27 Facts About JD Vance, Trump’s Pick for VP

Elections

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By The New York Times

Published 8 months ago on

July 26, 2024

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) prepares to take the floor with his wife, Usha, on the first day of the Republican National Convention, at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wis., on Monday, July 15, 2024. Vance met his wife, Usha, at Yale. They married in Kentucky in 2013, and were blessed by a Hindu pundit. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

Originally James Donald Bowman, Vance had a troubled childhood with an abusive mother and multiple father figures.
He initially opposed Trump but later supported him and has controversial views on marriage and social issues.
A Marine veteran and Yale Law grad, Vance's venture capital firm is named after Tolkien’s Elven rings, and he was influenced by mentors like Amy Chua.

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JD Vance, Donald Trump’s choice for vice president, has not lived an unexamined life. Here are 27 things to know about him, drawn from his best-selling 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” and the many other things he has said or written since.

1. His name was not always James David Vance. At birth, it was James Donald Bowman. It changed to James David Hamel after his mother remarried, and then it changed one more time.

2. He longed for a role model. His father left when he was 6. “It was the saddest I had ever felt,” he wrote in his memoir. “Of all the things I hated about my childhood,” he wrote, “nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures.”

3. He had a fraught relationship with his mother, who was married five times. One of the most harrowing scenes in the book occurs when he’s a young child, in a car with his mother, who often lapsed into cycles of abuse. She sped up to “what seemed like a hundred miles per hour and told me that she was going to crash the car and kill us both,” he writes. After she slowed down, so she could reach in the back of the car to beat him, he leaped out of the car and escaped to the house of a neighbor, who called the police.

4. He was raised by blue-dog Democrats. He spent much of his childhood with his grandfather and grandmother — papaw and mamaw, in his hillbilly patois. He described his mamaw’s “affinity for Bill Clinton” and wrote about how his papaw swayed from the Democrats only once, to vote for Ronald Reagan. “The people who raised me,” he said in one interview, “were classic blue-dog Democrats, union Democrats, right? They loved their country, they were socially conservative.”

5. As a teenager, he loved Black Sabbath, Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin. But then his biological father, who was deeply religious, re-entered his life. “When we first reconnected, he made it clear that he didn’t care for my taste in classic rock, especially Led Zeppelin,” he wrote. “He just advised that I listened to Christian rock instead.”

6. He was taught to accept gay people. Vance wrote that he would “never forget the time I convinced myself I was gay.” Not yet old enough to feel attracted to the opposite sex, he worried something was wrong. “You’re not gay,” his mamaw told him, and even if he were, she reassured him, “that would be OK. God would still love you.” As he wrote, “Now that I’m older, I recognize the profundity of her sentiment: Gay people, though unfamiliar, threatened nothing about mamaw’s being. There were more important things for a Christian to worry about.”

7. As a candidate, he said he would vote against federal protections for gay and interracial marriage. He called the matter a “bizarre distraction” from more pressing issues. Though he also said that “gay marriage is the law of the land in this country. And I’m not trying to do anything to change that.”

8. He’s a late-in-life Catholic. In 2019, when he was 35, Vance was baptized into the Catholic Church. He chose St. Augustine as his patron saint. “Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way,” he explained in an interview that year. “I also went through an angry atheist phase. As someone who spent a lot of his life buying into the lie that you had to be stupid to be a Christian, Augustine really demonstrated in a moving way that that’s not true.”

9. He was a young Marine. Vance joined the Marines after high school and eventually served in Iraq, where, he wrote, “I was lucky to escape any real fighting,” but it was a time that “affected me deeply nonetheless.” He worked in public affairs and, for a time, as “the media relations officer” for a large military base, Cherry Point, in North Carolina.

10. “Proud to Be an American” gets him every time. “I choke up when I hear Lee Greenwood’s cheesy anthem ‘Proud to Be an American,’” he wrote. “When I was 16, I vowed that every time I met a veteran, I would go out of my way to shake his or her hand, even if I had to awkwardly interject to do so.”

