Former President Donald Trump has selected Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) to be his running mate. Here’s how Vance’s humble origins led him to become a champion for the working class.
Vance is 39 years old, and would serve as the first millennial vice president of the United States if Trump wins the election. He would be the first-ever Marine combat veteran on the presidential ticket of a major party. He is also the first major presidential or vice presidential candidate to sport facial hair in nearly a century.
Vance also converted to Catholicism and, if elected, would be the second Catholic vice president after Joe Biden.
James Donald (J.D.) Bowman was born in August 1984 in Middletown, Ohio. He was six years old when his biological father gave him up for adoption to his stepfather. From then, he became James David Vance.
He had in a “tumultuous” childhood, CBS News reports:
Vance’s childhood was tumultuous. Not only did his father leave the family, but his mother struggled with an addiction to drugs and alcohol, which Vance documented in his book. Vance spent much of his time growing up with his grandparents in Kentucky. His grandmother, a “blue dog” Democrat who owned 19 handguns, according to Vance’s Senate biography, was a big influence on his life.
After graduating from high school, Vance enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps.
When attending Yale University for his law degree, he reportedly had to adapt to the nuances of the elite culture at the Ivy League university and it was a initially a challenge for him.
At Yale, he met his wife Usha.
The New York Times in 2022 described how Usha has helped guide J.D., even back at Yale Law School, where they organized a discussion group on the subject of “social decline in white America.”
“She instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask and she always encouraged me to seek opportunities that I didn’t know existed,” Vance said.
Usha is accomplished in her own right. She is a litigator and clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, as well as Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he served as a federal judge.
Vance and Usha, who is Indian-American, have three children together, Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel.
In 2016, months before Donald Trump won the presidency, Vance wrote Hillbilly Elegy, which told his personal story against the backdrop of Appalachia and Rust Belt America.
Vance’s memoir became a window into the lives of the “forgotten men and women,” who became a core part of Trump’s working-class coalition in 2016.
“J.D.’s book, ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ became a Major Best Seller and Movie, as it championed the hardworking men and women of our Country,” Trump wrote on Monday when he announced Vance as his running mate.
“J.D. has had a very successful business career in Technology and Finance, and now, during the Campaign, will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond,” he added.
Hillbilly Elegy even became a 2020 movie, which was nominated for an Academy Award.
Senate career
Vance joined Congress’s upper chamber after defeating Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH), a congressman first elected in 2002.
The Ohio senator serves on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee; the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee; the Joint Economic Committee, and the Special Committee on Aging.
In the Senate, Vance championed the populist and nationalist policies that propelled Donald Trump to the White House.
In a 2021 interview, Vance deconstructed many of the leftist frameworks, including critical race theory, white privilege, and globalist capital with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow:
Matt Perdie / Breitbart NewsThe National Immigration Center for Enforcement (NICE) wrote in a statement on Monday that Vance is “one of the best” lawmakers in Congress on immigration.
As detailed by Breitbart News’s John Binder, Vance cosponsored the Reshape Alternatives to Detention (ATD) to streamline enforcement tools to make it easier for a future administration to detain and deport illegal aliens. Vance has also tied mass immigration under Biden to the nation’s ever-increasing housing prices by grilling Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.
Vance also fought for Americans impacted by the derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in 2023, which spewed chemicals into the environment.
As the senator fought to ensure that citizens of East Palestine, Ohio, can be made whole after the derailment, Vance said that Republicans must represent those affected by the derailment over corporate interests and big government.
J. D. Vance: Rail Industry Is “in Bed with Big Government”
U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public WorksVance has led the movement to pass the Railway Safety Act to ensure that another disaster like the one in East Palestine does not happen again.
The Ohio senator has also critiqued the D.C. establishment’s “sleepwalking” America towards a conflict with the nuclear-armed Russia.
“I just spoke to a friend I trust on what’s going on in Russia. I think the risk of nuclear war is higher now than at any point in my lifetime. Biden is sleepwalking into World War 3,” Vance wrote after the Biden administration agreed to allow Ukraine to strike Russia with American-provided weapons.
