Senator J.D. Vance was chosen by Donald Trump as his running mate to be Vice President of the United States. The Ohio senator went from criticizing Trump to adopting the former president’s populist agenda. Vance is a venture capital investor and author of the best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” He was elected senator in 2022 after receiving a boost from Trump in a contentious Republican primary.
Vance is a military veteran. He is 39 years old and was born in Middletown, Ohio. Six years ago, Vance was a key voice in the (Never Trump) movement during the 2016 election and has a well-documented history of public opposition to the former president. Vance has won the affection of the right wing of the Republican Party, including Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who has had the Ohio Republican as a guest on his podcast and has publicly praised him.
In the Senate, Vance has been an outspoken supporter of Trump and often votes in loyalty to the former president’s interests. He opposed a Ukraine aid bill earlier this year, adopting Trump’s criticisms of providing more aid. In addition to his credentials as a supporter of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, Vance also brings to the presidential ticket his ties to traditionally liberal-leaning Silicon Valley. He recently helped organize a fundraiser for Trump in San Francisco, hosted by prominent venture capitalists David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya.
In 2016 and 2017, Vance liked tweets that harshly criticized Trump and his policies, including one that speculated that Vance might serve in the administration of former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Other tweets that Vance liked said that Trump committed serial sexual assault, described the then-candidate as one of America’s most hated, idiot celebrities and villains, and, in a series of now-deleted tweets, Vance harshly criticized Trump’s response to the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, something Vance now defends Trump for. Vance’s previous anti-Trump stances have been well-documented, but these examples, discovered in June through a comprehensive review of Vance’s past social media activity, show that they were more widespread and scathing than previously known.
Vance managed to gain Trump’s support in the 2022 Ohio Republican Senate primary after a sustained year-long effort by Vance to adopt a new image as a top defender of the MAGA platform, courting the former president in meetings at Mar-a-Lago and through appearances on Fox News. In a show of loyalty, Vance was one of several possible running mates and Republican lawmakers who stood by Trump in a New York courtroom during his criminal trial over hush money payments. He has also made it clear that his view of the constitutional limits on the role of a vice president in certifying election results differs from that of former Vice President Mike Pence, who incurred Trump’s wrath in January 2021 when he chose not to interfere with the process of approving the electoral votes for Joe Biden.
Vance told Kaitlan Collins in May that he was “extremely skeptical that Mike Pence’s life was ever in danger,” despite some members of the pro-Trump crowd that stormed the U.S. Capitol calling for Pence to be hanged. In another May interview, Vance said he would commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election “if it’s a free and fair election.”
It was March 2022, and Senate candidate J.D. Vance was standing under the hot lights in a Cleveland television studio debating with four fellow Republicans about whether the U.S. should support a no-fly zone over Ukraine, not a month into its war with Russia. “Absolutely not,” said Vance. “I’m in the minority here,” added the Navy veteran, “because ultimately as individuals we can accept, look, it’s tragic, it’s terrible. What Vladimir Putin did was wrong by invading a sovereign country on his border. But we have our own issues in the United States to deal with.”, “put America’s priorities above everything else,” his campaign said, and he had caught Donald Trump’s attention.
In 25 days, the former president had endorsed Vance, helping the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” and the Silicon Valley venture capitalist educated at Yale to defeat a crowded Republican field and ultimately win the vacant Senate seat in Ohio. A relationship was born that placed the 39-year-old Vance on Trump’s shortlist for vice-presidential candidates. Trump boosted Vance’s career, and Vance has returned the favor by incessantly defending Trump’s policies and behavior. His debating skills, his ability to articulate Trump’s vision, and his fundraising prowess are assets for Vance.
Vance’s relationship with Trump didn’t start there. His successful book earned Vance the reputation of a “Trump whisperer,” capable of helping explain the appeal of the maverick New York businessman in middle America, but Vance was never a Trumpist in 2016. He called Trump “dangerous” and “unfit” for office. Vance, whose wife, attorney Usha Chilukuri Vance, is Indian-American and the mother of their three children, also criticized Trump’s racist rhetoric, saying he could be “America’s Hitler.”
