JD Vance, from ‘hillbilly’ to VP candidate: How an Ohio kid from a broken home rose to be a Republican star

JD Vance, the famed Appalachian memoirist turned pugnacious Republican senator, has been named Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee as the former president looks to take back the White House.

It is an extraordinary ascent for a 39-year-old former US Marine and child of a violent, broken home, best known for his searing 2016 book about the poverty and despair of America’s Rust Belt.

Hillbilly Elegy – which sought to explain Trump’s rise by dissecting and sharply criticizing the culture that he’d grow up in – made Vance an instant media darling, hailed by many shell-shocked left-wingers as a “Trump whisperer.”

Although he was once fiercely anti-Trump, Vance will now be joining his old enemy on the Republican ticket and will be the presumed front-runner for the party’s presidential nominee in 2028.

So who is JD Vance, and how did he get here?

‘We’re the only people no one feels ashamed to look down on’

James David Vance was born in 1984 in Middletown, Ohio, a small city between Cincinnati and Dayton with a population (at the time) of around 45,000.

Coincidentally, his biological father was also called Donald – and, like Trump, had Scots ancestry – but his parents split when he was just a toddler and he was adopted by his mother’s new husband.

It was a rough upbringing. Vance’s book describes his mother as highly unstable, sometimes violent, and persistently addicted to prescription narcotics. His grandfather –Papaw, as he called – was frequently drunk, while his grandmother – Mamaw – was a “violent non-drunk” prone to unpleasant stunts such as dousing him in gasoline or serving him garbage on a plate.

In time, though, the pair stabilized their lives and became Vance’s legal guardians. As Vance describes it, they taught him that despite the violence in his childhood, and despite the discrimination he’d face coming from “hillbilly” stock, he’d need to take responsibility for digging himself out and making himself a happy life.

“We are the only group of people [other Americans] don’t have to be ashamed to look down upon,” Vance says his grandma once told him. Yet she also said: “Never be like these f***ing losers who think the deck is stacked against them.”

Vance finished high school and spent four years in the US Marine Corps, which he credits for much of his success. “[It] was basically a four-year education in character and self-management,” he told The American Conservative in 2016, describing how it helped him abandon his “learned helplessness” and believe in his capacity to do “difficult things”.

It was after graduating from Ohio State University in 2009 that Vance formed two relationships that would shape the rest of his life. At Yale Law School, he met his future wife, Usha Vance, an Indian-American from San Diego.

In San Francisco, where the couple moved in 2015, he met Peter Thiel – the prolific tech industry investor and arch-conservative who would later fund much of Vance’s campaign for the US Senate.

In 2017, having worked at Thiel’s firm for about two years, he joined another investment firm called Revolution LLC, where he was tasked with finding and backing promising start-ups from outside the sometimes insular San Francisco and New York City tech scenes.

Throughout his rise into the elite, however, Vance had been working on a book. At Yale he’d been encouraged to pursue the project by his professor Amy Chua, whose parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother had been a smash hit in 2011.

Vance was skeptical. “Nobody wants to read about me,” he told Chua.

’The Trump whisperer’

Published at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillbilly Elegy was a huge success.

Despite not having been written with Trump in mind, Vance’s book was hailed across the political spectrum as a welcome explanation for the destabilizing crisis that appeared to be emanating from middle America as Trump continued his combative, outrageous and unexpected rise to power.

Conservative thought leader Rod Dreher called it “one of the best books I’ve ever read”, saying: “You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading JD Vance.” The Washington Post called him “the voice of the Rust Belt” and “the Trump whisperer”. Vox called him “the reluctant interpreter of Trumpism.”

The subject of Vance’s book was the poverty and social decay of the Appalachian mountains. Vance had little patience for traditional conservatives who see no role for wider economic forces in those problems, and wrote scathingly of the elitism and bigotry of upper-class Americans towards his people.

But he also tore into what he saw as a culture of “learned helplessness,” arguing that working-class whites had shirked the duty of making wise choices because they believed their choices would not and could not matter.

“I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early,” Vance wrote. “I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the ‘Obama economy’ and how it had affected his life…

“But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.”

He would often cite the words of a teacher at his old high school, who told him: “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.”

It was a controversial thesis, with many left-wingers accusing him of blaming the poor for problems inflicted on them from above. The New Republic, a progressive magazine, labeled him a “false prophet” and his book “little more than a list of [right-wing] myths about ‘welfare queens’ repackaged as a primer on the white working class.”

Still, Vance made one other thing very clear – he thought Donald Trump was part of the problem.

“Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein,” he wrote in 2016, blasting the New York tycoon’s campaign as “cultural heroin” that offered an “easy escape” from “complex problems.”

In an interview with NPR, he said: “I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”

And to a friend, he privately texted: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?”

‘The ruling class are robbing us blind’

In 2021, having previously rejected the idea, Vance began exploring the possibility of running for the US Senate. He received a $10 million donation from his old friend Peter Thiel and an unknown amount from the conservative tech millionaire Robert Mercer.

In apparent contrast to his previous preaching against blaming Obama or the government, his 2021 speech announcing his run for the Senate struck a bellicose tone.

“If you look at every issue in this country,” he said, “every issue, I believe traces, back to this fact: On the one hand, the elites in the ruling class in this country are robbing us blind, and on the other, if you dare complain about it, you are a bad person.”

The Republican primary was crowded with opponents, some of whom raised Vance’s long history of anti-Trump statements. Yet like many former “never Trump” conservatives, Vance decisively recanted his old criticisms.

“Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016,” he said in 2021. “And I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy.

“I think he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.”

In May 2022, Trump endorsed Vance, and in that year’s midterm elections he was elected to represent his home state of Ohio. His first crisis was a catastrophic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which released toxic chemicals across a wide area.

As a senator, Vance has opposed abortion and voted against federal protections for contraception and IVF. He has proposed to criminalize gender transition healthcare for under-18-year-olds and cut off block taxpayer funding for adult transgender healthcare.

He has also been a staunch opponent of US aid to Ukraine, saying it would be “in “America’s best interest… to accept that Ukraine is going to have to cede some territory to the Russians.”

While working across the aisle in an attempt to improve railroad safety, he has also questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election and blamed Joe Biden’s campaign rhetoric for last week’s apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

Asked on Fox News on Monday how he would feel if he wasn’t picked to be Trump’s VP, Vance admitted: “I’m human, right? So when you know this thing is a possibility, if it doesn’t happen, there is certainly going to be a little bit of disappointment.”

But, earlier in the interview, he suggested it was something he’d get over. “They’ll ask me if they ask me. And if they don’t, that’s fine.”

On Monday, Trump asked.