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What is JD Vance known for?
JD Vance is known for being the 50th vice president of the United States in Donald Trump’s second administration. He is also known as the author of the memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Despite his early opposition to Trump, Vance has proven to be a loyal acolyte, casting key votes in his role as president of the Senate and managing a complicated foreign affairs portfolio. Vance has served as lead negotiator in seeking peace with Iran, despite his stated opposition to the war.
What is the significance of Hillbilly Elegy?
Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir by JD Vance that describes his experiences growing up in a struggling Ohio steel town and offers insights into the lives of working-class white people. The book was relevant during the 2016 presidential election. In 2026 Vance announced that another memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, would be published in June.
How did JD Vance enter politics?
JD Vance entered politics when he won election to the U.S. Senate in 2022, representing Ohio. He had spent much of the previous decade working in biotechnology and investment firms, including a stint in Silicon Valley, where he became close with a number of tech leaders, including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. He later became vice president of the United States in the second administration of Donald Trump in 2025.
What was JD Vance’s role in the Trump administration?
As vice president, JD Vance cast decisive votes in the U.S. Senate and focused on foreign policy, including controversial issues such as a possible U.S. takeover of Greenland and the U.S. role in the Russia-Ukraine War. Vance has served as lead negotiator in seeking peace with Iran, despite his opposition to the war.
What is JD Vance’s religious background?
JD Vance was raised evangelical but became an atheist during college. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 2019, finding it aligned with his values. In 2026 Vance announced that a book he had written about his faith—Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith—would be published in June.
JD Vance is the 50th vice president of the United States (2025– ) in the second administration of Republican Pres. Donald Trump (2025– ). Vance became widely known as the author of Hillbilly Elegy (2016), a best-selling memoir of his experiences growing up in “an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember.” At the time of the book’s publication, the United States was roiling with division over the upsurge in populist support for Trump, who was then the Republican candidate in the presidential election of 2016.
Meet JD Vance
Birth date: August 2, 1984
Birthplace: Middletown, Ohio, U.S.
About his name: Born James Donald Bowman, Vance has also been known as James David Hamel, J.D. Hamel, J.D. Vance, and, currently, JD Vance.
Family: Vance married Usha Chilukuri, a lawyer who clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, in 2014. They have three children, Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel, and are expecting a fourth child in July 2026.
Quotation: “I was wrong about Donald Trump.” —Vance during the 2024 vice presidential debate.
A lawyer and venture capitalist, Vance parlayed the success of his memoir into a political career. He was elected as a Republican to the U.S. Senate in 2022, representing the state of Ohio. At the time of his election to the vice presidency, he had served in public office for less than two years, making him less experienced than many of his predecessors.
Early life
Vance was born James Donald Bowman in Middletown, a small Rust Belt city in southwestern Ohio. His parents—Don Bowman and Bev Vance Bowman—came from Scots-Irish ancestry. He has an elder half sister, Lindsay, to whom Bev gave birth a few weeks after graduating from high school. His parents divorced when he was a small child. When his mother married her third husband, Robert Hamel, she changed her son’s name to James David Hamel. Throughout his time in high school, his service in the Marines, and his college years at the Ohio State University, he would be known as J.D. Hamel.
His mother struggled for years with drug and alcohol use disorders, and Vance was raised mostly by his maternal grandparents, James and Bonnie Vance, whom he called “Papaw” and “Mamaw.” They had relocated to Middletown from the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky. His family was one of numerous families in Middletown with Appalachian roots.
After graduating from Middletown High School in 2003, Vance enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. During his service in the Marines, he was deployed to Iraq to serve in the Iraq War. He later attended the Ohio State University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in political science and philosophy in 2009. He then studied at Yale Law School, earning a law degree in 2013.
Hillbilly Elegy
In 2016 Vance published Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, about his experiences growing up in Middletown and the summers he spent with family members in Jackson, Kentucky. In the book, Vance paints a bleak picture of life in those communities, describing an environment in which poverty was a “family tradition” for many people. He relates that substance use problems and domestic violence were commonplace and that hopes for a better economic future were in short supply. Alongside Vance’s harsh descriptions of his childhood, however, are striking memories of Mamaw, to whom he pays special tribute. “We didn’t have nice clothes, but Mamaw made sure that I had one of those graphing calculators,” Vance wrote, noting that because of her influence, he began to see his way out of a life of despair.