11. He was never a “birther.” Vance has said he was offended by the racist birther conspiracy against Barack Obama — peddled most famously by Trump — and alarmed at how people in his hometown seemed so susceptible to such things.

12. He later soured on Obama (and warmed to Trump). The former president was “unable of saying anything outside of the elite consensus,” Vance said in 2022, calling Obama “a walking, talking Atlantic magazine subscription.”

13. He felt impostor syndrome at Yale Law School. As he wrote: “I lived among the newly christened members of what folks back home pejoratively call the ‘elites,’ and by every outward appearance, I was one of them: I am a stale, white, straight male. I have never felt out of place in my entire life. But I did at Yale.”

14. Vance met his wife, Usha, at Yale. They married in Kentucky in 2013, and were blessed by a Hindu pundit. “Usha definitely brings me back to earth,” Vance said in a 2021 interview with Megyn Kelly.

15. He found famous mentors. One was Amy Chua, a law professor known for her memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” who encouraged Vance to write his own book. Another was David Frum, a speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration and cheerleader for the Iraq War who helped Vance make early career connections. Frum has since become disillusioned with his former charge, describing him as a hyper-ambitious shape-shifter who would do anything or be anyone to get ahead.

16. Former Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, a centrist, was his “political hero.” In 2022, Daniels observed that Vance had “veered in a different direction” that he described as being “a little regrettable.”

17. He did not vote for Trump in 2016. He voted instead for the independent candidate Evan McMullin.

18. But he claimed to understand Trump’s appeal. He predicted that Trump could be the GOP nominee in 2016, though he did not think Trump would win the general election. As he said in an interview the following year, “It’s amazing, and I can’t repeat enough: As much as I saw Trump winning the nomination, I was super wrong about his prospects in the general.”

19. He deleted his old social media posts that were critical of Trump. Among other things, Vance has called Trump “cultural heroin” and wondered if he would be “America’s Hitler.”

20. His wife clerked for Chief Justice John G. Roberts, and, before he was on the Supreme Court, for Brett Kavanaugh. The controversy around Kavanaugh’s nomination to the court seemed to be a pivotal moment in both Vance and his wife’s political journey. “My wife worked for Kavanaugh, loved the guy,” he told Ross Douthat, a New York Times columnist. “You start looking around and say, ‘If they can do this to him, can they just do this to any of us?’”

21. He has espoused traditional views of marriage and the role of women in the workplace. He has called Democratic leaders “childless cat ladies.” And he said that “if your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at The New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”

22. His champion is the Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel. After Yale, he worked for Thiel’s firm Mithril Capital, and Thiel donated $15 million to Vance’s race in Ohio.

23. His venture capital firm is named after “Lord of the Rings” lore. The firm, Narya Capital, was named after a mythical object from J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy: Narya was one of three Elven rings of power, worn in the third age by the wizard Gandalf. Vance has invested in various services including a Catholic prayer and meditation app and the right-wing, video-sharing platform Rumble.

24. He made amends with Trump, with Thiel’s help. The mogul brokered a meeting at Mar-a-Lago. Vance had been trailing in the polls during his primary race in Ohio. Trump backed him, with just two weeks left in the race, and Vance went on to win his crowded primary by nearly 10 points.

25. He was an executive producer on the film version of his memoir. The 2020 movie starred Glenn Close as mamaw and Amy Adams as Vance’s mother. Director Ron Howard largely steered the movie away from political debates. Still, the film prompted a backlash and was largely panned. A Times critic described it as a “strange stew of melodrama, didacticism and inadvertent camp.”

26. He is tight with Donald Trump Jr. 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.

27. His beard is Trump-approved. The former president has said that Vance looks like a young Abraham Lincoln.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Shawn McCreesh/Doug Mills
c.2024 The New York Times Company