J.D. Vance Keeps Selling His Soul. He’s Got Plenty of Buyers.

At the outset of Christopher Marlowe’s late 16th-century play “The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus,”the scholar at the center of the tale abandons all the learning he has mastered. Law, philosophy, medicine — none of these have fulfilled his boundless ambition. Instead, he turns to magic, making the fateful decision to sell his soul to the demon Mephistopheles, for what he “most desires” — “a world of profit and delight, /Of power, of honor.”

That brand of striving, so strong that it compels Faustus to sell what is most essential to him, must lie somewhere in the makeup of Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, who on Monday was offered and accepted the invitation to be Donald Trump’s running mate. What he has renounced in the process is in the public record for all to see.

Eight years ago, during the heated days of the 2016 Republican primary, Mr. Vance wrote that Mr. Trump’s policy proposals “range from immoral to absurd.” A few months later, he referred to Mr. Trump as “cultural heroin,” and called him “unfit for our nation’s highest office.” And memorably, in a text conversation with a former roommate, the future senator worried that Mr. Trump might be “America’s Hitler.”

After Monday’s announcement, of course, Mr. Vance distanced himself from those comments. Mr. Trump’s White House tenure, he said, had changed his mind, but it’s hard to take the senator entirely at his word.

Certainly, all politicians are ambitious — and many of them are cynical. But there is something particularly noxious about Mr. Vance’s posturing, which exceeds the run-of-the-mill Machiavellian self-interestedness that characterizes politics. The Faustian contract seems to have already been drawn up and signed.

Since being elected to the Senate, in large part due to the financial support of the tech billionaire and right-wing activist Peter Thiel, Mr. Vance has become a zealous convert to the MAGA cause. That’s a stunning reversal for a figure who eight years ago was celebrated as an astute voice of Never Trumper Republicanism, a man of learning who could formulate a centrist conservatism to supplant the dark turn that had taken hold of the G.O.P.