Hillbilly Elegy appeared during the 2016 election cycle. That year’s presidential contest pitted Democrat Hillary Clinton against Trump, whose appeal to working-class whites living outside major cities proved to be a key factor in his’s victory. Many reviewers of Hillbilly Elegy praised Vance for providing insight into the lives of this group of Americans. Some contended that the poverty and discontent Vance described explained why working-class whites supported a political outsider like Trump.
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An interview with Vance by Rod Dreher of The American Conservative published soon after the book’s release was so popular that it crashed the magazine’s website. Referring to the rise of populist support for Trump, Dreher wrote, “You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J.D. Vance.” Other critics denounced the book, claiming that it perpetuated harmful stereotypes of poor people living in Appalachia. A number of books about Appalachia that offered a direct rebuttal to Vance’s were published in the years after Hillbilly Elegy.
Vance’s memoir became a bestseller, and Vance quickly found himself in demand as a lecturer and political commentator. A movie adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy, directed by Ron Howard and starring Amy Adams as Bev Vance and Glenn Close as Mamaw, was released on Netflix in 2020. The film garnered some negative reviews, although Close was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance.
Time in Silicon Valley
In 2011, while at law school, Vance crossed paths with tech investor and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, who spoke at a Yale event about the ways in which ambition can harm innovation. Despite having a spot in one of the world’s most prestigious law schools, Vance was questioning whether he wanted to be a lawyer. Thiel’s talk solidified what had been a nagging doubt:
Peter’s talk remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School. He articulated a feeling that had until then remained unformed: that I was obsessed with achievement in se—not as an end to something meaningful, but to win a social competition.
Vance would go on to receive his law degree, but after brief stints at a law firm and clerking, he found himself in Silicon Valley working in biotech and venture capital investment firms. He also mingled with some of the biggest names in technology, including AOL cofounder Steve Case, Thiel, for whom he would work in 2016 and 2017, and Elon Musk. The latter two relationships would prove pivotal as Vance shifted from the tech world to politics.
Entering politics 2024 Republican TicketRepublican presidential nominee and former president Donald Trump appearing with vice presidential nominee JD Vance at their first campaign rally together in Grand Rapids, Michigan, July 20, 2024.(more)
During the 2016 election Vance had voiced strong criticism of Trump. In an interview that year with National Public Radio, for instance, Vance bluntly stated, “I can’t stomach Trump,” and expressed fears that Trump was “leading the white working class to a very dark place.” He also said that he would likely vote for a third-party candidate in 2016.
In 2017 Vance moved back to Ohio from California and founded Our Ohio Renewal, a nonprofit organization that aimed to help disadvantaged children and address problems such as drug addiction and the opioid epidemic. Within a few years, however, the organization folded. In 2020 Vance started an investment firm based in Cincinnati. Thiel, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and tech billionaire Marc Andreessen helped with funding.
In early 2021, when Republican Rob Portman, the junior U.S. senator from Ohio, announced that he would not seek reelection in 2022, Vance entered the next chapter of his career: politics.
He started his campaign with a formidable obstacle to overcome, namely potential opposition from Trump. Vance’s previous statements about the former president put him in an awkward position in solidly Republican Ohio. Despite having lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden, Trump remained highly popular among the state’s Republican voters. Vance turned to his friends from Silicon Valley. Thiel gave more than $15 million to Vance’s campaign, but just as importantly, he arranged for Trump and Vance to talk. Vance apologized for his previous criticism of Trump, and Trump offered a somewhat grudging endorsement of Vance, noting:
Like some others, JD Vance may have said some not so great things about me in the past, but he gets it now, and I have seen that in spades.
