Who is JD Vance: Biography, Perosnal Life, Wife, and Political Career

An Overview of JD Vance, Trump's Running Mate

On Monday at the Republican National Convention, former President Donald Trump chose J.D. Vance to be his running mate. This made the Ohio GOP senator even more famous across the country.

Republican Ohio Sen. J.D Vance, 39, is new to politics; he just joined the Senate last year. But in that short time, he has steadily risen in the conservative ranks. He was once a harsh Trump critic who called Mr. Trump "reprehensible" and "cultural heroin." But in his 2022 Senate race, he won Mr. Trump's support by fully supporting his politics and lies about an election being stolen. The endorsement put him ahead of a lot of other candidates and helped him get to the Senate.

J.D. Vance first became famous after writing the 2016 memoir "Hillbilly Elegy." The book is about his upbringing in a poor Appalachian family and reflects the values of many Americans who support Trump's policies. Vance worked as a venture capitalist at Andrew Theil's business, Mithril Capital, and for a short time at a corporate law firm before he ran for office.

He was also in the U.S. Marine Corps and was sent to Iraq. Vance beat a very strong field of Republicans in the primary election for the Senate. He then faced Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat and former presidential candidate, in a very close general election in November of that year.

Learn more: J.D Vance in the Marine Corps: 3 Names, 4 Years and Some Awards As Journalist

Trump picks JD Vance for VP

J.D. Vance Biography, Age (Birthday)

James David Vance is an American politician who was born James Donald Bowman on August 2, 1984. He has been the junior senator from Ohio since 2023.

Vance, who turns 40 on August 2, would be one of the youngest vice presidents in U.S. history if elected.

Early Life, Grandparents, Parents, Sister

John James Bowman Vance was born in Middletown, Ohio, a small rust belt city in the southwest. His parents, Don and Bev Bowman, were of Scots and Irish descent.

As a child, Vance went to Jackson to spend the summers with his great-grandmother and other family members. “I always told the difference between ‘my address' and ‘my home,'” he wrote in Hillbilly Elegy. No matter where my mother and sister lived, my address was where I spent most of my time with them. But I always lived in the house my great-grandmother owned in the holler in Jackson, Kentucky.

Vance was born in Kentucky and grew up in Ohio and Kentucky. He wrote about his poor and abused childhood in his best-selling 2016 autobiography, "Hillbilly Elegy." Vance's mother had a drug problem, so he spent a lot of his childhood with his grandmother, whom he called "Mamaw."

Jim and Bonnie Vance, his maternal grandparents and people he called "Papaw" and "Mamaw," moved to Middletown from Jackson, Kentucky, in the late 1940s. Jackson is a town in the coal region of southeastern Kentucky. Bob was 13 years old and pregnant with Jim's child. Jim was 16 years old. At the time, they were not married.

Lindsay is his older half-sister. Bev had her a few weeks after he graduated from high school. James' parents split up when he was a little kid. His mother later changed his middle name to David, and he eventually took the last name Vance, which was her maiden name. For years, Vance's mother had problems with drugs and alcohol. His maternal grandparents, who had moved to Middletown from the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky, raised him most of the time.

On his father's side, Vance comes from "hillbilly royalty." His grandfather's distant cousin, also named Jim Vance, married into the Hatfield family and is said to have killed the person who started the famous Hatfield-McCoy feud.

Donald Bowman and Bev Vance, Vance's biological parents, split up when he was a toddler. After that, his mother's new husband, Bob Hamel, took him in and changed his name to James David Hamel. His nickname, J.D., stayed the same after the name change.

Education, US Army, Career

Vance joined the U.S. Marine Corps

In 2003, he graduated from Middletown High School and joined the Marine Corps. He was a corporal in the Public Affairs section of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing and served in Iraq.

He has said, "I served my country honorably, and when I went to Iraq, I saw that I had been lied to—that the promises of the foreign policy establishment were a joke."

After that, he went to Ohio State University and got a bachelor's degree in political science and philosophy in 2009.

After that, he went to Yale Law School and got his law degree there in 2013.

While at Yale, he heard Thiel talk about how technology was stuck and how American elites were losing power. Vance later said of his first meeting with Thiel, "He saw these two trends... as connected." "If new technologies really led to real prosperity, our elites wouldn't feel like they have to compete with each other for fewer and fewer prestigious outcomes." Vance said that Thiel's speech was "the most important moment" of his time at Yale.

After that, he worked for investment firms in California and other places, as well as the multinational law firm Sidley Austin LLP.

Vance started his own business in 2019 called Narya. It is based in Ohio. Both Thiel's company, Palantir, and Narya were named after made-up things from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books.

JD Vance's Wife, Usha Vance and Their Children

Meeting Usha Chilukuri, who would become his wife and the mother of his three children, was another important event in his time at Yale. The two people got married in 2014, and a Hindu priest blessed them in a separate ceremony.

Usha Vance, Vance's wife, practices litigations for a San Francisco and Washington, D.C.-based law firm. One year after they graduated, the couple got married after meeting as Yale Law School students.

The couple has three young children: Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel.

Who Is Usha Vance, the Wife of J.D. Vance? Undoubtedly, the newly announced running mate of Donald J. Trump, the wife of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, possesses the necessary qualifications. Ms. Vance, a corporate litigator at a prominent San Francisco law firm, holds degrees from Yale and Cambridge and has clerked for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. while he was an appeals court judge. Usha Chilukuri, an immigrant from India, was raised in a suburb of San Diego. She was referred to as a “leader” and a “bookworm” by friends from her early and teenage years. Intelligent, driven, and realistic, she transferred from a four-year Yale extracurricular program to a Gates Fellowship at Cambridge, where she primarily interacted with left- and liberal-leaning circles. She was a registered Democrat in 2014. Usha Vance and Senator J.D. Vance She and Mr. Vance first connected while attending Yale Law School. In 2014, they were married in Kentucky and given a Hindu pundit's blessing at a different ceremony. Ms. Vance has contributed subtly but significantly to her husband's success. She assisted Mr. Vance at Yale in organizing his thoughts on the social decay of rural white America, which served as the inspiration for his best-selling memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy." (Ron Howard directed the book's adaptation into a movie in 2020.) Additionally, she made a few well-planned but infrequent appearances alongside Mr. Vance while he ran for the Ohio Senate, including an interview with Newsmax where she appeared to refute rumors that her husband adopted a populist stance in order to achieve political success.

Home

Vance lives in Cincinnati with his family in the East Walnut Hills neighborhood. He also bought a house in Alexandria, Virginia, for $1.5 million last year.

Vance's Policy Positions and Abortion

Vance represents the so-called "New Right," a type of populist conservatism that doesn't agree with many traditional Republican ideas. He backs trade tariffs and doesn't want the U.S. to get involved in other countries' wars, especially the one between Russia and Ukraine. He has also spoken out against any plans to cut Social Security.

Not all of Vance's work in the Senate has been done by Democrats only. After the train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio, he and Sen. Sherrod Brown introduced a bill to make trains safer. He worked with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren on a bill that would make bank executives responsible when banks fail.

On the other hand, a lot of his other bills show that he is a conservative. Vance, for example, put forward a bill to ban care that promotes gender identity for children and a bill to end diversity programs in the federal government.

Vance often says that the government should find ways to get people to have kids because she is against abortion.

But after Ohio and other states voted for abortion rights last year, Vance changed how he talks about the issue, just like other Republicans. As he spoke to CNN in December, he said that Republicans need to "accept that people do not want blanket abortion bans."

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