10 things to know about JD Vance, Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick

Vance served in Iraq as a public affairs marine, escorting members of the press and writing stories about service members. He wrote in his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” that the Marine Corps “taught me how to live like an adult.”

“It was in the Marine Corps where I first ordered grown men to do a job and watched them listen; where I learned that leadership depended far more on earning the respect of your subordinates than on bossing them around; where I discovered how to earn that respect; and where I saw that men and women of different social classes and races could work as a team and bond like family,” he wrote, according to an excerpt published by Military.com.

Vance majored in political science and philosophy at Ohio State and graduated summa cum laude. He then graduated from Yale Law School in 2013.

As Business Insider previously reported, while at Yale, law professor and “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” author Amy Chua encouraged Vance to write a memoir about his upbringing.

As a law student, Vance attended a talk by Paypal founder Peter Thiel. He wrote in The Lamp in 2020 that it was “the most significant moment” of his time at Yale.

After two clerkships and a brief career in corporate law, Vance began working at Mithril Capital, a firm backed by Thiel, in 2016. A year later, he moved to Revolution, a VC firm in Washington, DC.

Vance published “Hillbilly Elegy” in the summer of 2016, before Trump was elected or projected to win the presidency. The memoir, which became a New York Times bestseller, focuses on Vance’s experience growing up poor in Ohio and Kentucky and was largely read as an honest illustration of America’s white working class. After Trump won, many turned to the book as an explanation for Trump’s meteoric and unexpected rise.

A movie adaptation of “Hillbilly Elegy” came out on Netflix in 2020.

Vance met his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, when they were both students at Yale Law School. In “Hillbilly Elegy,” he wrote that Chilukuri Vance was his “Yale spirit guide” who encouraged him to seek opportunities within the elite institution. They wed in 2014.

Chilukuri Vance clerked for Judge Brett Kavanaugh in the US Court of Appeals before he became a Supreme Court Justice and also clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, The New York Times reported. She worked as a litigator at the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, then quit her job when Trump chose Vance as his running mate.

They have two sons, Ewan and Vivek, and a daughter, Mirabel.

In February, Vance read “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!” by Dr. Seuss on the Senate floor in honor of Vivek’s 4th birthday, The Hill reported.

When he published “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance was a self-described “Never Trumper” and even called the former president “reprehensible” in a now-deleted X post.

As the years — and Trump presidency — wore on, though, Vance started to take a different approach. He told The Financial Times in 2018 that the former president “recognizes the frustration that exists in large parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, eastern Kentucky, and so forth.”

Come 2020, Vance supported Trump’s campaign and expressed regret for his previous stance. The tide turned in both directions, as Trump began to support Vance’s foray into politics.

A junior congressman, Vance was only elected to the Senate in 2022 but has since become one of Trump’s most loyal supporters. He entered a cramped Ohio primary in 2021 in the mold of an unrelenting Trump supporter and anti-elitist.

Vance embraced the former president’s policies and eventually earned his coveted endorsement. With Trump’s blessing, he catapulted through the primary and into Congress.

In the Senate, Vance serves on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee; the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee; the Joint Economic Committee; and the Special Committee on Aging. Like Trump, he has an isolationist bent on foreign policy and takes a hard-line approach to immigration.

During his limited time in office, Vance has come to embody what Politico dubbed the “New Right” movement — an ill-defined coalition of younger conservatives who are trying to push the Republican party toward more populism, conservatism, and nationalism.

Trump selected Vance as his running mate in a post on Truth Social. In it, he celebrated Vance’s business background and said that, as vice president, the youngster “will do everything he can to help me MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

If elected, the 40-year-old will be one of the youngest vice presidents in the nation’s history and well-positioned to inherit the MAGA crown.