How J.D. Vance became Donald Trump's running mate

Former President Trump And VP Nominee Sen. JD Vance Hold Rally In St. Cloud, Minnesota

(Image credit: Stephen Maturen / Stringer)

published 30 July 2024

When Usha Vance introduced her husband J.D. Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate at the Republican National Convention – in a speech which he later said had him “crying back stage” – she described him as a “meat and potatoes kind of guy” and praised him for embracing her vegetarian diet. It was an affectionate, but telling observation, says The Wall Street Journal. Perhaps the Ohio senator’s greatest strength is his adaptability and ability to play any role convincingly. “He can sound like a Silicon Valley venture capitalist one day” and a rabid populist the next. When searching for a running mate, Trump often mused: “Where is my Cary Grant?”. In the suave, smart, articulate Vance, he has found him.

Vance was a “brilliant choice”, says Samuel Popkin, a political scientist at the University of California. He has the skill of “making an opportunistic move seem like righteous change” – not least in his changing attitude to Trump himself. Before the 2016 presidential election, Vance called Trump “noxious”, “reprehensible” and suggested he “might be America’s Hitler”. Now, he “arguably outdoes Trump” in his demagoguery, says Ryan Bourne in The Times. And when it comes to economic policy, Vance has evolved to become “more Trumpy than Trump himself” in terms of honing his “blue-collar appeal”. The former president might have steered the US towards protectionism on trade and immigration, but at least he “upheld free-market principles”. Vance, by contrast, champions an “aggressively interventionist policy”, arguing that Republicans should embrace trade unions, raise the minimum wage, break up Big Tech, block mergers, tax corporations that outsource jobs and use state power to punish woke companies.

Although Vance will almost certainly trade on his heartland roots on the campaign trail, he has largely left his early life “in the rear-view” mirror, says The Observer. His story began in Middletown, Ohio – a steel mill entrepôt, which once drew thousands of economic migrants from across the Appalachian region – including his Kentucky-born grandparents – before suffering a devastating decline in the 1970s. “Our homes are a chaotic mess,” wrote Vance in Hillbilly Elegy, the bestselling 2016 memoir that put him on the political map – chronicling his mother’s struggle with drug addiction and domestic instability.

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He credits his grandmother for raising him and pushing him to work hard at school. Vance viewed joining the United States Marine Corps as an escape from “the anger and resentment harboured by everyone around me” and served as “a combat journalist” from 2003 to 2007, taking in a six-month deployment to Iraq. He went on to study political science and philosophy at Ohio State University, later winning a scholarship to Yale Law School where he fell in love with his classmate Usha Chilukuri. They married a year after graduation.

The most influential figure in Vance’s rise was Peter Thiel, says the FT – the libertarian PayPal founder and venture capitalist who, in 2016, was one of the few in Silicon Valley openly to endorse Trump. When Thiel gave a talk at Yale in 2011, Vance was transfixed. He went on to join Thiel’s firm, Mithril Capital, crediting his mentor both with an introduction to venture capital and his conversion to Catholicism. When Vance came to found his own firm, he named it Narya Capital “in a nod to Thiel’s penchant for companies with J.R.R. Tolkien-inspired monikers”. When Vance decided to run for the US Senate in 2021, Thiel was his biggest donor. The following year he introduced Vance to Trump at his Palm Beach club, Mar-a-Lago. And if Vance looks like one of Trump’s sons, that’s no accident, says Dennis Altman on The Conversation. “For Trump, politics is an extension of the family business and Vance has cleverly positioned himself as a de facto son.”

Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.