This week Donald Trump made the bold and consequential choice to make JD Vance, a 39-year-old Ohio senator and bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy, his running mate. Trump did so reportedly on the advice of his two sons, Don jnr and Eric, while rejecting counsel from most other elected Republicans, who dislike Vance for precisely the reasons many of them dislike Trump; they see him as a threat to the recent Republican orthodoxies on trade and foreign policy. They worry that Vance has follow-through where Trump is lackadaisical and easier to manoeuvre around. They worry that Vance will turn “Trumpism” into a real policy programme that lasts.
They should.
Vance’s story is a tale of American mobility, of a man with talent working hard in functioning American institutions and rising to the top. While not poor, Vance hails from a genuinely dysfunctional working-class background. His mother was an alcoholic. His father, abusive.
In his biography it was his hilariously vulgar, astonishingly devout grandmother – “Mamaw” – who put Vance on the straight and narrow. He joined the marines after September 11th, serving as a military journalist in Iraq and stateside. He then completed a college education at Ohio State University in two years, graduating at the top of his class.
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From there, to the corridors of Yale Law School which has produced four of America’s current Supreme Court justices: Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas. It was at Yale that Prof Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, encouraged him to write his early life memoir.
Vance worked briefly at a top law firm, before taking a job in Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm in 2016, the same year that Thiel, a famous early investor in Facebook, proudly endorsed Donald Trump. Hillbilly Elegy was published and became a bestseller, devoured as a kind of guidebook for America’s intellectual class trying to understand the Donald Trump phenomenon. Vance used the notoriety to start his own venture capital fund, to invest in heartland enterprises. Hollywood’s Ron Howard directed a filmed adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy for Netflix.
When a senate seat opened up in his home state, Ohio, Peter Thiel and other unorthodox conservative donors backed him to the hilt. He survived a gruelling Republican primary, winning over Trump-aligned voters first, and then beating a well-funded moderate Democrat in the general election. Less than two years later, at age 39, he’s on the presidential ticket. Vance’s political superpower is that he understands his kind of life story has become much rarer in America today, that the class divides are becoming chasms that people no longer cross with ease. And he pitches his political programme as a way of addressing that.
The most immediate objection from Trump supporters and critics alike is that JD Vance was a biting critic of Trump in 2016. He compared Trump to the opioid crisis ravaging middle America. In a text to a friend, he wondered if Trump was America’s Hitler.
Since then, Vance has become a convert. In his own telling, this conversion was a meeting of humility and ambition. Vance wanted to represent the kind of people he grew up around, and those people loved Donald Trump: “If I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him.”
Vance is deeply culturally conservative, and a recent convert to Catholicism. To his critics, he is a craven opportunist. To his fans on the right, including Trump’s sons, he’s a bold, risk-taking and shrewd operator.
The truth is that Vance has always been a little bit of a Trumpian conservative. Before his anti-Trump comments, he was focused on making the Republican Party more friendly to working-class voters, and actually delivering them material benefits from their support of Republican policies. I know this because (full disclosure) Vance has long been a correspondent with conservative writers and thinkers (including me) who are trying to think through how America’s trade policy, foreign policy and domestic policy can be turned away from utopian ideologies of seamless free trade, and Bush-era democratic messianism, toward the more practical purpose of securing our country, growing America’s middle class, and supporting young people as they form families.
Former Mitt Romney adviser Oren Cass has pointed out that while the American economy produces marvels like the iPhone, the practical badges of a middle-class lifestyle – a starter home, a car payment, medical insurance, and tuition for college – have costs rising much faster than the average male income, putting the American dream out of reach for many Millennials and Gen Z. Vance speaks directly to those concerns.
In his short time in the Senate he has pushed for bipartisan legislation with Democrats like John Fetterman and Elizabeth Warren. At the same time, he also proposed legislation to have practical effect for the right in America’s perpetual culture wars, such as a Bill that would remove all diversity, equity and inclusion training from the federal government.
In his short, remarkable rise, Vance has made good on many long shot bets. Now Trump is taking one on him.
Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review, and William F. Buckley Senior Scholar at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. He is the author of My Father Left Me Ireland
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