There must have been a moment during his recent visit to Switzerland to lead peace talks when US Vice President JD Vance looked about and thought: is this all a dream? Growing up surrounded by poverty, raised by his extended family in hillbilly Kentucky and rust-belt Ohio, his mother struggling with opioid addictions, meant that dinner at a restaurant was a once-a-yeavr luxury at best and, even then, it was at an all-you-can-eat buffet joint.
Graduating from Yale with a law degree in his late 20s, he was still only familiar with two kinds of wine, red and white; offered chardonnay or sauvignon blanc at a work event, he went with the one that was easier to pronounce (he later remembered thinking, “Come on, lady, stop with the fancy French words and just give me some white wine”).
Now here he was, guest of honour at the Burgenstock Resort, a spectacularly expensive hotel complex perched atop a Swiss mountain like a lair for a Bond villain (which did, incidentally, feature as a backdrop in 1964’s Goldfinger). It boasts one of the oldest funicular railways in Switzerland, views over Lake Lucerne, spas, a golf course, cigar lounges and elegant restaurants that offer local salmon fattened in crystal-clear mountain streams and caviar literally squeezed from specially selected sturgeon.
Whisked up here in a motorcade of black SUVs to head the US-Iran peace talks, Vance surely had to pinch himself. The third-youngest US vice president in history, still just 41, he had come a very long way in a very short time, but this was next level; he was entrusted with some of the most important negotiations since the 1973 accords that eventually led to the end of the Vietnam War. Succeed here and Vance could strengthen his grasp on the Republican nomination in 2028, not as a stereotypical lame-duck vice president but as an astute dealmaker in his own right.
And yet, who knows what Donald Trump was thinking when he handed Vance this opportunity? Was it to see if he shone, or stumbled? “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” Trump “joked”. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD.” How did Vance get here? Is he still the likely Republican nominee for presidential elections in 2028?
Where did JD Vance come from?
The Vance origin story is well-trodden, at least in the United States, where his 2016 bestselling childhood memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, later made into a film, was widely seen as a window into the disaffection of the disenfranchised working classes that propelled Trump to power in his first term.
“It was that book that really launched his career,” says Jared Mondschein, director of research at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. “It was perfect timing in 2016. That was one book everyone said you should read, regardless of your political persuasion, to help give an idea of where Trump was coming from and why.”
A manifesto about how the US was failing a forgotten generation of poor whites – “hillbillies” – written largely from Vance’s own experience, it is a frank and compelling tale of growing up in a dysfunctional but loving clan that hailed from the Kentucky boondocks, Appalachian country.
“He’s lived the problems of deindustrialisation and the malaise to which Appalachia and that semi-rural working class was subjected,” says Tim Lynch, a professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.
Vance and his elder (half) sister Lindsay were largely raised by their grandparents, “Mamaw” and “Papaw”, in the absence of their parents in struggling steel town Middleton, Ohio. His father, Donald, vanished early and mother, Bev, struggled with substance abuse and a string of failed relationships.
As a child, Vance writes, he didn’t particularly notice the poverty all around him, but it would later inform his politics: Hillbilly Elegy (subtitle: a Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis) is full of his hard truths about hardscrabble folk descended from Scottish and Irish immigrants who he says have been left to rot in an economy wrecked by globalisation. “I was one of those kids with a grim future,” he writes. “I almost failed out of high school. I nearly gave in to the deep anger and resentment harboured by everyone around me.”
What kept him afloat amid this messy upbringing, he says, was his extended family’s old-fashioned virtues of loyalty and love of country.
Even his name tells a story of dislocation and transience: born James David Bowman, his surname was changed by his mother to that of her third husband, Hamel; Vance later changed again to his mother’s maiden name and chose to go by his nickname, JD.
What kept him afloat amid this messy upbringing, he says, was his extended family’s old-fashioned virtues of loyalty and love of country. Mamaw, who Vance said kept 19 loaded handguns around the house and as a child had shot a man who had tried to steal the family cow back in Kentucky, “loathed disloyalty, and there was no greater disloyalty than class betrayal”.
Somehow, Vance made it through high school, then enlisted in the Marines, seeing active duty in Iraq, where he was deployed as a military correspondent, writing articles and taking photographs for internal publications. “I left for Iraq in 2005, a young idealist committed to spreading democracy and liberalism to the backward nations of the world,” he would later write. “I returned in 2006, sceptical of the war and the ideology that underpinned it.”
