The Messed Up Reality Of JD Vance

In mid-July 2024, not long after the assassination attempt against him, former president Donald Trump announced Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate in the 2024 presidential election,. Two days later, at the Republican National Convention, Vance accepted the nomination, becoming the GOP's vice presidential pick. But before entering politics, the Ohio native published his best-selling 2016 memoir "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis." The book explores the life for poor white comunities where poverty is the "family tradition" and reveals his family's experiences with this reality. It was made into a Ron Howard-directed feature film that released in 2020 and dives into Vance's childhood in all of its harrowing detail.

Between his difficult upbringing and all of the exposure and criticism that comes from rising into the public eye, Vance's life, comments, and decisions have painted quite a picture. Described on The Atlantic as a "self-described hillbilly turned Marine turned Ivy League law-school graduate turned venture capitalist turned Senate candidate," his trajectory has been controversial, to say the least. Here's the messed up reality of J.D. Vance.

In his 2016 memoir "Hillbilly Elegy," J.D. Vance painted a detailed portrait of his troubled, violent, poverty-stricken upbringing — one that was rife with substance abuse and poverty. His mother experienced addiction and was abusive and neglectful of Vance, who eventually went to live with his grandparents, whom he described as having a "violent" relationship. His grandmother once even set his grandfather on fire after he came home drunk.

Yet in his book, Vance expressed empathy for his family and others in similar situations. Speaking to NPR in 2016, he spoke about this perspective. "I definitely — in a lot of ways, I was at the ground floor of the opioid epidemic because I saw it happening with my mom before it had really reached crisis proportions," he said. "But in a lot of ways, she was just responding to the things that cause people to go and search for drugs in the first place."

He described her as a person who had a lot of "emotional baggage" and "emotional turmoil and hurt" from her childhood. "And so she turned to drugs," he explained. "But a lot of people have done the same, of course, in the past five or 10 years, which is why these addiction rates — which is why these overdose rates are so high in these communities." Given these experiences, it's unsurprising that Vance has made the opioid crisis a focal point of his political career and has signed various bills intended to combat America's drug epidemic.

One of the most harrowing stories from J.D. Vance's childhood is when his mother threatened to kill them both. When he was 12 years old, she took him on a "big makeup trip" after she apologized to him about "something she had done earlier," as he told NPR in 2016. "But what happened is that something ignited her temper while we were together," he continued. "She sped up the car on the highway. Went over — you know, it seemed at the time like she was driving over 100 mph. And she just kept on saying, I'm going to crash this car and kill us both. I'm going to crash this car and kill us both."

Vance ended up escaping and finding someone's home, and his mother was arrested for domestic violence. The 12-year-old then faced a tough decision: "Keep talking" to the child welfare bureaucracy, which would lead to his mom being charged and his placement in foster care, or "keep quiet about things" and stay with his family. Vance chose the latter. He said he trusted his grandmother to take care of him — or at least not let "anything too bad" happen to him." He also felt a deep mistrust of the lawyers and judge presiding over the case, who he perceived as wealthy and in a different world than him.

Before J.D. Vance joined Donald Trump to take the White House, he had quite the different impression of the former real president. As reported by CNN, in 2016, Vance messaged a friend and called Trump "America's Hitler," and a few months later he penned a piece for The Atlantic in which he called the politician "cultural heroin." Vance also liked tweets that accused Trump of committing "serial sexual assault" and urged Christians to stop apologizing for the politician after his the "Access Hollywood" tape was published in 2016 — a tape a study in Political Communications said showed "unambiguously predatory, stereotypical and misogynistic attitudes toward women."

Vance's shift on Trump came in 2020, and in 2021, he ran for Senate and sought an endorsement from the man he once appeared to revile. He received the blessing, and in 2024 he was side-by-side the former president as they made their bid to lead America. According to Reuters, both Democrats and Republicans have questioned Vance's motivations. Some believe he is an opportunist driven less by his particular ideological beliefs and more by serving his career. Others, like conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, who himself has faced accusations of racism and misogyny, believe Vance's shift came from seeing the benefits Trump brought to America during his time as president.

Back in 2021, J.D. Vance, then Ohio's Republican Senate nominee, spoke at Pacifica Christian High School in Southern California in September 2021, taking aim at the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and its purported effects on marriage. "This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, 'well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy,'" he said, per Vice. "'And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that's going to make people happier in the long term.'"

Vance described his grandparents' relationship as "violet" in "Hillbilly Elegy," and his comments on marriage resurfaced after his nomination as Trump's vice president, leading to criticism. "JD Vance said women are obligated to stay in 'violent' marriages," Shannon Watts, a gun violence prevention activist and the founder of Moms Demand Action, wrote on X, formerly Twitter. "Each month, 70 women are fatally shot by intimate partners in the U.S., and 1 million women alive today have been shot or shot at by intimate partners."

The Cut accused Vance — who criticized Democrat leaders as "childless cat ladys" — of wanting to "take women back to the 1950s." At this time in the United States, martial rape was legal — it wasn't until 1993 that it was criminalized all 50 states. When speaking to Spectrum News in September 2021, Vance was asked whether he supported rape and incest exceptions for abortion. He appeared to oppose them, saying "two wrongs don't make a right." "It's not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it's whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child's birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society," he said.

In "Hillbilly Elegy," J.D. Vance revealed that he once "convinced" himself he was gay. "I was eight or nine, maybe younger ... the only thing I knew about gay men was that they preferred men to women. This described me perfectly: I disliked girls, and my best friend in the world was my buddy Bill. Oh no, I'm going to hell." He talked to his grandmother about it, and she rebuked him: "Don't be a f****** idiot, how would you know that you're gay?" And later: "And even if you did want to suck d****, that would be okay. God would still love you."

Fast-forward to Vance's political career in a party with explicitly anti-LGBTQ+ lawmakers, where his stance on LGBTQ+ rights has drawn scrutiny. When running for the Ohio Senate in 2022, he told right-wing Christian organization Mission America he would oppose legislation that would enshrine same-sex marriage rights and the right to interracial marriage — the Respect for Marriage Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022. "Most Americans, I think, don't really care about same-sex marriage," Vance told Business Insider in 2023. 

In July 2024, the GOP — under the leadership of Donald Trump, now with Vance at his side — revamped its platform to remove explicit opposition to same-sex marriage. But with Republicans ramping up attacks on the LGBTQ+ community in recent years, many are unconvinced that this removal suggests any real step toward inclusivity — and point to the new focus on curtailing the rights of transgender people. Sam Paisley, interim communications director for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told The Washington Post that the new platform "advances the scale of [Republicans'] policies and plans that hurt LGBTQ+ Americans." "Trump's MAGA allies in state legislatures have introduced more than 1,000 anti-LGBTQ+ bills over the last two years, and these attacks are only growing," he said.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

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