JD Vance

• 1. Introduction

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  JD Vance took the oath as the 50th vice president of the United States at noon on the 20th of January 2025. Justice Brett Kavanaugh administered it. The man standing there had not always answered to that name. He was born James Donald Bowman on the 2nd of August 1984, in Middletown, Ohio. He did not adopt the surname Vance until he was nearly thirty. Between that birth and that oath came a Marine Corps deployment to Iraq. There was a law degree from Yale and a stint in Silicon Valley venture capital. There was also a memoir that turned a private childhood into a national talking point. He had once called Donald Trump 'reprehensible' and described himself as a 'never Trump guy.' Within a decade he was standing beside Trump as his running mate. What carried him from a fractured household in Middletown to the vice presidency, and what changed his mind about the man he now serves?

• 2. A Name Three Times Over

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  Beverly Carol Aikins and Donald Ray Bowman divorced while their son was still a toddler. James Donald Bowman, as he was named at birth, grew up instead in the household of his maternal grandparents, James and Bonnie Vance, whom he called Papaw and Mamaw. He and his older sister, Lindsay, spent much of their childhood in that house rather than with their mother, who struggled with drug addiction. Vance later described his upbringing as one of hardship and abuse, worsened by his mother's addiction to drugs. He described his family as Scots-Irish and part of an Appalachian American culture, and he spent summers with relatives in Jackson, Kentucky.

  When his mother married her third husband, Bob Hamel, she had her son's name changed again, this time to James David Hamel. The new name dropped his biological father's identity and borrowed the first name of an uncle, David. Vance kept the nickname JD through both versions of his name. He would not become James David Vance, taking his mother's maiden name, until April 2013, decades after his birth.

  Vance's early education happened at Roosevelt Elementary School and Vail Middle School, both later demolished, in 2008 and 2012. He also spent a brief stretch at West Elkton Elementary School for fourth grade, before graduating from Middletown High School in 2003. That same year, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps as a private.

  Vance served four years as a combat correspondent, a military journalist, with the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. In 2005 he deployed to Iraq for six months in a non-combat role, writing articles and taking photographs. That December, he sat in on a roundtable discussion with Vice President Dick Cheney. He left the Marines in 2007 holding the rank of corporal. His decorations included the Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal and the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal.

  The G.I. Bill paid for what came next. Vance enrolled at Ohio State University and graduated with highest honors in 2009, holding a bachelor's degree in political science and philosophy. The following year, he entered Yale Law School and won a staff position on The Yale Law Journal, checking citations with fellow editors. At Yale he also became friends with a fellow Ohio native, future Republican politician Vivek Ramaswamy.

  Professor Amy Chua persuaded Vance, during his first year at Yale, to begin writing the memoir that became Hillbilly Elegy. In 2011, he attended a talk at Yale given by Peter Thiel and struck up a rapport with him. That connection would shape much of his later career. Around the same time, from 2010 to 2011, Vance wrote for David Frum's website FrumForum under the name J. D. Hamel. He earned his Juris Doctor from Yale in May 2013, the same year he finally became James David Vance. He was admitted to the Kentucky bar later that year.

• 3. Hillbilly Elegy and Its Fallout

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  Harper published Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis in June 2016. The book recounted the Appalachian culture and economic struggles of Vance's own upbringing. It landed on The New York Times Best Seller list in both 2016 and 2017, arriving as Donald Trump won the presidency. Scholars and journalists treated it as a guide to white working-class disaffection, and the Times included it among '6 Books to Help Understand Trump's Win.'

  The Washington Post profiled Vance and called him 'the voice of the Rust Belt.' Not every review was kind. In The New Republic, Sarah Jones described Vance as 'liberal media's favorite white trash-splainer' and a 'false prophet of blue America,' dismissing the book as 'little more than a list of myths about welfare queens.'

  Hillbilly Elegy's success pulled Vance into contact with social elites, and he began writing a column for The New York Times. He later said those encounters, and what he took to be the elites' disdain for the people he grew up with, helped shape his later political views.

  Vance sold the film rights to Hillbilly Elegy to Imagine Entertainment in 2017, and Ron Howard signed on to direct that April. The film reached select theaters on the 11th of November 2020, and later that month arrived on Netflix, carrying Vance's story to a wider audience.

