JD Vance

Military service After graduating from high school, Vance enlisted in the United States Marine Corps as a private, During his four years of service, he was deployed to Iraq in 2005 for six months in a non-combat role, writing articles and taking photographs. In December 2005, he was part of a group of Marines that held a roundtable discussion with Vice President Dick Cheney. He attained the rank of corporal, and his decorations include the Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal and the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal. In 2007, Vance left the military and used the G. I. Bill to study at Ohio State.

Career After graduating from law school, Vance worked for Republican senator John Cornyn. He spent a year as a law clerk for Judge David Bunning of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, then worked at the law firm Sidley Austin, beginning a brief career as a corporate lawyer. Having practiced law for slightly under two years, Vance moved to San Francisco to work in the technology industry as a venture capitalist.

In June 2016, Harper published Vance's book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. Hillbilly Elegy was on The New York Times Best Seller list in 2016 and 2017. The Times listed it among "6 Books to Help Understand Trump's Win", and Vance was profiled in The Washington Post, which called him "the voice of the Rust Belt". In The New Republic, Sarah Jones criticized Vance as "liberal media's favorite white trash–splainer" and a "false prophet of blue America", calling the book "little more than a list of myths about welfare queens". Hillbilly Elegys success helped propel Vance into contact with social elites, and he began writing a column for The New York Times. Vance later said that his interactions with social elites from this time, particularly their perceived disdain for "the people he grew up with", helped shape his later views.

Vance worked at a biotech company named Circuit Therapeutics from 2015 to 2017. Its chairman, Frederic Moll, said he hired Vance for his intelligence, legal qualifications, and connection to Thiel. At Mithril, Vance clashed with Mithril's co-founder and managing director Ajay Royan. He decided to leave in 2017. Bloomberg reports he deleted all traces of Mithril from his LinkedIn profile. Vance moved back to Ohio, where he published an op-ed in The New York Times with the headline "Why I'm moving home", in which he complained about "highly educated transplants" in Silicon Valley. In another interview, he said elite tech crowds wielded "political-financial power in combination with a certain condescension". At Revolution Vance was tasked with expanding the "Rise of the Rest" initiative, which focuses on growing investments in underserved regions outside Silicon Valley and New York City.

Vance was a CNN contributor from 2017 to 2018.

In 2017, Vance sold the film rights to Hillbilly Elegy to Imagine Entertainment. In April 2017, Ron Howard signed on to direct the film version, which was released in select theaters on November 11, 2020, and later that month on Netflix.

In 2019, Vance was on the board of advisors of the With Honor Fund, a Super PAC that helps veterans run for office. From 2020 to 2023, he was on the board of advisors of American Moment, a networking and training organization for young conservatives that is affiliated with Project 2025.

In 2019, Vance and Chris Buskirk co-founded the conservative political advocacy group Rockbridge Network. That year, he also co-founded venture capital firm Narya Capital in Cincinnati with financial backing from Thiel, Eric Schmidt, and Marc Andreessen. In 2020, he raised $93 million for the firm. With Thiel and former Trump adviser Darren Blanton, Vance invested in Rumble, a Canadian online video platform popular with the political right.

Our Ohio Renewal Vance speaks about his book Hillbilly Elegy at New America's Securing the American Dream for Young Children event in 2017. In December 2016, Vance said he planned to move to Ohio and would consider starting a nonprofit or running for office. According to a 2020 capture of the website, those four remained in those positions throughout the organization's existence. Our Ohio Renewal closed by 2021 with sparse achievements. According to Jivani, the organization's director of law and policy, its work was derailed by Jivani's cancer diagnosis. It raised around $221,000 in 2017 (including $80,000 from Vance himself) and spent most of its revenue on overhead costs and travel. In subsequent years, it raised less than $50,000.

During Vance's 2022 U.S. Senate campaign, Tim Ryan, the Democratic nominee, said the charity was a front for Vance's political ambitions, pointing to reports that the organization paid a Vance political adviser and conducted public opinion polling, while its efforts to address addiction failed. Vance denied the characterization. Our Ohio Renewal's tax filings show that in its first year, it spent more (over $63,000) on "management services" provided by its executive director Jai Chabria, who became Vance's chief campaign strategist, than it did on programs to fight opioid abuse.

