On Monday, the 15th of July, Republican Party’s Presidential candidate and former U.S President Donald Trump announced that his running mate for this year’s election would be 39 year old senator from Ohio James David Vance. Abbreviated as J.D Vance, who is he really?
His political career began eight years ago, after he published his best selling memoir Hill Billy Elegy. Throughout the octave, he has undergone a controversial political transformation, that has stirred conflicting opinions on his moral compass. In the beginning, he was the “Never a Trump” type of politician but as he grew in politics, he transformed into a stalwart MAGA loyalist and an unquestioning defender of Mr. Trump. In his defense, he has repeatedly indicated that he had a change of heart while to his critics, he molded himself for convenience and political correctness.
Whichever of convenience or political growth that he went through seem to have paid off as the man himself could be the second most powerful man in the United States post the 2024 Presidential election. Trump, 71, has consistently insisted that he doesn’t have political peers in any part of the world and is bound to win the forthcoming elections by a landslide. During his tenure at the senate, Vance presented a leader to the populist faction of the GOP and a reliable ally to Donald Trump. However, his key leadership traits can be traced through his posts on X, comments in his memoire and bites from his interviews in the media, key among them Politico Magazine.
In the introduction to Hillbilly Elegy, Vance says; “I’ll be the first to admit that I have accomplished nothing great in my life,” alluding to his life, growing up in a working class family, in the post industrial era state of Ohio. “I am not a senator, a governor, or a former cabinet secretary. I haven’t started a billion dollar company, or a world-changing non-profit.” This gives the undertone of a man who at the time yearned to lead or at least to make a difference in his capacity as Vance.
In the year 2015, two years after graduating from Yale Law School, he joined the Mirthril Capital, a firm offering venture Capital services. Mirthril is run by one Peter Thiel, a Silicone Valley scion. Later, in 2016, he made public his plans to move to Ohio from Carlifonia, where he would start a non-profit known as Our Ohio Renewal, whose main mission was to ‘ make it easier for disadvantaged children to realise their dreams.’ Six years later, he was supported by Peter Thiel, through a generous donation of $10 million for campaigns, which culminated into his election to the United States senate. This, was his first public office.
Reminiscing his first ever encounter with Thiel back in the year 2011, Vance wrote in his memoire “…Thiel articulated a feeling… that I was obsessed with achievement in [itself] not as an end to something meaningful but to win a social competition. My worry that IU had prioritized thriving over character took on a heightened significance: striving for what?” In the memoire, it is indicated that he was born on Aug. the 2nd 1984, in Middletown Ohio. Middletown is a an industrial city, situated 30 miles off the north of Cincinnati and 20 miles off the South of Dayton.
His maternal grandparents moved from Jackson, Kentucky to Middletown in the late 40s. At the time, Jim, the grandfather was 16 while Bonnie, the grandmother 13 and pregnant with the formers’ first child. On his fathers’ side, his grand fathers distant cousin married into the Hatfield family, and allegedly committed the murder that informed the legendary Hatfield-McCoy feud.
His parents, Donald Bowman and Bev Vance divorced when he was just a kid. He was then adopted by his mother’s new husband Bob Hamel prompting him to change his name to James David Hamel. As they settled into a new family set up, Bev and Bob divorced, and the former plunged into drug addiction. Therefore, Vance had to be raised by his grand parents to whom, he is forever grateful for being “The best things to have ever happened to him,” according to quotes from his memoire.
Both his grandparents were Union Democrats except, in 1984 when the grand father voted for President Ronald Reagan. Growing up, he spent his summer vacations visiting his great grand-mother and their extended family in Jackson. “I always distinguished ‘my address’ from ‘my home,’” he wrote in Hillbilly Elegy. “My address was where I spent most of my time with my mother and sister, wherever that might be. But my home never changed: my great-grandmother’s house, in the holler, in Jackson, Kentucky,” he writes in Hillbilly Elegy. “To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart,” he continues. This Scots-Irish legacy entailed “many good traits … but also many bad ones. We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or, most importantly, how they talk.”
