Who is Vice President JD Vance?
January 20, 2025
JD Vance is the 50th vice president of the United States, deputy to President Donald Trump and potentially the future of the president's long-running populist "Make America Great Again" movement.
Born James David Bowman and raised by his maternal grandparents — whose surname he later adopted — the 40-year-old former senator and father of three grew up in a steel manufacturing town in Ohio and joined the US Marines after graduating high school.
He completed a six-month tour of Iraq in a noncombat military journalist role in 2005.
After leaving the Marines, he graduated from Ohio State University and Yale Law School. He later switched from law to tech investing in California, where he started his own venture capital firm.
He also met his wife Usha Chilukuri at Yale.
Vance succeeds Kamala Harris in the role of second-in-command. Harris ran as the Democratic Party candidate against Trump in November's presidential election.
The role of the vice president
The vice presidency has become a more prominent role since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, which resulted in Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson taking the presidential oath aboard Air Force One just hours after the shooting.
Rarely had such a public ascendency — in both the national and global eye — taken place.
The US Constitution outlines the role of the vice president as one to assume command if the president is unable to perform their duties due to "Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of said Office."
The vice president could also assume the top job if they and a cabinet majority agreed the president was unfit for duty.
The constitution names the VP as the president of the senate, casting a tiebreaking vote if required.
Recent presidents have used their VP pick to build bridges with target communities. Trump's first running-mate, Mike Pence, helped him connect with the Republican Party's conservative evangelical wing, while Joe Biden's choice of Harris in 2020 was seen as a way to contrast his age with youth and put the first woman of color and Asian-American into the deputy's chair.
A future president?
Constitutional limitations mean Donald Trump is unable to run for president again in 2028, and while big hitters such as governors and senators will likely run for the Republican candidacy, Vance has the advantage of incumbency as VP.
He also has the reported support of many key players within the Republican Party and MAGA movement, including Trump's son Donald Jr, and Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and David Sacks.
While Trump will dominate the headlines as president for the next four years, a close eye will be kept on Vance's approach to key policy issues such as abortion, immigration and foreign policy — and how his stances could shape the Republican Party's post-Trump era.
'Never Trumper' turns into MAGA senator
It was in May 2016 that Vance entered the public eye with the publication of his acclaimed "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis."
The bestseller reflected on Vance's upbringing and was considered a window into the lives of people in the declining manufacturing region known as the Rust Belt just months before slim-margin wins in the region's states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania swept Trump to power in 2016.
Those states abandoned Trump in 2020, then they flipped back to him in 2024.
Not unlike the Rust Belt, Vance's support for his president has also flipped.
In a 2016 interview on NPR, Vance said he couldn't "stomach Trump" and would consider voting for Hillary Clinton, but also said the Trump phenomenon was buoyed by the support of white working-class voters who "aren't necessarily economically destitute but in some ways feel very culturally isolated and very pessimistic about the future. That's one of the biggest predictors of whether someone will support Donald Trump. It may be the biggest predictor."
Among those heaping praise on the book was PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. The New York Times reported in July that Thiel — a long-standing mentor of Vance's and one of the first high-profile Silicon Valley figures to support Trump in 2016 — brokered an initial meeting between the former president and his future VP in 2021.
Vance later wound back his position as "a Never Trump guy" when he successfully ran in the 2022 Republican primary to represent Ohio in the US Senate.
Edited by: Carla Bleiker
This article was originally published on November 6, 2024, and was updated on January 20, 2025, following JD Vance becoming vice president of the United States.