Buoyed by the endorsement, Vance made Trump’s policies the centerpiece of his campaign, defeating Democratic U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan in the November general election. In his first year in office, Vance frequently repeated Make America Great Again (MAGA) talking points on social media and podcasts hosted by right-wing commentators, yet he also cosponsored bipartisan bills in Congress on issues such as accountability for CEOs of failed banks. He butted heads with several fellow Republicans, including U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney and GOP minority leader Mitch McConnell, particularly on the issue of U.S. aid to Ukraine to help the country’s war against invading Russian forces.
A religious conversion
About the same time Vance moved back to Ohio from California, he explored another transformation—a religious one. Raised an evangelical by Mamaw and devout as a child, by the time he was in college, Vance had fallen away from any belief system and considered himself an atheist.
But throughout the 2010s, as he took in Thiel’s comments on the search for meaning, Vance turned to religion as part of his quest. He found what he was seeking in something that even he concedes is surprising, the Roman Catholic Church. He wrote about his 2019 conversion in the Catholic journal The Lamp, in 2020:
Despite my Mamaw’s unfamiliarity with the liturgy, the Roman and Italian cultural influences, and the foreign pope, I slowly began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of her kind of Christianity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive. And above all: a faith centered around a Christ who demands perfection of us even as He loves unconditionally and forgives easily.
In 2026 Vance announced that he had written a second book, a decade after the publication of Hillbilly Elegy. This memoir focuses on faith and is titled Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, to be published in June.
Vice president The second coupleUsha and JD Vance arriving at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Washington, D.C., January 20, 2025, shortly before JD Vance was sworn in as vice president.(more)
In the Republican primaries for the 2024 presidential election, Vance supported Trump. When it came time for Trump to pick a running mate, Vance’s chances of being selected were boosted when both Thiel and Musk lobbied Trump to choose him. On July 15, 2024, the first day of the Republican National Convention, Trump did just that. Despite his relative inexperience—Vance had served only two years in the Senate at the time of his selection—Vance proved to be a tenacious campaigner, and on November 5, 2024, Trump and Vance defeated the Democratic ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
As vice president, Vance has cast a number of decisive votes in his role as president of the Senate, including the confirmation of Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and blocking a vote on withdrawal of U.S. troops from Venezuela.
However, Vance’s foreign policy portfolio has dominated his tenure as vice president. Early in the Trump administration, Vance made clear his support of the president even on some controversial issues, including Trump’s desire to take over Greenland and the U.S.’s role in brokering peace in the Russia-Ukraine War. When Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, visited the Oval Office in February 2025, in what became a disastrous shouting match between Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, Vance chastised Zelensky, asking, “Have you said ‘thank you’ once?” In March 2025 Vance and his wife made a controversial, scaled-back visit to a U.S. military base in Greenland amid protests. He reiterated the president’s contention that Greenland’s strategic importance could not be ignored, telling the news media: “We can’t just bury our head in the sand or, in Greenland, bury our head in the snow.”
In April 2026 Vance set off for Hungary to stump for embattled autocratic leader Viktor Orbán as he sought reelection. Vance campaigned with Orbán, calling him “one of the only true statesmen in Europe.” When Orbán’s party was resoundingly defeated, Vance defended the trip but acknowledged that “we certainly knew there was a very good chance that Viktor would lose that election.”
Even in areas where Vance has disagreed with Trump, he has ultimately stood with the president. A notable example includes the 2026 U.S. war with Iran. Vance, a former Marine who had served in the Iraq War, had a reputation for opposing foreign intervention. In meetings with the president and other members of the “war cabinet,” Vance expressed concern about casualties, doubt about the likely success of “regime change,” and skepticism about the possibility of bringing peace to Iran.
Despite the documented opposition, it was Vance whom Trump sent to Pakistan in April 2026 for what would be the highest-level negotiations between the U.S. and Iran since the 1979 Iranian Revolution and subsequent hostage crisis. The initial round of talks failed to yield an agreement. Trump highlighted the near-impossible task he had set for his vice president, saying: “If it doesn’t happen, I’m blaming JD Vance. If it does happen, I’m taking full credit.”
Quick Facts
Notable Family Members:
spouse Usha Vance
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Vance is seen as a likely contender for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, as he would seek to succeed Trump.