J.D. Vance Once Warned Trump About Lying About Elections. That Was Then.

In the last days of the 2016 presidential campaign, when Donald J. Trump preemptively accused Hillary Clinton of stealing an election that many assumed Mr. Trump would lose, his critics included his future running mate.

“If he decides to make this election about how it was stolen from him, then folks are going to be angry and they will be less engaged in the political process than they otherwise would be,” J.D. Vance warned in a CNN interview that October. He said he hoped that Mr. Trump, if he lost, “acts magnanimous.”

But after Mr. Trump did, in fact, lose and contest an election, four years later, Mr. Vance took a very different position.

“We have a fake country right now,” Mr. Vance — at the time, a Senate candidate vying for Mr. Trump’s endorsement in a Republican primary — told a reporter for The Vindicator, a newspaper in Mahoning County, Ohio, in October 2021. “There were certainly people voting illegally on a large-scale basis.”

Mr. Vance has candidly acknowledged his very public journey from outspoken critic of Mr. Trump — who he once speculated might be “America’s Hitler” in a text message to a former roommate — to an enthusiastic supporter of the former president, who named Mr. Vance his vice-presidential candidate on Monday.

As Mr. Trump’s running mate, the most consequential part of this journey may be his transformation from a critic of Mr. Trump’s false 2016 claims about election fraud to a defender of his efforts to overturn the 2020 results.