By Guillermo Azábal
James David Vance (Ohio, 1984), was designated on Monday by Donald Trump as his nominee for vice president in the race for the White House.
Trump recently described Vance as a «young Abraham Lincoln» for whom even the beard «looks good.»
The detail may seem trivial, but it says a lot about the respect that Trump, who is known to loathe facial hair, now has for this rising figure in the party, who went from living a real personal drama and serving as a Marine in the Iraq War to becoming a best-selling author.
Long before he became a senator for Ohio, JD, as he is popularly known, had a childhood filled with violence, guns, and drug use in Middletown, Ohio.
His harsh reality was that of many white families in the declining manufacturing cities of the United States in the 1990s.
His parents’ constant fighting led to a divorce, after which JD began using his mother’s last name, Vance, instead of his father’s, Bowman; and his upbringing fell to his tough grandmother, whom he called «Mamaw,» whose teachings shaped the person and politician he is today.
In his small town (located in the Appalachians), young JD Vance learned that you don’t choose your family, but you gotta love them anyway, that Christianity was his salvation, and that if he ever failed, there were always the 19 guns that «Mamaw» kept at home.
That traditional set of values and the desire to change his surroundings motivated him to enlist in the US Marine Corps and serve in the Iraq War (2003).
In 2005, his grandmother passed away, and JD realized that his military career was over and that he needed to focus on his undergraduate studies in political science and philosophy at Ohio State University, where he graduated cum laude (with distinction, typically a 3.5-3.6 GPA or top 16-35% of the class) before attending Yale Law School.
The echoes of this «white trash» childhood (a pejorative term used in the US to describe low-income, dysfunctional families) resurfaced in JD’s mind a decade later, prompting him to leave his booming jobs at California law firms and tech companies to write his memoirs.
These memoirs were titled “Hillbilly Elegy,” published in 2016 by HarperCollins, and were an instant hit in the publishing industry.
Media outlets such as The New York Times and CNN, where he would soon serve as a political commentator, praised the merits of a work with such impact that it found its way into the presidential campaign between Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton and became a Netflix movie in 2020.
«I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place,» Vance said in an interview with NPR public radio in 2016.
Until then, JD had shown a more moderate and socially centered profile, even founding an NGO to protect children from complicated backgrounds like his own.
However, in recent years he has shifted to a conservatism more aligned with the MAGA, Make America Great Again; when he held the Ohio Senate seat in 2022, he publicly apologized to Trump for the 2016 comments, calling them «a mistake.»
Recently, he has strongly defended Israeli attacks in Gaza and harshly criticized the Biden Administration for its economic management.
Father of three children and married to a woman of Appalachian origin, Vance now faces another major challenge, subject to the unpredictable Trump and his way of working as a team, which has turned the role of vice president into a somewhat irrelevant position; see the case of Mike Pence.
