Meet JD Vance, Republican Vice-Presidential Candidate

After teasing both North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, former President Donald Trump opted yesterday for Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate. In selecting Vance, Trump opted not to expand his political appeal, as he did back in 2016. Then he picked Mike Pence, a favorite of Christian evangelicals who might have doubted a New-York-real-estate-developer-turned-presidential candidate. This time around, Trump doubled down on his Make America Great MAGA brand. Vance, who turns forty in just over two weeks and only a few years ago was a proud “Never Trumper,” is one of Trump’s fiercest defenders.

If the Republican ticket wins in November, Vance will become the third-youngest vice president, trailing John Breckenridge, who was thirty-six when he took office in 1857, and Richard Nixon, who was forty-years-and-eleven-days old when he did in 1953. Assuming that Vance keeps his beard, he will be the first president or vice president to sport facial hair since Charles Curtis was Herbert Hoover’s vice president in 1933 and the first to sport a full beard since Charles Fairbanks was Teddy Roosevelt’s vice president in 1909. Vance would also be the first graduate of a Big Ten School to become vice president since Gerald R. Ford in 1974.

The Basics

Name: James David Vance (James David Bowman)

Date of Birth: August 2, 1984

Birthplace: Middletown, Ohio

Religion: Catholicism

Political Party: Republican

Marital Status: Married to Usha Chilukuri Vance (2014-present)

Children: Ewan (b. 2017), Vivek (b. 2020), and Mirabel (b. 2021)

Alma Mater: Ohio State University, B.A. in philosophy and political science, 2009; Yale Law School, J.D., 2013.

Twitter Handle: @JDVance1

Instagram Handles: @TeamJDVance and @SenatorVance

Trump’s Announcement

Trump unveiled his selection of Vance yesterday afternoon in the most twenty-first century way: on social media.

The two men then appeared last night to a rousing ovation at the opening of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

Vance’s selection may have been a near-run thing. NBC News reported that Trump had been leaning toward picking Burgum. When the former president met last week with his sons Donald Jr. and Eric to solicit their advice, they lobbied vociferously for Vance.

Don Jr. and Eric went bats--- crazy: “Why would you do something so stupid? He offers us nothing,” a longtime Republican operative familiar with the discussion told NBC News.

They were basically all like “JD, JD, JD,” the operative said.

Vance described what Trump said when he called to offer him the vice-presidential slot:

I think we’ve got to go save this country. I think you’re the guy who can help me in the best way, you can help me govern, he can help me win, you can help me in some of these Midwestern states like Pennsylvania and Michigan and so forth.

Vance said his seven-year-old son Ewan was in the room at the time making noise. Trump reacted by asking Vance to hand the phone to his son, which he did. Vance said: “You think about this. Everything that’s happened, the guy just got shot at a couple of days ago, and he takes the time to talk to my 7-year-old. It’s a moment I’ll never forget.”

Vance’s Story

Vance’s life story reads like the script of a Hollywood movie—indeed, his life has been turned into one. He was born into poverty in Middletown, Ohio. His parents divorced when he was young. His mother struggled with drug addiction, and he was raised primarily by her parents. Their influence on him was so great that he dropped his birth surname, “Bowman,” and took their last name, “Vance,” as his.

Vance graduated from Middletown High School in 2003 and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. He served for four years and rose to the rank of corporal. He did a tour of duty in Iraq as a combat correspondent. After leaving the Marines in 2007, he enrolled at Ohio State University. He completed his coursework in two years, graduating summa cum laude with a double major in philosophy and political science.

Vance then moved east to attend Yale Law School. There one of his mentors, Amy Chua, best known as the author of The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, encouraged him to write a memoir. He did. The result was Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. The book debuted in 2016 and became a New York Times best-seller, in part because many people saw it as a window into the plight of poor and working-class White Americans who were turning in droves to Trump during the 2016 election. The book became the 2020 film of the same name directed by Ron Howard and starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close.

Vance held a series of jobs in the decade after graduating from Yale Law School in 2013. Like many others, he headed west to San Francisco to become a venture capitalist. In 2015, he joined Mithril Capital, which was run by Silicon Valley legend Peter Thiel. Within a year, he was a partner in the firm.

But Vance’s time in San Francisco was short. In December 2016, after the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, he returned to Ohio to establish the non-profit Our Ohio Renewal. Its mission was to help end the opioid scourge and “pursue government policies and private partnerships that make it easier for disadvantaged children to achieve their dreams.” The organization accomplished almost nothing and shut its doors in 2021. Critics called the effort a “charade” and an investigation of “its tax filings showed that in its first year, the non-profit spent more on ‘management services’ provided by its executive director—who also serves as Vance's top political advisor—than it did on programs to fight opioid abuse.”

