Who Is JD Vance? (No, Seriously. Who Is He?)
At the Turning Point USA conference at the University of Mississippi in October, an audience member asked Vice President JD Vance about the tension between his interracial, interfaith marriage with Usha, the daughter of Indian immigrants, and his beliefs that the U.S. should reduce the number of immigrants. He began with his thoughts on immigration policy, then veered toward the personal by saying he hopes Usha converts to Catholicism. “Do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved by in church? I honestly do wish that because I believe in the Christian Gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way,” he said.
It wasn’t the most grotesque statement Vance has made—there are plenty of contenders for that—but it exposed his twisted priorities. Here was the vice president defending the administration’s vile immigration policies in a way that fundamentally degrades the experiences and traditions of his own family, of people he is bound by vows—vows that should be sacred to a Christian—to love and protect. It sums up Vance’s journey into public life and politics: There is nobody he won’t betray, and no principle he won’t cast aside, in his quest to accrue more fame and power.
This has been clear since he rose to fame. Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a suburb between Cincinnati and Dayton. In his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance describes the hardships of his childhood there—his mother’s addictions, his absent father, his feuding grandparents—which he left by joining the Army and later going to college. His grandparents were from the Appalachians in Eastern Kentucky and had moved there for factory work, like so many other transplants looking for work in the middle of the last century. Because of that history, Vance claimed a kind of hillbilly mantel. “We called our hometown of Middletown Middletucky because so many of the residents actually came from Kentucky,” he said on Fresh Air in 2016. “So it was this massive transplantation of one culture and one group of people into an entirely different area. And a lot of times, of course, they kept the culture, and they kept a lot of their habits with them when they moved.”
Of course, he was not from Kentucky. He visited it in summers and briefly describes a visit for the book, but doesn’t portray it as a real place where people still live. If he thinks of himself as a hillbilly, maybe it’s partly because that’s how Ohioans thought of him and his family, but he and his mother both grew up in Ohio. Writers from Kentucky have rejected his characterizations and portrayed him more as a carpetbagger who doesn’t understand mountain culture.
Vance had already graduated from Yale Law School, dabbled in corporate law, and worked at Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm by the time he wrote Hillbilly Elegy, which now made him a sort of public intellectual—or at least a sought-after hillbilly whisperer. Lots of young adults go through similar odysseys of becoming, but at the end of the day, they become someone; their worldview crystallizes. But Vance’s mind seems to keep changing. After his memoir became a bestseller and was adapted into a movie, he explored the sense of want and identity that had helped elect President Donald Trump. But he was no fan at the time. He was instead aligned himself with the elite Ivy League and Big Tech conservatives who found him distasteful. In 2016, he called Trump “America’s Hitler,” and said Trump was like a needle in a vein for people who needed hope to get through their tough lives.
Within three years, though, Vance was running for a Senate seat in Ohio as a MAGA-fied conservative Catholic who flirted with the far right. It’s possible he saw an opening for power and abandoned all of his principles for a chance at it. It seems more likely to me that Vance had no principles—and when he realized there was more adulation to be had by adopting Trumpism instead of opposing it, he jumped aboard. It worked: Vance landed Trump’s endorsement and defeated several Republicans with extensive political experience en route to a comfortable win in the general election.
It was from this perch that Trump chose him as his running mate, and the latest iteration of Vance was complete. As vice president, Vance hasn’t just supported the xenophobia Trump espouses, but built upon it and amplified it. As he did in his Turning Point USA speech, he’s called for the reduction of immigration—legal and illegal—into the U.S., saying it will bankrupt the country and blaming the housing affordability crisis on immigrants. He has also blamed antisemitism in the U.S. on young immigrants. On X, he said that the U.S. “imported a lot of people with ethnic grievances” and that to stop antisemitism the country needed to “lower immigration and support assimilation.”
As Trump’s cruel border and deportation policies have ramped up, Vance, a Catholic, pushed back against Catholic leaders’ criticism of those polices and questioned their motives. “I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” he said on CBS’s Face the Nation.
When news of a racist, pro-Nazi filled young Republican group chat surfaced in October, Vance went on the Charlie Kirk Show to defend the participants. “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” he said. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke—telling a very offensive, stupid joke—is cause to ruin their lives.” But he didn’t think the same of anyone who criticized Kirk after his assassination in September, pushing for them to face consequences.
Vance has championed a hard right turn on many other fronts as well, promoting pro-natalism while dismantling the safety net that protects children and families, and trying to sell lies about the administration’s disastrous handling of the economy. He does all of this as an ally to those who have helped his rise, from Christian nationalists to tech billionaires. But Americans aren’t fond of Vance: Roughly half the country disapproves of him. Maybe that’s because they see him as a cynical shapeshifter, changing identities based on whatever he thinks will resonate most—so he can accrue yet more power. That’s how he won over Trump, and it paid off handsomely. But if Vance decides to run for president—as he is almost certain to do, given that he’s already landing high-profile endorsements—there will be no more coattails to ride. Who will he pretend to be then?