After Trump’s victory, Vance returned to his native Ohio and created an anti-opioid charity. He participated in the lecture circuit and was a favorite guest at Republican Lincoln Day dinners. His sought-after appearances were less about book signings and more about selling his ideas for fixing the country, an approach his opponents would label as overly convenient preparation for entering politics in 2021. Former Ohio Senate President Larry Obhof, also a Yale graduate, often shared the stage with Vance back then. He said Vance’s story, the struggles and heartache he suffered due to his mother’s drug addiction, resonated. The opioid epidemic that ravaged Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia when he was a child was killing an average of a dozen Ohioans a day in 2016.
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Vance’s family left the house in Middletown where he grew up, but it still has an admirer living there. Standing on the porch one recent morning, with her six teenagers’ shoes scattered under a hammock, Amanda Bailey, 35, said she thought “Hillbilly Elegy” nailed it, and that Trump and Vance “would make a great team.” “I grew up here my whole life; I left, and I came back. I think he did a really good job of portraying Middletown,” she said. “Everything. The struggle, the economic aspect of it, the cultural aspect of it. Just all of it. I think it was pretty good.”
But not everyone sees the book that way, which was later adapted into a film directed by Ron Howard and starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams. The book drew criticism from Appalachian scholars, many of whom said it trafficked in cheap stereotypes and failed to diagnose the roots of the region’s troubled history or offer viable policy solutions. Some city officials in Middletown still cringe at the mention of it. They fear their city has been forever branded as a backwater, even though local investment is being made in industry, infrastructure, and recreational opportunities. The Senate office Vance set up in the city remains locked.
“So many people in Appalachia were upset about it, because he’s not telling his own story. In the middle of the book, he switches from ‘I’ to ‘we,’” explains Meredith McCarroll, co-editor of the 2019 book “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy.” “Appalachia is a 13-state region that is far from monolithic, and he’s not only presenting it as a single place, but he’s presenting it in a very negative way and in a very victim-blaming way.”
Vance has acknowledged some criticisms. He recently told The New York Times that he had distanced himself from “Hillbilly Elegy” in order not to “wake up in 10 years and really hate everything I’ve become.” Nevertheless, it introduced him to the Trump family. Don Jr. loved the book and met Vance when he went to launch his political career. The two hit it off and have remained friends. The Ohioan’s populist rhetoric seemed Trumpian. When Vance met Trump in 2021, he had changed his mind, citing Trump’s achievements as president.
McCarroll said Vance’s evolution in his book and Trump shows he is “really willing to do and say what he needs to do and say to find himself in a position of power.” Once elected, Vance became a fierce Trump ally on Capitol Hill. Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, said he is now a leading voice for a conservative movement on key issues including a shift away from interventionist foreign policy, free-market economics, and “American culture writ large.” “Given his upbringing, he has not only overcome that, but he has used that to become a great patriot who served in the United States Marines, built a great career in business and now serves in the Senate,” Roberts said.
Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative activist group Turning Point USA, said Vance convincingly articulates the America First worldview and, as a running mate, could help Trump in states that share Ohio’s values, demographics, and economy. “I say commonly that JD Vance’s superpower is his ability to go into adversarial media environments, be calm, cool and collected, and say things that are very persuasive without raising his voice,” Kirk said.
Vance’s politics can be hard to pin down. Democrats label him an extremist, citing provocative positions Vance has taken but sometimes later modified. J.D. Vance, currently serving in the Senate, has a varied political record. Initially, he supported a national 15-week abortion ban during his Senate campaign but softened his stance after Ohioans supported an abortion rights amendment in 2023. His controversial views on the 2020 election and potential conditions for the 2024 election results have drawn criticism, branding him as an extremist by some Democrats.
Despite this, Vance has shown bipartisanship in the Senate, co-sponsoring a railway safety bill with Democrat Sherrod Brown and supporting legislation for Great Lakes restoration and worker and family support. Known for his debating skills and fundraising, he is considered a strong asset for articulating Trump’s vision, potentially helping the GOP in pivotal states like Michigan and Wisconsin.
Critics, however, view a possible Trump-Vance ticket as a move towards extremism. Personal accounts from Vance’s high school teacher, Chris Tape, depict him as a committed and patriotic individual, shaping his political and service-oriented approach.
