen by Fox News and its former star Tucker Carlson — from self-proclaimed “Never Trump guy” to MAGA culture warrior.

Vance fills the spot created because Trump dropped former Vice President Mike Pence from the ticket. In 2021, Pence refused to submit to the then-president’s demands to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and blamed Trump for a mob of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6. By contrast, Vance says he still questions the election results, that he would have taken a different course if he had been vice president, and that “no real Republican with any credibility in the party is still blaming” Trump for the January 6 insurrection.

Vance was a favorite of elite bastions like The New York Times and the Aspen Ideas Festival for much of 2016 and 2017. His bestselling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which provided a despairing look at the community in which he grew up and was published around the time Trump became the GOP presidential nominee, made him an in-demand voice to explain Trump’s supporters. Vance either agreed with or played to his audience during this period, publicly denouncing Trump as “an idiot” who was “noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place,” identifying as “a Never Trump guy,” and privately mulling whether Trump was “America’s Hitler.”

But Vance also possessed a will to power, and unable to beat the MAGA movement, he joined it. He stopped appearing on news channels like CNN and MSNBC for years and camped out at Fox, making at least 151 appearances on the Trumpist propaganda network’s weekday programs since 2018, according to a review of Media Matters’ database.

A closer look at that data and the would-be vice president’s appearances reveals that Carlson — who earned notoriety for mainstreaming white nationalist talking points and concocting sinister counternarratives that minimize the violence Trumpists perpetrated on January 6 — played a key role in Vance’s right-wing rebrand. Indeed, the only figure who may loom larger in Vance’s story is Peter Thiel, the fascist billionaire who employed Vance and then spent millions supporting his 2022 Senate campaign.

Forty-six of Vance’s Fox interviews occurred on Tucker Carlson Tonight. That’s more interviews by far than he gave any other program on the network, even though the show was canceled in April 2023 when Fox canned its host. And Carlson interviewed Vance regularly before anyone else at Fox, providing 15 of his 17 appearances from 2018 through 2020. (Laura Ingraham’s show is a distant second with 36 total Vance appearances, the first of which came in February 2021.)

Vance’s interviews with Carlson underwent a dramatic transformation as he entered the political arena. Vance focused on providing measured and deliberate political analysis in his early appearances, though he had already swapped out the Trump criticism he previously provided to other outlets in exchange for arguments that GOP leaders needed to show they were “proud of the coalition that we have.” But as he geared up his Senate campaign in February 2021, Vance’s commentary abruptly changed to mirror Carlson’s own culture war bomb-throwing, authoritarianism, and conspiracy theorizing. As I’ve previously noted, during this period:

Carlson did more than provide Vance with a massive platform to reinvent himself. On the air, he vouched for Vance to his audience, lavishing him with praise and declaring his personal admiration. And off the air, he successfully lobbied Trump by phone to endorse Vance in the Ohio Senate primary, reportedly “promising Trump that Vance was with him on the issues despite the candidate’s past anti-Trump comments.” Trump’s endorsement helped Vance secure his GOP primary, and he ultimately won a narrow victory in the general election that put him on the map as a potential VP pick.

Carlson, like his fellow MAGA extremists Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk, who also regularly host Vance on their programs, reportedly urged Trump to pick the Ohio senator as his running mate. “Carlson said that picking Vance would be ‘a sign of Trump’s commitment to his own voters,’ whose views he said Vance uniquely understands,” The Wall Street Journal reported.