Three weeks ago, author JD Vance was in dead last place in the Ohio Republican primary for US Senate. He was polling in single digits. He didn’t stand a chance. Then the new sheriff of the Republican Party flew into town. President Donald Trump publicly endorsed Vance. It was an electric moment – Vance had tears in his eyes.

It was an incredible moment because the two of them hated each other just a few years ago. And on Tuesday night, Vance blew out the competition in Ohio’s primary. He’s officially the Republican nominee heading into November. Trump’s endorsement was the only thing that allowed Vance to pull out an amazing come-from-behind victory.

Tuesday was an amazing night for President Trump and for the America First movement. Of the 22 candidates in Indiana and Ohio’s primary that Trump endorsed, all 22 won their races. In one of Trump’s most hilarious acts of trolling in recent years, he endorsed Greg Pence in his Indiana House race – and Pence won. He’s the younger brother of Mike Pence.

Along with his 33-0 record in the Texas primary, Donald Trump has now chosen 55 of the Republican candidates running for office in November. He has a perfect 55-0 record so far this year. This is tremendous news for those of us who have been in the MAGA movement since the day that Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015 to deliver the most important election speech in US history. Trump’s perfect record, however, is terrible news for the establishment. They hate many of the Trump-endorsed candidates with as much white-hot fury as they hate Trump himself.

The JD Vance race is certainly the most interesting and most important one from Tuesday night. Vance hated Trump seven years ago. In fact, he hated Donald Trump so fiercely that he voted for that Evan McMuffin weirdo in Utah!

Vance is the author of the bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” The book chronicles the destruction of America’s middle class through the eyes of Vance as he was growing up (he’s now 37). The Bush and Clinton presidencies gutted our manufacturing and industrial center and allowed oxycontin and other drugs to flow in from Mexico and crush many families, including some of Vance’s closest relatives in Ohio. The book is pretty good, and the Ron Howard-directed biopic is a real tear-jerker if you haven’t seen it yet.

Vance was one of the lucky Americans who managed to “pull himself up by his bootstraps” after our terrible establishment politicians removed every bootstrap in sight. He tells a great story about the resentment that working people feel about the welfare leeches in our society. He was working as a grocery store clerk and couldn’t afford a cell phone of his own, as he was cashing welfare checks for people who all had cell phones.

Like many of us who remember the Clinton and Bush presidencies, Vance drank deeply of the neocon Kool-Aid. Most of us know what JD Vance’s politics were like, because we shared them back in the day. Sure, we thought, America was going through a declining patch, but it will get better if we just keep doing more lopsided free trade deals with communist countries that pay their workers in slave wages. Free trade creates jobs! That was the mantra.

Plus, we all believed that legal immigrants would pull America out of its slump. It was just the illegals that we were concerned about. It never occurred to us that the millions of legal immigrants our leaders were bringing in to compete for our increasingly scarce jobs were just as unskilled and uneducated as the illegals and were crushing our wages just as badly.

So, Vance was an ardent Never-Trumper just a few years ago. But because Vance seems to have some humility and the ability to self-reflect, he came to realize during Trump’s amazing first term that the president’s economic populism was working, where all the neocon garbage and forever wars were not. Trump’s results were impossible to disagree with unless you were an incredibly stupid person with blinders on.

JD Vance may be a relatively new convert to the movement compared to some of us, but he’s young and it looks like he will be a good torchbearer for the MAGA movement. And we need to pick up at least one new Senate seat this November. It might as well be the one in Ohio that he’s running for.