• 4. From Law to Silicon Valley

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  John Cornyn, the Republican senator from Texas, gave Vance his first job after law school. He then spent a year clerking for Judge David Bunning of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky. He next joined the law firm Sidley Austin as a corporate lawyer. Fewer than two years into that career, Vance left law behind for San Francisco and a job as a venture capitalist.

  Frederic Moll, chairman of the biotech company Circuit Therapeutics, hired Vance in 2015 for his intelligence, his legal background, and his connection to Peter Thiel. Vance tried to steer Thiel's firm, Mithril Capital, into investing in Circuit, but Mithril passed. Colin Greenspon, then a managing director at Mithril, liked Vance regardless and brought him onto the firm in 2016 as a principal.

  Ajay Royan, Mithril's co-founder and managing director, did not get along with Vance. The clash led Vance to leave the firm in 2017; Bloomberg later reported that he scrubbed every trace of Mithril from his LinkedIn profile. He moved back to Ohio and wrote a New York Times op-ed headlined 'Why I'm moving home,' complaining about 'highly educated transplants' in Silicon Valley. In a separate interview, he said elite tech circles wielded 'political-financial power in combination with a certain condescension.'

  Steve Case's investment firm, Revolution LLC, gave Vance his next role in 2017. Greenspon, who had also left Mithril, joined him there in 2018. At Revolution, Vance was put in charge of expanding 'Rise of the Rest,' an initiative growing investment outside Silicon Valley and New York City. He was also a CNN contributor from 2017 to 2018. Starting in 2019, he sat on the board of advisors of the With Honor Fund, a veterans' Super PAC. From 2020 to 2023, he served the same role at American Moment, a conservative training group tied to Project 2025.

  Chris Buskirk co-founded a political advocacy group with Vance in 2019 called the Rockbridge Network. That same year, Vance also co-founded a venture capital firm in Cincinnati named Narya Capital, backed financially by Thiel, Eric Schmidt, and Marc Andreessen. He raised $93 million for the firm in 2020. Alongside Thiel and former Trump adviser Darren Blanton, he invested in Rumble, a Canadian video platform popular with the political right.

• 5. The Ohio Ventures

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  Keith Humphreys, Jamil Jivani, Yuval Levin, and Sally Satel sat on the advisory board of Our Ohio Renewal. Vance founded the 501(c)(4) nonprofit after announcing in December 2016 that he planned to move back to Ohio. The group targeted education and addiction, the same 'social ills' Vance had written about in his memoir. Archived captures of its website from 2017 and 2020 show the same four advisors throughout its existence.

  Jivani, who served as the organization's director of law and policy, later said its work was derailed by his own cancer diagnosis. Our Ohio Renewal raised around $221,000 in 2017, including $80,000 from Vance personally, and spent most of that on overhead and travel. In the years after, it raised less than $50,000 annually. Tax filings show that in its first year, the charity paid more than $63,000 in 'management services' to its executive director, Jai Chabria. That was more than it spent fighting opioid abuse. Chabria later became Vance's chief campaign strategist. The organization closed by 2021.

  Tim Ryan, Vance's Democratic opponent in the 2022 Senate race, called the charity a front for Vance's political ambitions. He cited reports that it paid a Vance political adviser and commissioned public opinion polling. Vance denied the characterization. A related 501(c)(3), Our Ohio Renewal Foundation, formed in 2017 and raised about $69,000 through 2023. As of September 2024, it had not spent any money since 2019.

  Sally Satel's yearlong residency in Ohio's Appalachian region in 2018 was the charity's biggest accomplishment. According to the Associated Press and a 2019 ProPublica investigation, it was also its most compromised one. Satel's employer, the American Enterprise Institute, had financial ties to Purdue Pharma, and ProPublica found a knowledge exchange between Satel and the opioid manufacturer. Satel denied any relationship with Purdue or knowledge of its donations to AEI.

  Jonathan Webb founded AppHarvest, an indoor vertical farming startup in Kentucky. Vance sat on its board of directors from March 2017 to April 2021, while the company stood as one of Narya Capital's first announced investments. Vance publicly praised the company's promise to bring good jobs with health benefits to a depressed part of Appalachia. AppHarvest went bankrupt in 2023, owing more than $340 million. Webb and his top executives had little experience in horticulture or indoor agriculture, and the company struggled to meet buyers' produce standards.

  Workers inside AppHarvest's greenhouses complained to authorities about 'brutal' conditions. Many local employees quit and were replaced by migrant contract workers, who eventually made up more than half the company's labor force. Vance never held an operational role at AppHarvest. His vice-presidential campaign said he had been unaware of the working-conditions complaints. It added that the decision to hire migrant workers came after he had already resigned from the board.

