On the first day of the Republican National Convention, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made an official announcement confirming his running mate.
Meet JD Vance: a 39-year-old Republican senator from Ohio who has gone from being one of the former president’s biggest critics to one of his most vocal supporters. Now, Vance could become the first Millennial to hold the office of Vice President.
But who, exactly, is this younger senator?
Vance first rose to fame when he wrote and published his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which follows the story of his family’s experiences over generations of living in the Kentucky Appalachia. It was widely praised by critics and the public for providing context for the generational poverty often associated with Appalachia communities.
An excerpt from this book reads as the following:
“I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty’s the family tradition. Their ancestors were day laborers in the southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and mill workers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends and family.”
He was born James Donald Bowman to Beverly Carol Vance and Donald Ray Bowman on Aug. 2, 1984, in Middletown, Ohio and grew up in an area 30 miles north of Cincinnati and 20 miles south of Dayton. His parents divorced when Vance was a toddler, and he was eventually adopted by his step-father Bob Hamel. Hamel and Vance’s mother would eventually divorce over struggles she faced with substance abuse.
Vance was mostly raised by his grandparents, known as Mamaw and Papaw, who were union Democrats. In fact, Vance is quoted in his memoir as saying their political outlook was: “All politicians might be crooks, but if there were any exceptions, they were undoubtedly members of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition.”
After serving in the Marine Corps, Vance would go on to attend Yale Law School and join a a venture capital firm run by the Silicon Valley scion Peter Thiel. He also started a nonprofit dedicated to “mak[ing] it easier for disadvantaged children to achieve their dreams.”
While at Yale, Vance met his wife and the mother of his three children, Usha Chilukuri Vance. Usha, 38, a corporate lawyer who used to be a registered Democrat, is the daughter of Indian immigrants and a practicing Hindu, something a lot of MAGA supporters have voiced opposition to. JD and Usha married in an interfaith ceremony in Kentucky in 2014. In the same year, she worked in the influential DC circuit for Brett Kavanaugh, who would later be nominated by Donald Trump and confirmed to the U.S. supreme court in 2018.
Usha was also a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice John Roberts during the 2017-2018 term. It was during that time Roberts wrote a 5-4 ruling upholding Trump’s travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries.
“Usha definitely brings me back to earth a little bit, and if I maybe get a little bit too cocky or a little too proud, I just remind myself that she is way more accomplished than I am,” JD told the Megyn Kelly Show podcast in 2020. “I’m one of those guys who really benefits from having, like, a sort of powerful female voice on his left shoulder saying: ‘Don’t do that, do do that’ – it just is important.”
One important aspect of Vance’s political ideology to take note of is his sudden transformation from a “never Trump” conservative to a MAGA loyalist and Trump’s VP pick.
During the 2016 Election, Vance told Charlie Rose he would never be “a Trump guy,” and even went on to call the then presidential candidate “cultural heroin.”
“I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place,” he said on NPR.
However during the Trump years, Vance appeared to have a shift in his political beliefs, claiming he came to support the MAGA movement after seeing what he thought was an overreaction from liberals across America.
In July 2021, Vance announced his campaign to become a U.S. Senator for Ohio, which would become the first public office he ever held. In a speech during his campaign, Vance said he “regrets being wrong” about Trump.
“I think he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flack,” Vance said. He later added: “He’s the best president of my lifetime.”
Trump once described (rather, tweeted) Vance as someone who “is kissing my ass … he wants my support so bad.” Longtime Senator Mitt Romney also went on record and told his biographer in 2022 during Vance’s campaign that he couldn’t “disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance.”
Since being elected to the U.S. Senate, Vance has become one of the most vocal defenders of the former president. Politico dubbed Vance as “the standard-bearer of the New Right.” Most of the legislation Vance has proposed since his time in the Senate have emerged from working with progressive Democrats, some of which include a railway safety reform bill co-authored by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and an executive pay claw-back provision drafted with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Neither of these policies have had a vote on the Senate floor, however.
These aren’t the only pieces of legislation Vance has tried to push through the Senate. He has also proposed a bill criminalizing and banning gender-affirming care for trans kids, a ban on federal mask mandates and getting rid of affirmative action policies at colleges and universities. He publicly supports a 15-week abortion ban with exceptions for rape, incest and threats to the life of the mother.
Vance is also one of the main opponents to sending financial assistance and weapons to Ukraine, a country that has been engaging in conflict with Russia since February 2022.
“I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” Vance told Steve Bannon in a 2022 interview.
The Ohio Senator has also suggested a conspiracy theory implying the Biden Administration is allowing fentanyl to cross the U.S. Mexico Border with the hopes of killing off Republican voters.
“If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl,” Vance said. “It does look intentional. It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him.”
Vance has also stated the criminal proceedings against Trump were a “threat to American democracy,” and has said in order to bring America to its fullest potential, it’s going to have to get “pretty wild.”
“We are in a late Republican period in America,” he said on a podcast appearance in 2022. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”