Back in Ohio, he attended state university on the GI Bill (the program supporting veterans to attend college), graduating with such good grades he was accepted into Yale Law School. Yale was where he reportedly became politicised, as an outsider given an insight into the lives of the elite (he later described such institutions as “expensive day care centres for coddled children”). Yale was also where he met the two women who would shape the course of his future: law professor Amy Chua and fellow student Usha Chilukuri, accomplished daughter of successful Indian immigrants (she would go on to attend Cambridge University and win a coveted role as a judicial clerk, including for a Supreme Court justice).
Chua was not just an academic but an author well known for the controversial 2011 memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which introduced the phrase “tiger mom” into common usage and caused an uproar for her uncommonly strict approach to parenting. Something of a mentor to Vance at Yale, Chua was among those who guided him to turn his initial idea for a polemic about dispossessed white Americans into what became a much more marketable and appealing personal memoir.
Usha took it upon herself to bring him up to speed, reportedly keeping a spreadsheet listing things he should try, including Greek yoghurt.
Chua is also credited with encouraging Vance to romantically pursue Usha, whom Vance had met in 2010 at a discussion group about “social decline in white America”. “Usha is a woman of many talents,” observed the Yale magazine Rumpus in 2006, profiling her for its Most Beautiful People edition. “Her interests are as diverse as she is attractive,” it noted (these were different times), saying she had tended to date men who were tall, handsome and conservative but was still, surprisingly, single (Vance yet to make his case).
Usha, who had grown up in middle-class San Diego to parents Lakshmi, a molecular biologist, and Radhakrishna, a mechanical engineer and university lecturer, was far more at home among the coastal elites of Yale than Vance, and took it upon herself to bring him up to speed, reportedly keeping a spreadsheet listing things he should try, including Greek yoghurt. She even advised him on how to negotiate the social minefield of multi-course cutlery at work events (make your way from the outside in, she said). They married in 2014 in back-to-back Christian and Hindu ceremonies, Usha putting her legal career on the back burner to raise a family; they now have three children, with a fourth on the way. (Usha has recently debunked rumours that she was considering converting to Catholicism, as Vance did in 2019.)
How did Vance become vice president?
Alongside Amy Chua and Usha Chilukuri, there turned out to be a third major influence in Vance’s life, also from his time at Yale. In 2011, Vance went to see a talk at the university from the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and the AI and data firm Palantir Technologies. Afterwards, Vance introduced himself to Thiel, the two hit it off and two years after graduating and dabbling in law, Vance went to work for Thiel in 2015 at venture capital firm Mithril Capital. (He later stepped out on his own to invest in Midwestern start-ups, moving from California back to Columbus, Ohio with Usha and family in 2017. “It wasn’t an easy choice,” he wrote in The New York Times. “But there were practical reasons to move: I’m founding an organisation to combat Ohio’s opioid epidemic … and the truth is that not every motivation is rational: part of me loves Ohio simply because it’s home.”)
Thiel was a long-time Trump fan, Vance at this stage not so much, telling an associate in a private Facebook message: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler” (a remark that would subsequently be regurgitated in a million profile articles).
Promoting Hillbilly Elegy in 2016, Vance did make several critical remarks about Trump, such as telling NPR, “I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.” He did call Trump an “idiot” on Twitter, said he didn’t like him, and wrote in The New York Times that Trump was “unfit for our nation’s highest office”.
So when Vance later ran for Congress with Trump’s endorsement, his opponents painted him as having made a total about-face. That wasn’t completely the case. He had also told another interviewer, at right-wing website The American Conservative, that he recognised Trump’s appeal in America’s hinterland. “These people, my people, are really struggling, and there hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles in a long time. Donald Trump at least tries,” he said. “Trump’s candidacy is music to their ears. He criticises the factories shipping jobs overseas. His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground. He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can’t because they lack a platform … He shoots from the hip; he’s not constantly afraid of offending someone; he’ll get angry about politics; he’ll call someone a liar or a fraud. This is how a lot of people in the white working class actually talk about politics, and even many elites recognise how refreshing and entertaining it can be.”
Vance reportedly had his eye on politics by 2017; by the time he tilted for Republican nomination for a 2022 run at the Senate, in a seat being vacated by retiring Ohio senator Rob Portman, propelled by the popularity of Hillbilly Elegy but needing Trump’s support to get over the line, he was overtly contrite. “I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016,” he told Fox News. “I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy.” For his part, Trump was magnanimous, choosing to endorse Vance over stronger candidates. (“God loves a sinner that repenteth,” notes Tim Lynch.)
‘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.’