Vance also used his time in Columbus to set up his own venture-capital firm Narya Capital. The name came from a ring that figured in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Thiel, along with other Silicon Valley titans like Mark Andreessen and Eric Schmidt, helped bankroll the firm. Vance claimed during his Senate campaign that Narya Capital created “nearly 1,000 jobs” in Ohio. Independent analyses suggested that the number was closer to 750. Either way, it was a small number in a state with a population of more than eleven million people.

In July 2021, Vance declared his candidacy for the U.S. Senate to fill a seat left open by the retirement of Republican Senator Robert Portman. Vance won the three-way Republican primary and then defeated Ohio Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan in the November 2022 election. Vance was sworn into the Senate on January 3, 2023. He sits on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, the Joint Economic Committee, and the Special Committee on Aging.

Vance met his wife, Usha Chilukuri, at Yale Law School. They married in 2014 and have three children. Usha clerked for current Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was an appeals court judge. She then clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts.

Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019. His family growing up was Protestant but not particularly religious. He credits Theil with helping start the journey that led to his becoming a Catholic.

Vance and Trump

Vance was a Trump critic long before he became a fan. In 2016, he penned an opinion piece for The Atlantic decrying Trump’s appeal to Middle America. He called Trump “cultural heroin” that offered a momentary break from, rather a cure for, the country’s many problems:

What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission. As he told a New Hampshire crowd—folks all too familiar with the opioid scourge—he can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. It doesn’t matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.

Vance also wrote an op-ed for USA Today saying that “Trump’s actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd.”

Vance’s criticisms of Trump also got personal. He described Trump as “noxious” and “reprehensible,” called him an “idiot,” told a college friend that Trump was either a “cynical a—hole” or “America’s Hitler,” and said that he believed a woman who accused Trump of rape. On the eve of Trump’s election in 2016, Vance positioned himself as “a Never Trump Guy. I never liked him.”

Vance doesn’t deny that he criticized Trump. The issue came up last night in a primetime interview he did on Fox News with Sean Hannity.

Vance explained the change in his thinking this way:

I was certainly skeptical of Donald Trump in 2016, but President Trump was a great president, and he changed my mind. I think he changed the minds of a lot of Americans because, again, he delivered that peace and prosperity.

Vance also blamed the media for his criticism of Trump:

I bought into the media's lies and distortions. I bought into this idea that somehow he was going to be so different, a terrible threat to democracy. It was a joke.

Vance did not explain why a summa cum laude graduate of Ohio State and a product of Yale Law School could be duped by the media.

Vance’s critics attribute his about-face to his thirst for power. Those critics include some of Vance’s fellow Republicans. The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins wrote in his profile of Mitt Romney’s decision to retire from the Senate that the Utah senator and former Republican presidential candidate said: “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance.” Romney pointed to Vance’s embrace of MAGA politics and asked, “How do you sit next to him at lunch?”

Whatever Vance’s motives, Trump has fueled his political rise. Trump endorsed him in 2022. That endorsement likely catapulted the political neophyte to victory in the Republican primary race and eventually in the general election.

Vance contends, against all available evidence, that the 2020 “election was stolen from Trump.” Earlier this year he said that that unlike Mike Pence he would have refused to have certified the results of the 2020 presidential election. He would instead have allowed battleground states to submit alternate slates of electors, and the “U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there.”

Vance’s Foreign Policy Views

Vance does not sit on either the Armed Services or Foreign Relations committees in the Senate. That hasn’t stopped him from making foreign policy, and particularly opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine, one of his signature issues. He staked out his view before the conflict began. On the eve of the Russian invasion, he said: “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”

Vance’s primary argument against sending aid to Kyiv is that Ukraine can’t win and that U.S. funds would be better spent elsewhere. As he put in an op-ed in the New York Times in April:

Ukraine’s challenge is not the G.O.P.; it’s math. Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can field, even with draconian conscription policies. And it needs more matériel than the United States can provide. This reality must inform any future Ukraine policy, from further congressional aid to the diplomatic course set by the president.

He supplemented his op-ed with a “factsheet” that purported to show that “the United States faces the same strategic challenge whether or not the 2024 emergency defense supplemental passes: the war in Ukraine consumes far more military matériel than the west can produce, and it costs the lives of far more Ukrainians than Ukraine can mobilize.”

