- Former President Donald Trump chose Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate.
- A former Trump critic, Vance rose to fame as the author of a bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
- Vance was elected to the Senate in 2022 and became an outspoken supporter of Trump.
Donald Trump’s dramatic Veepstakes have come to an end and Sen. JD Vance of Ohio has come out on top.
Despite winning the coveted spot as Trump’s No. 2, though, Vance has had a winding path through Trumpism and politics overall.
Here are 10 things you need to know about Vance, the potential 50th vice president and heir apparent to the MAGA movement.
Born James Donald Bowman in Middletown, Ohio, JD Vance grew up in the Rust Belt and joined the Marines after high school.
Vance served in Iraq as a public affairs marine, escorting members of the press and writing stories about service members. He wrote in his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” that the Marine Corps “taught me how to live like an adult.”
“It was in the Marine Corps where I first ordered grown men to do a job and watched them listen; where I learned that leadership depended far more on earning the respect of your subordinates than on bossing them around; where I discovered how to earn that respect; and where I saw that men and women of different social classes and races could work as a team and bond like family,” he wrote, according to an excerpt published by Military.com.
He went on to study at Ohio State University and Yale Law School.
Vance majored in political science and philosophy at Ohio State and graduated summa cum laude. He then graduated from Yale Law School in 2013.
As Business Insider previously reported, while at Yale, law professor and “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” author Amy Chua 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. He wrote in The Lamp in 2020 that it was “the most significant moment” of his time at Yale.
After two clerkships and a brief career in corporate law, Vance began working at Mithril Capital, a firm backed by Thiel, in 2016. A year later, he moved to Revolution, a VC firm in Washington, DC.
He wrote a best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Vance published “Hillbilly Elegy” in the summer of 2016, before Trump was elected or projected to win the presidency. The memoir, which became a New York Times bestseller, focuses on Vance’s experience growing up poor in Ohio and Kentucky and was largely read as an honest illustration of America’s white working class. After Trump won, many turned to the book as an explanation for Trump’s meteoric and unexpected rise.
A movie adaptation of “Hillbilly Elegy” came out on Netflix in 2020.
Vance is married to litigator Usha Chilukuri Vance.
Vance met his wife when they were both students at Yale Law School. In “Hillbilly Elegy,” he wrote that Chilukuri Vance was his “Yale spirit guide” who encouraged him to seek opportunities within the elite institution. They wed in 2014.
Chilukuri Vance clerked for Judge Brett Kavanaugh in the US Court of Appeals before he became a Supreme Court Justice and also clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, The New York Times reported. She now works at the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson.
Vance and his wife have three young children.
They have two sons, 6-year-old Ewan and 4-year-old Vivek, and a 2-year-old daughter, Mirabel.
In February, Vance read “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!” by Dr. Seuss on the Senate floor in honor of Vivek’s 4th birthday, The Hill reported.
Vance started out as a “Never Trumper,” but slowly changed his tune and embraced the former president.
When he published “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance was a self-described “Never Trumper” and even called the former president “reprehensible” in a now-deleted Twitter post.
As the years — and Trump presidency — wore on, though, Vance started to take a different approach. He told The Financial Times in 2018 that the former president “recognizes the frustration that exists in large parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, eastern Kentucky and so forth.”
Come 2020, Vance supported Trump’s campaign and expressed regret for his previous stance. The tide turned in both directions, as Trump began to support Vance’s foray into politics.
In 2021, Vance entered a crowded Senate primary race.
A junior congressman, Vance was only elected to the Senate in 2022 but has since become one of Trump’s most loyal supporters. He entered a cramped Ohio primary in 2021 in the mold of an unrelenting Trump supporter and anti-elitist.
Vance embraced the former president’s policies and eventually earned his coveted endorsement. With Trump’s blessing, he catapulted through the primary and into Congress.
Vance serves on various congressional committees and represents the “New Right.”
In the Senate, Vance 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. Like Trump, he has an isolationist bent on foreign policy and takes a hard-line approach to immigration.
During his limited time in office, Vance has come to embody what Politico dubbed the “New Right” movement — an ill-defined coalition of younger conservatives who are trying to push the Republican party toward more populism, conservatism, and nationalism.
Trump selected Vance as his running mate in the 2024 presidential race.
Trump selected Vance as his running mate in a post on Truth Social. In it, he celebrated Vance’s business background and said that, as vice president, the youngster “will do everything he can to help me MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”
If elected, the 39-year-old will be one of the youngest vice presidents in the nation’s history and well-positioned to inherit the MAGA crown.
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Source: Business Insider