Donald Trump, 2022
It was Thiel, meanwhile, who arranged for Vance to break bread with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida in 2021; Vance apologised to Trump and the rift was healed. “Like some others,” Trump later said, “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.” Trump’s endorsement got Vance the primary nomination (where the party chooses its candidate for the election) then the Senate seat.
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Two years later Trump tapped Vance, then just 39, to be his running mate for the 2024 presidential election. Says Jared Mondschein: “Trump liked JD Vance’s look, how effectively he debated his opponents.” Vance brought experience in social media, strong presence on television and in live debates, his military record, Ivy League law degree, relationships with Silicon Valley “tech bros” and, of course, his deep connection to a Republican base, projecting what news outlet Politico described as “cool anger”.
“I didn’t really understand why Trump picked Vance,” says Kathryn Schumaker, a specialist in US history at the United States Studies Centre. “But in retrospect it’s clear that Vance was backed by Peter Thiel. That’s a lot of money, that’s a lot of political power, a different kind of political power than Trump had already. It was likely a bit of an uneasy marriage.”
What does Vance stand for today?
Vance grew up in fundamentalist churches but abandoned religion in his 20s, later writing, “Much of my new atheism came down to a desire for social acceptance among American elites … I knew how the educated tended to feel about religion: at best, provincial and stupid; at worst, evil.” Yet by 2019 he was ready to embrace religion again, converting to Catholicism, a journey he describes in his new book Communion (essentially, part two of Hillbilly Elegy).
Some have seen him as inconsistent. A 2025 profile for The Atlantic was titled “The Talented Mr Vance”, referencing the story of The Talented Mr Ripley, about a chameleon-like sociopath who shape-shifts to exploit the people around him. “JD Vance poses a problem, and at its core is a question about character,” wrote George Packer. “In the years after the 2016 election, he transformed himself from a centre-right memoirist and public speaker, offering a complex analysis of America’s social ills and a sharp critique of Donald Trump, into a right-wing populist politician whose illiberal ideas and vitriolic rhetoric frequently out-Trump the original.”
‘He interrogates ideas and faiths and people because none ever quite satisfies him.’
Tim Lynch, University of Melbourne
Others have been more generous, suggesting that Vance has the rare ability to change tack when presented with compelling evidence. “He interrogates ideas and faiths and people,” says Tim Lynch, “because none ever quite satisfies him. So he ends up with Catholicism because it’s the most tried, tested, the oldest. He wants that kind of stability and permanence in his life.”
Post Yale, Vance might have swung left; he once considered voting for Hillary Clinton and contributed posts to a blog run by David Frum, today a senior editor for The Atlantic, which has been consistently (if not fanatically) critical of the Trump administration. “I’m not suggesting that JD Vance doesn’t believe what he says today,” Frum told NPR in 2024. “I’m just saying that it doesn’t necessarily have much connection with what he said yesterday, and it’s not a sure predictor of what he will say tomorrow.”
We do know Vance is happy to play the role of Trump’s attack dog when needed, as when he scolded Volodymyr Zelensky during the Ukraine president’s visit to the White House in early 2025.
“Vance was critical of Trump beforehand but he has been the most loyal Trumpian since he was appointed,” says political scientist Michael de Percy. He’s clearly comfortable repeating the kind of extreme theories popular among Trump’s MAGA supporters – viz, his recent claim that Nixon’s downfall after Watergate was actually the result of a “deep state” conspiracy. Moreover, he said, possibly as a joke, “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
Despite being married to a Hindu-faith daughter of migrants with whom he shares mixed-race children, he is a strong advocate for Trump’s punitive immigration policies. As a senator in 2024 he stoked anti-immigration sentiment when he repeated untrue claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio had eaten people’s pet cats and dogs (“people who shouldn’t be in this country”); more recently he weighed into the furore over the death of British teenager Henry Nowak at the hands of a British-born Sikh, writing on social media that Nowak would still be alive “if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it”.
‘He talks so fast, he reaches really snap judgments, and he thinks they’re really genius, and I don’t think you get the best outcome from that.’
Bruce Wolpe, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney
He opposes abortion and in 2022 supported the US Supreme Court overturning the historic ruling Roe v Wade, half a century after it had made abortion a federal constitutional right. He has argued that childless Americans should pay higher taxes. In Communion, he blames falling birth rates on “our abandonment of Christian culture [which] has coincided with an apparent decline in our collective will to live.” In 2021, he claimed the US was in danger of being run by “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” – clearly a dig at then-vice president Kamala Harris – although it was a remark he later said he regretted, saying it had been “boneheaded”.