According to the Associated Press (AP) and a 2019 ProPublica investigation, the charity's biggest accomplishment, sending psychiatrist Sally Satel to Ohio's Appalachian region for a yearlong residency in 2018, was "tainted" by the ties among Satel, her employer, American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Purdue Pharma, in the form of knowledge exchange between Satel and Purdue and financial support from Purdue to AEI. Satel denied having any relationship with Purdue or any knowledge of its donations to AEI. Company founder Jonathan Webb and top executives collectively had little experience with horticulture and indoor agriculture, and the company struggled to meet its produce buyers' standards. Workers complained to authorities about "brutal" working conditions in company greenhouses; after many local workers quit, they were replaced by migrant contract workers, who eventually constituted over half the company's labor force. Vance never held an operational role at the company, and his vice-presidential campaign said he had been unaware of the complaints about working conditions and that the decision to hire migrants was made after he resigned from the board. but did not. In March 2021, Peter Thiel gave $10 million to Protect Ohio Values, a super PAC created in February to support a potential Vance candidacy. Robert Mercer also gave an undisclosed amount. In May, he launched an exploratory committee.

Vance announced his Senate campaign in Ohio on July 1, 2021. defeating multiple candidates, including Josh Mandel (24%) and Matt Dolan (23%). On November 8, in the general election, Vance defeated Democratic nominee Tim Ryan with 53% of the vote to Ryan's 47%. This vote share was considered a vast underperformance compared to other Ohio Republicans, especially in the coinciding gubernatorial election. Vance had often previously spelled his name with periods after his initials ("J.D.")—including in the publication of Hillbilly Elegy—but after becoming a candidate for office, he removed the periods ("JD"). He attended Biden's 2023 State of the Union Address.

On March 1, 2023, Vance and Senator Sherrod Brown co-sponsored bipartisan legislation to prevent derailments like the one in East Palestine, but the bill failed due to lack of intra-caucus Republican support. In June 2023, Vance voted against raising the debt ceiling, standing against final passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 and saying it would result in "a reduced military in the face of a rising threat from China".

In July 2023, Vance and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced legislation that would have made gender-affirming care for minors a federal crime, with penalties of up to 12 years in prison. In June 2024, Vance sponsored the Dismantle DEI Act, which would ban federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and funding for agencies, contractors, and organizations receiving federal funds. Vance was not present for any Senate votes during his vice-presidential campaign.

Vance became Ohio's senior senator on January 3, 2025, upon the swearing-in of Bernie Moreno. At midnight on January 10, Vance resigned from the Senate in anticipation of his inauguration as vice president of the United States on January 20. On January 17, Governor Mike DeWine announced his appointment of Jon Husted to the Senate seat Vance vacated.

Committee assignments Vance was named to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection, on Housing, Transportation, and Community Development, and on Securities, Insurance, and Investment. He was also assigned to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, on Communications, Media, and Broadband, on Oceans, Fisheries, Climate Change, and Manufacturing, and on Space and Science. He was additionally assigned to the Senate Special Committee on Aging.

2024 presidential election Vice-presidential campaign

On January 31, 2023, Vance endorsed former president Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican Party presidential primaries. On July 15, 2024, the first day of the Republican National Convention, Trump announced on Truth Social that he had chosen Vance as his running mate. On July 17, the third day of the convention, Vance accepted the nomination to be Trump's running mate.

