Asshole of the Month: J.D. Vance

Trump’s pick for running mate, J.D. Vance, has been called the “voice of the Rust Belt” after his 2016 bestseller Hillbilly Elegy was published. The memoir recounted the travails of his dysfunctional family, originating in Kentucky coal mining country. Vance does have a true hillbilly pedigree: His paternal grandfather’s cousin, also named Jim, married into the Hatfields and participated in the New Year’s massacre of the McCoy family. He was tracked down and killed by a bounty hunter just days after the attack.

J.D.’s mother was an abusive drug addict married five times. He credits his maternal grandparents, whom he affectionately calls Mamaw and Papaw, with providing emotional and financial security. Both sets of grandparents had moved from Kentucky to Middletown, Ohio, in the 1940s to work in the steel mills. By the 1970s, however, most of the steel mills had shut down, leaving a region mired in unemployment, poverty and addiction as other manufacturing jobs fled overseas during the ensuing decades of globalization.

After high school, J.D. enlisted in the Marine Corps and served a tour of duty in Iraq, including a six-month stint as a combat correspondent, although he was “lucky to escape any real fighting.” With the tuition benefits provided by the G.I. Bill, he could afford to attend Ohio State, graduating with a degree in political science and philosophy. Then he won the upward mobility lottery: a near full scholarship for his first year to Yale Law School, that bastion of America’s ruling class. He practiced law for almost two years before moving to San Francisco to become a venture capitalist with right-wing PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital. Ever since, Thiel has been Vance’s deep-pockets godfather.

In 2016, Vance announced that he planned to move back to Ohio and founded Our Ohio Renewal (OOR), a nonprofit advocacy organization that focused on education, addiction and other “social ills,” but did little more than serve as a front for Vance’s burgeoning political ambition. A 2021 report by Business Insider demonstrated that OOR’s tax filings showed that they spent more in their first year on “management services” by executive director and main Vance political advisor Jai Chabria than it did on fighting opioid abuse. Although he abandoned his grandparents’ Democratic party for the GOP, Vance was horrified by Donald Trump in 2016, writing to a friend from Yale Law School, “But I’m not surprised by Trump’s rise, and I think the entire party has only itself to blame. We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people, and I have been saying for a long time that we need to offer those people SOMETHING…or a demagogue would. We are now at that point. Trump is the fruit of the party’s collective neglect…I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad…or that he’s America’s Hitler.” At other times, Vance wrote or said, “I’m a never Trump guy.” “Terrible candidate.” “Idiot if you voted for him.” “Cultural heroin.” “Noxious” and “reprehensible.” “Trump’s actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd.”