He is frequently critical of what he calls “radical gender ideology” and while in the Senate proposed a bill that would have made gender reassignment surgery on minors a criminal offence. “This is what he focused on when he was very briefly in the Senate, so I think that’s something that at least has been consistent,” says Kathryn Schumaker.
As for his recent attack on Pope Leo, telling him to be “careful when he talks about matters of theology,” after the Pope posted on social media that anyone who is a disciple of Christ “is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs” – that would possibly have been career-ending in another era, says Bruce Wolpe, a senior fellow at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney. Yet under the Trump administration it’s just another oddity of the times, he says. “He had the temerity to lecture the Pope on theology. Really, it’s just not right. There’s no doubt he’s smart. What bothers me about him is he talks so fast, he reaches really snap judgments, and he thinks they’re really genius, and I don’t think you get the best outcome from that.”
What are Vance’s chances of becoming president?
Of 22 vice presidents, only six have run for election and won. Vance served barely two years in the Senate and has held no other public office. He will be 44 by the time of the 2028 presidential election; the youngest president ever elected was John F. Kennedy, aged 43. “He would be the most inexperienced president in American history,” says Wolpe. That said, Tim Lynch contends, “He represents the future of American conservatism.” And Vance is in a much stronger position than had he not been vice president and was instead serving the rest of his six-year term in the Senate, says Wolpe. “It’s the quickest road to the White House, to the Oval Office.”
Says Lynch: “Vance is clearly using the VP role to test the market for a run at the presidency. Everyone assumes he will run.” Schumaker agrees. “Obviously, now he’s hoping to inherit Trump’s endorsement and that’s why he has this new memoir – he’s gearing up for his presidential campaign.” (Presidential endorsement is not technically necessary for a potential successor, and historically has even not been common. It can direct the outgoing incumbent’s own supporters towards their preference and supercharge their campaign; conversely, there’s a risk that endorsement by an unpopular president could damage the incoming candidate’s chances.)
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Meantime, the vice presidency affords Vance visibility and agency that would have been unlikely in the Senate, says Schumaker, giving him “a huge advantage in the primary [election] – and I wouldn’t be surprised if Vance does get the nomination.” A survey by the Pew Research Centre from earlier this year suggested Vance was already a far more recognisable figure to American voters than most other figures in the Trump administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, widely considered the other main contender for the top job. “People look to JD Vance as somebody who is living the dream,” says Michael de Percy, “the background that we came from, able to achieve these things.”
‘I’m one of those guys who really benefits from having sort of a powerful female voice over his left shoulder saying, “Don’t do that, do that.” ’
JD Vance
Usha, meanwhile, brings smarts, stability and support, described in one profile as “even-tempered, politically opaque, hyper-organised, mapping out her work and life with Vance on Post-it notes, whiteboards and spreadsheets”. Vance says she keeps him humble. “If I get a little too cocky or a little too proud, I just remind myself that she’s way more accomplished than I,” he said in 2020. “I’m one of those guys who really benefits from having sort of a powerful female voice over his left shoulder saying, ‘Don’t do that, do that.’”
After reading Communion, Lynch comes away with an impression of Vance as “a whirligig of different positions and postures, and I mean, it’s too easy to say this comes from the turbulent childhood that he lived, but he himself admits that he’s got lots of issues, a fear of abandonment, a fear that everything will crash, this impending sense of doom – this all comes from this revolving door of stepfathers that came through. It makes the book, in part, quite a compelling read, but it also calls into question, well, does he have the requisite stability to be president of the US?”
Wolpe has different questions. “We really do not know what his true posture is going to be on foreign policy and international relations, and what he wants the United States to do. This is going to be a very mysterious presidency, if he ever gets there, because we don’t know what he really believes, what he truly embraces. How is he going to engage with Putin, and how is he going to engage with Xi? He has not been very public on that at all.”
For his part, Trump has given Vance the opportunity to strut his stuff on the world stage, but has threatened to pull the rug out from under him too: he could be credited for a peace deal, or, as Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace put it to The New York Times, he could be “viewed as the architect of an American humiliation and a deal that concedes billions of dollars to a committed US adversary.”
Trump has yet to offer an endorsement of either Vance or Rubio and seems to enjoy toying with them both, asking a crowd recently, “Who’s it gonna be? Is it gonna be JD, is it gonna be somebody else? I don’t know.” Bottom line, says Lynch, “I don’t think Trump is of a mind to give it anyways. He likes the idea of ferrets in a sack all squabbling for the succession.”
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