Along with Vance, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, Florida senator Marco Rubio, and South Carolina senator Tim Scott were finalists to be Trump's running mate. Trump's two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, advocated for Vance. Several media and industry figures are said to have lobbied for Vance to be on the ticket, including Elon Musk, David O. Sacks, Tucker Carlson, and Peter Thiel, who first introduced Trump to Vance in 2021. The Heritage Foundation, which drafted Project 2025, privately advocated for Vance. Musk responded to Trump's vice-presidential pick hours after its announcement, saying the ticket "resounds with victory". David Sacks, a prominent GOP donor and Silicon Valley venture capitalist, wrote on Twitter: "This is who I want by Trump's side: an American patriot." In 2022, Sacks gave a super PAC supporting Vance's Senate campaign $900,000, and Thiel added $15 million. but Musk later said he planned to donate "much lower amounts".

On May 15, 2024, Trump attended a $50,000 per head private fundraising dinner with Vance in Cincinnati. Guests included Chris Bortz and Republican fundraiser Nate Morris. Vance appeared at significant conservative political events and in June was described as a potential running mate for Trump. In July, a former friend of Vance's from Yale Law School exposed to the media communications between them and Vance from 2014 to 2017, with the friend alleging that Vance has "changed [his] opinion on literally every imaginable issue that affects everyday Americans" in pursuit of "political power and wealth".

In late July 2024, after President Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy for reelection and Vice President Kamala Harris became a presidential candidate, Vance said at a private fundraiser that the "bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden ... Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did"; a day later, Vance told the media, "I don't think the political calculus changes at all" with Harris as the Democratic nominee. After criticism of his past remarks and political positions, Vance said in an August 2024 interview that a vice president "doesn't really matter" and that Harris "has been a bad vice president". This came after Trump said that the "vice president, in terms of the election, does not have any impact".

In August 2024, Vance said that Trump had "said that explicitly that he would" veto a national abortion ban. In September 2024, during his debate with Harris, Trump was asked about Vance's statement about the veto, and responded: "I didn't discuss it with JD ... I think he was speaking for me—but I really didn't."

Comments made by Vance repeating false claims of immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eating people's pets during the election received significant media attention. When challenged on the factual basis of the claims, Vance told interviewer Dana Bash, "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do." Additional comments made by Vance during an interview with Tucker Carlson in 2021 where he stated that the country was being run by "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too" and criticized some Democrats for not having children were described by NPR as going "viral" during the campaign and received bipartisan criticism.

In late September 2024, Vance spoke at a western Pennsylvania town hall event organized by Lance Wallnau, who has promoted election denialism and called Kamala Harris a "demon". In October 2024, Vance said he did not believe Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and that he believed "Big Tech rigged the election" through censorship.

Vice-presidential debate

Opinion polls In July 2024, a CNN poll analysis after the Republican National Convention showed a net-negative approval rating for Vance.

After the October 2024 vice-presidential debate, A CBS News/YouGov poll of likely debate viewers found Vance's favorability rose from 40% to 49%, while Walz's increased from 52% to 60%. Both candidates' unfavorability ratings also declined, with Vance's dropping from 54% to 47% and Walz's falling from 41% to 35%.

Vice presidency (2025–present)

At noon on January 20, 2025, Vance became the 50th vice president of the United States, sworn into the office by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Before his inauguration, he held a meeting with China's vice president Han Zheng in which they discussed China–United States relations. Vance is also the first Marine Corps veteran to serve as vice president.

Among Vance's first acts as vice president was swearing in Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the first of Trump's cabinet nominees to be approved by the Senate, on January 21. On January 24, he cast the tie-breaking vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. In February 2025, after multiple federal judges issued temporary rulings against various Trump administration actions, Vance wrote, "judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power".

On February 14, 2025, Vance delivered a speech at the 61st Munich Security Conference. In it, he criticized European Union leaders for actions such as annulling Romania's presidential election under claims of foreign interference and using "misinformation" laws to silence political opposition. Vance warned that the US would condition its support for Europe on whether its governments actually uphold free speech, press freedom, and political legitimacy, and criticized European governments for "running in fear of their own voters". His tone and content marked a sharp departure from past US foreign policy rhetoric and prompted strong backlash from European leaders. Several media outlets regarded the speech as a turning point in European Union–United States relations along with Trump's telephone conversation with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Some called it a declaration of "ideological war" and "culture war" against the United States' European allies, and a "wrecking ball" to the decades-long status quo of transatlantic relations.