• 6. Senate Years and the Road to VP

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  Peter Thiel gave $10 million to Protect Ohio Values, a super PAC created in February 2021 to support a possible Vance Senate campaign. Robert Mercer also gave an undisclosed amount. Vance launched an exploratory committee in May 2021 and formally announced his campaign on the 1st of July that year.

  Josh Mandel and Matt Dolan were his closest rivals in the Republican primary. On the 3rd of May 2022, Vance won that primary with 32% of the vote, ahead of Mandel's 24% and Dolan's 23%. He went on to defeat Democratic nominee Tim Ryan in the general election, taking 53% of the vote to Ryan's 47%, though the margin was seen as weak compared to other Ohio Republicans that year. Around the time he became a candidate, Vance dropped the periods from how he had long spelled his initials, changing 'J.D.' to 'JD.'

  Sworn into the Senate on the 3rd of January 2023, Vance represented Ohio for two years. By the middle of 2024, he had delivered 45 Senate speeches and sponsored 57 bills, none of which passed. He co-sponsored 288 more, two of which passed both chambers before being vetoed by President Biden. In March 2023, he and Senator Sherrod Brown co-sponsored legislation meant to prevent train derailments like the one in East Palestine. It failed for lack of Republican support. That June, Vance voted against raising the debt ceiling, warning it would leave 'a reduced military in the face of a rising threat from China.'

  Vance resigned his Senate seat at midnight on the 10th of January, days before his swearing-in as vice president. Governor Mike DeWine appointed Jon Husted to fill the vacancy.

  By 2021, entering his own Senate race, Vance had reversed course. He apologized for past criticism of Trump and deleted some of it from public view. He also advised Trump that year to replace career civil servants with loyalists. Vance later said that had he been vice president during the 2020 election, he would not have certified the results, arguing instead that states Trump lost should have sent competing electors for Congress to sort out.

  Trump announced Vance as his running mate on Truth Social on the 15th of July 2024, the first day of the Republican National Convention. Vance accepted the nomination two days later. North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, Florida senator Marco Rubio, and South Carolina senator Tim Scott were the other finalists. Trump's sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, pushed for Vance. So did Elon Musk, David Sacks, Tucker Carlson, and Peter Thiel, who had first introduced Vance to Trump in 2021. The Heritage Foundation, architect of Project 2025, lobbied for him privately.

  Musk called the ticket a combination that 'resounds with victory.' Sacks, a Silicon Valley donor who had given $900,000 to a pro-Vance super PAC in 2022, wrote that Vance was 'an American patriot.' Reports that Musk would give the campaign $45 million a month turned out to be overstated. Musk later said his contributions would be 'much lower amounts.'

  A former friend from Yale Law School surfaced private messages in July 2024 accusing Vance of having 'changed his opinion on literally every imaginable issue that affects everyday Americans' in pursuit of 'political power and wealth.' After Joe Biden withdrew from the race that same month, Vance was recorded telling a private fundraiser that Kamala Harris 'does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden.' A day later, he told reporters, 'I don't think the political calculus changes at all.' By August, he was arguing publicly that a running mate 'doesn't really matter' while calling Harris 'a bad vice president.'

  A CNN poll taken after the convention showed Vance with a net-negative approval rating, prompting some Republicans to question the pick. The debate against Tim Walz changed that trajectory. A CBS News and YouGov poll of 1,630 viewers found Vance's favorability climbing from 40% to 49%, while his unfavorability fell from 54% to 47%. Walz saw a similar rise, from 52% to 60% favorable.

• 7. Confrontations Abroad

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  Vance delivered a speech at the 61st Munich Security Conference on the 14th of February 2025. He argued that Europe's greatest danger was not Russia or China, but the erosion of its own democratic norms. He cited censorship and the suppression of dissent. He criticized European Union leaders for annulling Romania's presidential election over claims of foreign interference and for using 'misinformation' laws against political opponents. Vance warned that continued American support for Europe would depend on whether its governments upheld free speech and political legitimacy. He accused them of 'running in fear of their own voters.' Several outlets described the speech as a turning point in relations between the European Union and the United States. Some called it a declaration of 'ideological war' against America's European allies.

