- Former President Donald Trump chose Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate.
- Vance, a one-time critic of Trump, rose to fame as the author of the best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”
- Vance was elected to the Senate in 2022 and has been an outspoken supporter of Trump.
Donald Trump’s dramatic vice presidential election has concluded, with Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio winning.
Despite earning the coveted position of President Trump’s second vice president, Vance has had a twisty and winding path through Trumpism and politics in general.
Here are 10 things to know about Vance, the next 50th vice president and heir to the MAGA movement.
Born James Donald Bowman in Middletown, Ohio, J.D. Vance grew up in the Rust Belt and enlisted in the Marines after graduating from high school.
Vance served in Iraq as a Marine public affairs officer, protecting reporters and writing about military personnel, and wrote in his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” that the Marines “taught me how to be an adult.”
“In the Marines, I was able to give orders to adults to do their jobs for the first time and watch them obey. I learned that leadership is much more about earning the respect of my subordinates than it is about intimidating them. I discovered how to earn that respect. And I learned that men and women of different social classes and races could work as a team and bond like a family,” he wrote. According to an excerpt published by military.com.
He continued his studies at Ohio State University and Yale Law School.
Vance graduated summa cum laude from Ohio State University, where he majored in political science and philosophy, and then graduated from Yale Law School in 2013.
As Business Insider previously reported, while he was a student at Yale, Amy Chua, a law professor and author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” encouraged Vance to write a memoir about his upbringing.
Before becoming an author and politician, Vance worked at a venture capital firm backed by billionaire Peter Thiel.
As a law student, Vance attended a talk by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, which he wrote in The Lamp in 2020 as “the most important moment” of his time at Yale.
After two clerkship stints and a brief career in corporate law, Vance began working at Thiel-backed Mithril Capital in 2016. A year later, he moved to Revolution, a Washington, D.C., venture capital firm.
He wrote a bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Vance published “Hillbilly Elegy” in the summer of 2016, before Trump was elected or expected to be elected president. The New York Times bestselling memoir focuses on Vance’s experiences growing up poor in Ohio and Kentucky and has been widely read as an honest portrayal of white working-class America. After Trump was elected, many looked to the book as a way to explain his unexpected rise to power.
A film version of Hillbilly Elegy was released on Netflix in 2020.
Vance is married to litigation lawyer Usha Chirukuri Vance.
Vance met his wife when they were both students at Yale Law School. In “Hillbilly Elegy,” he writes that Chilculi Vance was his “spiritual guide at Yale,” encouraging him to pursue opportunities at the elite school. The couple married in 2014.
Chilculi Vance as clerk Before joining the Supreme Court, Judge Brett Kavanaugh served on the U.S. Court of Appeals and Chief Justice John Roberts, The New York Times She is reportedly currently employed at the law firm of Munger, Torres & Olson.
Vance and his wife have three young children.
They have two sons, Ewan, six, and Vivec, four, and a daughter, Mirabelle, two.
In February, Senator Vance celebrated Vivec’s fourth birthday by reading Dr. Seuss’s “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!” on the Senate floor, The Hill reported.
Vance was initially “anti-Trump,” but gradually changed his stance and came to support the former president.
At the time he published “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance described himself as a “Never Trumper” and even called the former president “reprehensible” in a now-deleted Twitter post.
But as the years went by and Trump’s term grew, Vance took a different approach: In 2018, he told the Financial Times that the former president “recognizes the discontent that exists in large parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, eastern Kentucky and elsewhere.”
In 2020, Vance endorsed Trump’s campaign and expressed regret for his previous stance. The tide turned in both directions as Trump began to support Vance’s political venture.
In 2021, Vance ran in a hotly contested Senate primary.
Vance, a congressman, was only elected to the Senate in 2022, but has since become one of Trump’s staunchest supporters. He ran in a tough Ohio primary in 2021 presenting himself as a staunch Trump supporter and anti-elitist.
Vance supported the policies of the former president and ultimately got the endorsement he wanted: With Trump’s backing, he rose through the primaries and into Congress.
Vance serves on various congressional committees and represents the “New Right.”
In the Senate, Vance sits on the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Commerce, Science and Transportation, Joint Economic Committee and Select Committee on Aging. Like Trump, he has isolationist tendencies in foreign policy and a hard-line stance on immigration.
During his limited tenure, Vance has come to embody what Politico has dubbed the “New Right” movement, a loose coalition of younger conservatives trying to push the Republican Party toward populism, conservatism and nationalism.
President Trump has selected Vance as his running mate for the 2024 presidential election.
Trump selected Vance as his running mate in a post on Truth Social, in which he praised Vance’s business record and said that as vice president he would “do everything in our power to Make America Great Again.”
If elected, the 39-year-old would become one of the youngest vice presidents in U.S. history and be well-positioned to inherit the MAGA throne.