In a first for a sitting U.S. vice president, in March 2025 Vance visited Greenland, where he said "We can't just ignore the president's desires" for the U.S. to acquire Greenland. He also warned that Greenland faced the "encroachment of powerful countries" China and Russia "as they expand their ambitions", while declaring in a "message to Denmark" that "you have not done a good job". Vance criticized Denmark for having "underinvested in the security architecture" and "people of Greenland". The next month, he lamented that the "globalist economy" had caused the U.S. to "borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture".

In May 2025, Vance and Rubio helped mediate a ceasefire deal between India and Pakistan amid the 2025 India–Pakistan conflict. In February 2026, Vance became the first sitting U.S. vice president to visit Armenia, where he met with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to advance a U.S.-brokered multi-billion-dollar civil nuclear energy deal with the goal of decreasing Russia's influence in the region.

In March 2026, reports emerged of a policy divide between Trump and Vance over U.S.-Israeli military strikes against Iran. Vance publicly defended the administration's actions as necessary to eliminate Iran's nuclear threat, but reportedly expressed skepticism during internal White House deliberations before the military operation. Vance was the head of the U.S. delegation at the April 2026 negotiations with Iran in Islamabad. A former administration official told The Hill, "This is probably the toughest thing he'll do as vice president. [...] These are the toughest negotiators in the world." On April 12, after 21 hours of talks, Vance said the negotiations had ended without an agreement and reiterated that Iran "cannot have a nuclear weapon".

In August 2026, The New York Times reported that Vance had embraced the role of a pugilistic "attack dog" and "one of the administration's chief trolls" by replying to liberal and conservative commentators' criticism with profanity and personal insults. It described the embrace as departing from previous vice presidents' standards of decorum and restraint.

Political positions

Vance speaking at a 2025 Turning Point USA event in Oxford, Mississippi. The organization's founder, activist Charlie Kirk, was assassinated one month earlier. Vance has been called a national conservative, right-wing populist, and an ideological successor to paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan. Vance describes himself, and has been described by others, as a member of the postliberal right. He has said he was influenced by Catholic social teaching. He has endorsed books by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, and far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec.

On social issues, Vance is considered conservative. He opposes abortion, same-sex marriage, He has taken a number of natalist positions. He has repeatedly expressed a belief that childlessness is linked to sociopathy and said that parents should have more voting power than non-parents, but he backtracked from that suggestion in August 2024. He has proposed federal criminalization of gender-affirming care for minors. He supports Israel in the Gaza war. He opposes continued American military aid to Ukraine during the ongoing Russian invasion and prefers a negotiated peace. He has argued that the country's largest and most powerful institutions have united against the right. He has said there is a "need to seize the institutions of the left" and has called for "a de-woke-ification program" even if the courts say it is illegal. He is critical of universities, which he has called "the enemy". Vance is also critical of both the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In October 2025, Vance said a much lower rate of legal immigration would be better for the U.S.

In 2016, Vance was an outspoken critic of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, calling him "America's Hitler" and "reprehensible" and himself a "never Trump guy". In 2021, after he announced his Senate candidacy, Vance publicly announced support for Trump, apologizing for his past criticisms and deleting some of them. That year, Vance advised Trump to fire all civil servants and replace them with Trump supporters. Vance has said that if he had been vice president during the 2020 presidential election, he would not have certified the results. Instead, Vance said that some states Trump lost should have sent pro-Trump electors to Washington so that Congress could decide the election. Vance has dismissed the Watergate scandal and suggested that Richard Nixon was unfairly forced out in 1974, repeatedly comparing Nixon to Trump. Historians have responded that the Watergate tapes provide overwhelming evidence of Nixon's abuses.

Vance has cited the writers Patrick Deneen, Rod Dreher, Curtis Yarvin, and J. R. R. Tolkien as influences on his beliefs. Peter Thiel, William Julius Wilson, Robert Putnam, David Autor, René Girard, Raj Chetty, Oren Cass, and Yoram Hazony are also said to have shaped his thinking. Dreher was a guest at Vance's baptism.