  On the 28th of February 2025, Vance and Trump met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House's Oval Office. Vance stayed mostly silent for the meeting's first 40 minutes. He then interjected, telling Zelenskyy, 'The path to peace and the path to prosperity is maybe engaging in diplomacy.' Zelenskyy asked, 'What kind of diplomacy, JD, are you speaking about?' after noting that Putin had not honored an earlier ceasefire and prisoner exchange.

  Vance told Zelenskyy he was discussing 'diplomacy that's going to end the destruction of Ukraine.' He called it 'disrespectful' for Zelenskyy to litigate the dispute 'in front of the American media.' He added that Ukraine was 'forcing conscripts to the front lines' for lack of manpower, and accused Zelenskyy of running a 'propaganda tour.' Vance also incorrectly claimed Zelenskyy had 'campaigned for the opposition' during a visit to Pennsylvania in October 2024. Zelenskyy had in fact visited a factory there to thank ammunition workers. Zelenskyy's delegation was then asked to leave the White House, and a planned minerals deal between Ukraine and the U.S. was called off.

  Before his own inauguration, Vance had already held talks with China's vice president, Han Zheng, on U.S.-China relations. In March 2025, he became the first sitting vice president to visit Greenland. There, he told reporters, 'We can't just ignore the president's desires' regarding U.S. interest in acquiring the territory. He also told Denmark directly, 'you have not done a good job.' Two months later, he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio helped mediate a ceasefire between India and Pakistan during their 2025 conflict. In February 2026, Vance became the first sitting vice president to visit Armenia. There he met Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to advance a multi-billion-dollar civil nuclear energy deal aimed at reducing Russia's regional influence.

  Vance led the U.S. delegation to negotiations with Iran in Islamabad in April 2026. A former administration official told The Hill it was 'probably the toughest thing he'll do as vice president.' The official called Iranian negotiators 'the toughest negotiators in the world.' After 21 hours of talks on the 12th of April, Vance announced the negotiations had ended without an agreement. He repeated that Iran 'cannot have a nuclear weapon.'

• 8. Faith and Family

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  Usha Chilukuri met Vance in 2013 while both were students at Yale Law School. They married in Kentucky on the 14th of June 2014, in an interfaith ceremony, she Hindu and he then a Protestant Christian. Vance's close friend Jamil Jivani read from the Bible, and a Hindu pandit blessed the couple. Usha went on to clerk for appellate judge Brett Kavanaugh and then for Chief Justice John Roberts.

  Vance was raised in a 'conservative, evangelical' branch of Protestantism but became an atheist when he entered college. By September 2016, he described himself as not active in any denomination while 'thinking very seriously about converting to Catholicism.' In August 2019, he was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church, choosing Augustine of Hippo as his confirmation saint. Peter Thiel was an influence on that decision. Rod Dreher attended the baptism as a guest. Vance said Augustine 'gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way.' Both Pope Francis and his successor, Pope Leo XIV, have since criticized Vance's views on immigration. Vance has answered by invoking ordo amoris, a concept from Catholic theology, which he equates with 'America First.' Cardinal Timothy Dolan has called Vance 'a very good guy' while disagreeing with him on immigration and foreign policy.

  Patrick Deneen, Rod Dreher, Curtis Yarvin, and J. R. R. Tolkien are among the writers Vance names as influences on his politics. Peter Thiel, Robert Putnam, Raj Chetty, and Yoram Hazony are also cited as shaping his thinking. That thinking runs toward opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control, and continued American military aid to Ukraine. He also supports federal criminalization of gender-affirming care for minors. Vance has linked childlessness to what he calls sociopathy. He once suggested parents should have more voting power than non-parents, a position he backed away from in August 2024. He has also called for a 'de-woke-ification program' at American institutions, even where courts might rule it illegal.

  JD and Usha Vance have three children together. On the 20th of January 2026, the couple announced they were expecting a fourth child, due that summer. They own more than 100 acres of land in Kentucky, along with a home in Cincinnati's East Walnut Hills neighborhood that Vance bought in 2018.

  Nate Vance, JD's cousin and fellow Marine Corps veteran, volunteered to fight for Ukraine in 2022 after Russia's invasion. He served in the 'Da Vinci Wolves' unit, fighting in battles including Kupiansk and Bakhmut. In 2025, Nate publicly criticized JD's stance on Ukraine, accusing him and Trump of aiding Russia. He said he was disappointed JD never consulted him despite their family tie. JD's half-brother, Cory Bowman, ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Cincinnati in 2025.