Donald Trump selected Sen. JD Vance from Ohio on Monday as his running mate in the Nov. 5 election, which the former president hopes will return him to the White House. Vance accepted and Vice President Kamala Harris said she’s ready to debate him.
So, who is JD Vance?
Here are five things to know about him.
1. A Marine
Vance served in the Marine Corps from 2003 to 2007 as a combat correspondent. He deployed to Iraq for six months in late 2005.
Vance is one of four Marines currently serving in the Senate. The other three are Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Ct.; Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska; and Todd Young, R-Ind.
The late former astronaut John Glenn is the only other person to have represented Ohio in the Senate as a Marine.
2. Venture Capitalist
After graduating from Ohio State University in 2009 and Yale Law School in 2013, Vance worked at PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm Mithril Capital between 2016 and 2017.
Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy will immediately recognize the name of Thiel’s firm, which is a reference to an extremely strong and valuable dwarven metal that saves Frodo Baggins’ life in the Peter Jackson film version of “The Fellowship of the Ring.”
Vance also included a nod to Tolkien when he launched his own venture capital firm in Cincinnati. He started Narya Capital in 2020, naming it after one of the three elven rings in “The Lord of the Rings.” The wizard Gandalf (played by Ian McKellen in Jackson’s films) wore the ring, which helps its wearer resist tyranny.
3. ‘Hillbilly Elegy’
While working at Mithril Capital, Vance published his bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis” in 2016.
“Hillbilly Elegy,” which describes Vance’s youth in the hollowed-out Rust Belt, captured the struggles of Middle America and catapulted him to cultural and political stardom.
The book highlights the Appalachian values of Vance’s Kentucky family and the socioeconomic problems of his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, where his mother’s parents settled when they were young. Ron Howard directed a 2020 film adaptation starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.
Commentators noted that the struggles Vance revealed in his memoir echo the experiences of the “forgotten men and women” who helped elect Trump as president in 2016.
4. U.S. Senator
Vance, who initially criticized the former president, received Trump’s endorsement in the 2022 U.S. Senate race in Ohio, ultimately defeating Democratic nominee Rep. Tim Ryan.
As senator, Vance has championed many of Trump’s issues. Vance repeatedly has warned about the consequences of illegal immigration and has loudly supported funding the completion of Trump’s wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Vance has opposed experimental transgender medical interventions for minors—often euphemistically branded “gender-affirming care” to hide the true nature of such procedures. He introduced the Protect Children’s Innocence Act to make interventions such as “puberty blockers,” cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries a felony when performed on minors.
“Under no circumstances should doctors be allowed to perform these gruesome, irreversible operations on underage children,” the Ohio Republican said in introducing the bill.
Vance has indicated that he would support a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks’ gestation, although he more recently said abortion laws should be up to the states in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling. In an interview July 7 with “Meet the Press,” Vance said he supports Americans having access to mifepristone, an abortion pill.
He has argued that the U.S. should shift its focus to East Asia, criticized unaccountable U.S. military aid to Ukraine, and backed funding for Israel during its war with the Hamas terrorist organization.
5. Family and Faith
Vance, who turns 40 on Aug. 2, has three children with his wife Usha Chilukuri Vance, whom he married in 2014.
Although the Ohio senator grew up in a “conservative, evangelical” branch of Protestantism, he told The Washington Post that he was seriously considering converting to Catholicism in September 2016. He was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church in Cincinnati in 2019.
Vance chose Augustine of Hippo as his confirmation saint. Augustine, best known for his seminal works “Confessions” and “City of God,” helped found a robust intellectual tradition in the Catholic Church and inspired many Protestants as well.
“One of the subtexts about my return to Christianity is that I had come from a world that wasn’t super-intellectual about the Christian faith,” Vance told columnist Rod Dreher in 2019. “I spend a lot of my time these days among a lot of intellectual people who aren’t Christian. Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way.”
“I also went through an angry atheist phase,” Vance added. “As someone who spent a lot of his life buying into the lie that you had to be stupid to be a Christian, Augustine really demonstrated in a moving way that that’s not true.”