Abortion and gun control Vance opposes abortion, and supported the Supreme Court of the United States overturning of Roe v. Wade. In 2022, he said, "I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally." In 2024, he said that abortion laws should be set by the states. Vance has called the "right to life" a priority for conservatives.

Vance has taken a pro-Second Amendment position and said in 2022 that many gun control measures infringe on people's rights without making them safer. In 2024, during a campaign event held the day after a mass shooting at a high school in Georgia, Vance said that school shootings are "a fact of life" and that they would not be prevented by stricter gun laws, instead calling for more security in schools.

Immigration and ICE enforcement Vance has been a supporter of Trump's proposal for a wall along the southern border and proposed spending $3 billion to finish the wall. In 2024, he said "Haitian illegal immigrants" were causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio, and that people's pets had been abducted and eaten by illegal immigrants. In October 2025, Vance called for a reduction in legal immigration to the United States. In January 2026, he defended the ICE officer who shot and killed Renée Good, a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis, saying that Good was a left-wing agitator who tried to hit the officer with her car. Vance said the officer who shot Good was "protected by absolute immunity". He toned down his remark later that month, noting that there would be an investigation into the shooting incident. and privately urged the administration to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy military forces against protestors.

Foreign policy Vance has been called an isolationist and a realist. He considers China a serious national security threat, a view broadly aligned with Republican national security professional Elbridge Colby. At the 2024 Munich Security Conference, Vance said the U.S. did not want to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but argued the U.S. should shift its focus to East Asia, and that certain European and NATO member countries were not spending enough for their own security. During the 2026 Iran war, Vance criticized conservative hawks in the US, saying they want to topple the Iranian regime, despite the fact that the US history of doing so is not encouraging and it would involve a significant commitment of ground troops.

Personal life

Vance wrote in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, that he was raised in a low-income family by his single mother and grandmother. In 2013, Vance met Usha Chilukuri while both were students at Yale Law School. she is Hindu and he was a Protestant Christian. In 2019, he converted to Roman Catholicism. and the bride and groom were blessed by a Hindu pandit. Usha clerked for a year for Brett Kavanaugh, at the time an appeals court judge in Washington, then clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts for a year.

JD and Usha Vance have four children. With the birth of the couple's fourth child on July 19, 2026, Vance became the first vice president to have a child while in office since Schuyler Colfax in 1870. In an excerpt from his book Communion published in June 2026 as an op-ed by The Wall Street Journal, Vance wrote that the 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk influenced Usha's decision to have a fourth child. The couple own over 100 acres of land in Kentucky.

Vance was raised in a "conservative, evangelical" branch of Protestantism. By September 2016, he was "not an active participant" in any particular Christian denomination but was "thinking very seriously about converting to Catholicism". In August 2019, Vance was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church. He chose Augustine of Hippo as his confirmation saint. Vance said he converted because he "became persuaded over time that Catholicism was true [...] and Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way", adding that Catholic theology aligned with his political views and key people in his life are Catholic. Vance has been criticized by both Pope Francis and his successor, Pope Leo XIV, for his views on immigration and responded by invoking the traditional concept of ordo amoris in Catholic theology, which he interprets as loving his own nationals more than foreigners and equates with the slogan "America First". Cardinal Timothy Dolan has called Vance "a very good guy" while expressing disagreement with him on immigration and foreign policy.

Vance's cousin Nate Vance, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, volunteered to fight for Ukraine in 2022 after Russia's invasion. Nate served in the "Da Vinci Wolves" unit, fighting in major battles like Kupiansk and Bakhmut. In 2025, he criticized JD's stance on Ukraine, accusing him and Trump of aiding Russia. He expressed disappointment that JD, despite their family connection, did not consult him for insights on the war. Vance's half-brother Cory Bowman unsuccessfully ran for office in the 2025 Cincinnati mayoral election.

Electoral history 2022 United States Senate race in Ohio

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