55 Things to Know About J.D. Vance, Trump’s VP Pick
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/15/jd-vance-55-things-trump-vp-00167882
Here — culled from his memoir, his writing and public remarks, his voluminous tweets and an extensive series of interviews he conducted with POLITICO Magazine earlier this year — are some clues.
After graduating from Middletown High School in 2003, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and served in Iraq as a corporal with the Public Affairs section of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. “I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to — that the promises of the foreign policy establishment were a complete joke,” he has said.
In a review, the New York Times called Hillbilly Elegy “a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion, particularly the ascent of Donald J. Trump.”
During the 2016 election, Vance emerged as a vocal critic of Donald Trump: “I’m a Never Trump guy,” he told Charlie Rose in October 2016.
In November 2020, one week after the presidential election, Netflix released a film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy, directed by Ron Howard and starring Gabriel Basso as Vance, Glenn Close as Mamaw and Amy Adams as Bev Vance. The movie was widely panned, with the New Yorker calling it “a libertarian’s fantasy.” Friends of Vance have said that the negative reaction to the film was the “last straw” of Vance’s estrangement from elite liberal society.
He believes that “the culture war is class war” — that pushing back against the cultural values of progressive elites is necessary to advance the economic and political interests of the working class. In the Senate, his culture war initiatives include a bill criminalizing gender-affirming care for transgender kids, a ban on federal mask mandates, and crack-down on affirmative action policies at colleges and universities. He publicly supports a 15-week abortion ban with exceptions for rape, incest and threats to the life of the mother.