Vance argues that Ukraine should adopt a purely defensive military strategy that denies Russia a victory on the ground and that can force negotiations. In doing so, he says that "Ukraine is going to have to cede some territory to the Russians." Vance is unclear on how much territory Ukraine must give up, why a Ukraine that has less U.S. support will be better positioned to hold off Russia, or why Moscow wouldn’t interpret a reduction in U.S. support as evidence that the war is its to win. There’s also the question of what U.S. allies, both in Europe and Asia, would make of a U.S. about-face on Ukraine.

Vance’s hostility toward support for Ukraine is embedded in his rejection of how the United States has approached the world over the past eight decades. One journalist who has spoken to him repeatedly about foreign policy concluded:

Vance is deeply skeptical of the so-called rules-based international order—the system of laws, norms and multilateral institutions established in the years following the Second World War to mitigate global conflict and facilitate international economic activity. As Vance sees it, this system has enriched economic elites while harming working-class people who are rooted in older industrial economies—all while failing to deliver on the ultimate goal of liberalizing non-democratic countries like China and Russia.

That said, Vance isn’t seeking to dismantle the extensive U.S. alliance system. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference in February, he gave what he called a “wake-up call” to Europe.

Now, on the question of European security, I think there’s a fundamental issue here that Europe really has to wake up to. And I offer this in the spirit of friendship, not in the spirit of criticism, because, no, I don’t think that we should pull out of NATO, and no, I don’t think that we should abandon Europe. But yes, I think that we should pivot. The United States has to focus more on East Asia. That is going to be the future of American foreign policy for the next 40 years, and Europe has to wake up to that fact.

Vance quite notably did not attend other sessions in Munich, including one with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, where he would have had his views on NATO and Ukraine challenged.

As Vance’s comment about a pivot suggests, he, like almost everyone else in Washington, wants to make China foreign policy job number one. He recently said that China is “the biggest threat to our country and we are completely distracted from it.” He at times implicitly acknowledges that this claim is overstated. He said at Munich that he is a fan of “AUKUS,” the security cooperation among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which is one of the Biden administration’s major steps for responding to a rising China. Vance favors broad-based tariffs on Chinese goods and has introduced legislation in Congress, which has not been enacted, that would cut China off from U.S. financial markets unless it made major changes in its foreign economic policy.

Vance is a staunch supporter of Israel. He has criticized the Biden administration for undermining “Israel’s war to actually take out Hamas” and says that Israel should win the war in Gaza “as quickly as possible.” In keeping with his criticism of America’s “forever wars,” he is not eager for the United States to intervene in the Middle East. When asked last fall about possible attacks on U.S. troops by Iranian proxies, he said: “If they hit us, we have to hit them back but if you’re talking about an attack on the Iranian mainland, I think that would be a significant escalation right now, it would be a mistake.”

As recently as four years ago, Vance argued that “we have a climate problem in our society.” No longer. In 2022, he said: “I’m skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man.” He has criticized efforts to increase reliance on wind power, solar energy, and electric vehicles.

More on Vance

Vance has been the subject of press coverage ever since Hillbilly Elegy hit the bookstore shelves, and even more as he switched from Trump critic to Trump acolyte. The Washington Post Magazine offered up “The Radicalization of J.D. Vance.” The profile’s author, Simon van Zuylen-Wood, concluded that “the more I watched him, the more it seemed to me that the emerging canon of “what happened to J.D. Vance” commentary was missing the point. Vance’s new political identity isn’t so much a façade or a reversal as an expression of an alienated worldview that is, in fact, consistent with his life story.”

Politico’s Ian Ward wrote back in March about a series of conversations he had with Vance about the senator’s approach to foreign policy. Ward characterized Vance “as the standard-bearer of the “New Right,” a loose movement of young, edgy and elite conservatives trying to take the ideological revolution that began under Trump—including his overt embrace of nationalism, his hard-line stance on immigration, his vocal opposition of U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts like Ukraine and his overt skepticism toward certain liberal democratic principles—in an even more radical direction.” 

The New York Times came up with “27 Facts About J.D. Vance, Trump’s Pick for V.P.” Among other things, he and Donald Trump Jr. are close. “They text or talk nearly daily and try to meet up if they are in the same city, according to people who know them both. They are a social-media tag team, often reposting each other’s messages.”

Politico Magazine outdid the Times and offered up “Fifty-Five Things to Know About J.D. Vance, Trump’s VP Pick.” Among other nuggets, the article reports that “Vance is descended from ‘hillbilly royalty’ on his father’s side: His grandfather’s distant cousin—also named Jim Vance—married into the Hatfield family and is rumored to have committed the murder that instigated the legendary Hatfield-McCoy feud.” (Politico presumably meant on his maternal grandfather’s side of the family, which is how Vance tells the story in Hillbilly Elegy.)

Shelby Sires assisted in the preparation of this post.