At the 60th Munich Security Conference, Vance argued that an additional $60 billion in aid to Ukraine would not “fundamentally change the reality” of the country’s protracted fight against Russia.
“Enough With the BS:” J.D. Vance Blasts Globalists, GOP Establishment Threatening WW3 over Ukraine
Matt Perdie / Breitbart NewsVance also opposed the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), a bill that would create an antitrust exemption for the media industry to collectively bargain against big tech platforms, effectively creating a media cartel.
Vance credited Breitbart News and Alex Marlow “with informing his opposition to it.” He said, “So there’s a universe where — if you fix some of the problems here — you might actually have a good piece of legislation, but I think it’s always important to look to the people who have actually been warriors on this stuff, where are they coming down on it?”
He continued, “I think Josh Hawley — of course, has endorsed me in the Senate race, is a good friend of mine — sounds like he’s not a huge fan of this legislation, and I think that if Breitbart and Alex Marlow and Josh Hawley think that this is bad, we should step back and wonder what it’s actually doing.”
Trump’s Anti-Establishment Pick
The establishment wing of the GOP has long fought against making Vance Trump’s running mate.
In June the editorial board of the New York Post, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, opposed the Ohio senator for vice president because he opposes aid to Ukraine.
Reports from July said that Murdoch called Trump multiple times per day, and even enlisted the help of his outlets, the Post and the Wall Street Journal, to push his anti-Vance position.
“A lot of supposedly conservative news outlets turn out to have zero interest in anything their readers and viewers care about. Instead, they’re focused on promoting pointless wars,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said at the time. “That’s why they’re working so hard to destroy J.D. Vance before Trump can pick him. Let’s hope they don’t succeed.”
One Fox communications consultant said Murdoch’s preference for Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND) was a scheme to end “Trumpism” after a second Trump term.
“And it bothers him. He’s not looking forward to another four years where he’ll have to kiss Trump’s ass. They don’t want Trump on Fox, so they get Burgum on there and groom him for the next four years and make him president. That’s his way of ending Trumpism,” the consultant said.
After Trump chose Vance as his running mate, Carlson said that every bad person in Washington, DC, “was aligned” against Vance, emphasizing the Ohio senator’s opposition to the proxy war against Russia.
“I’m gonna tell you what I just saw, which is that every bad person I’ve ever met in a lifetime in Washington was aligned against J.D. Vance,” Carlson said during the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Fest.
The former Fox News host said that those opposed to Vance are only involved in politics to reap the benefits of “killing other people in pointless wars.”
He explained, “Not on personal grounds. I mean, he’s a perfectly nice guy — he’s, like, one of the only members of the Senate with a happy marriage, true — but because they thought he would be harder to manipulate and slightly less enthusiastic about killing people. That’s it. That he would be an impediment to their exercising power.”
After Carlson’s speech at the Heritage Foundation Policy Fest, he cited Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a staunchly pro-Ukraine war lawmaker, as one of the Republicans most opposed to Vance’s nomination for vice president.
Carlson wrote, “Lindsey Graham is a liar. No one lobbied harder against JD Vance than he did, and in the sleaziest, most vicious way. He was doing it this morning. This is why everyone hates Washington, because people like Lindsey Graham are happy to lie right to your face, smiling as they plot your destruction. It’s disgusting.”
In a recent interview with the New York Times‘s Ross Douthat, Vance said that, in a similar manner to Trump, advocating for his populist message necessarily entailed burning bridges with America’s elite.
Douthat asked:
Let me put the question differently. One interpretation of why conservatives trust Trump is that by saying things that are offensive to the conventions of elite liberalism, he’s effectively burning his ships. He can never just go back to being host of “The Apprentice.” And one interpretation of your Senate campaign was that you were consciously doing the same thing, that you were trying to piss liberals off to make yourself seem more trustworthy to Republican voters. Did you think about it that way?
Vance responded, “I didn’t think about it quite that way, but before I ran, I had this conversation with myself and my wife that if my underlying critique is correct, there’s no way to run the campaign without burning bridges.”
He added, “You have to self-consciously accept that previous friends of yours are going to think you’re a bad person.”
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.