Vice President JD Vance is the incumbent Vice President of the United States after being sworn in on January 20th. This means VP Vance is one heartbeat from becoming the leader of the Western world. President Trump has already been fired upon and is the oldest president to ever take office, 78, being older than President Biden when he took office four years ago. We have seen the clear deterioration of Biden in the last four years, his age and cognitive ability were the final blows to his presidential race. With this in mind, it has never been more important to examine the Vice President.
VP Vance has had a meteoric rise in politics over the last decade, from an anti-Trump best-selling author and political commentator to a pro-Trump senator and eventual Vice President to the man he once described as the “America’s Hitler”. The Vice President was a heated choice which received a considerate amount of backlash when President Trump made his pick, this criticism came from both sides of the political spectrum. However, Vance showed his craft as a lawyer, when appearing in TV interviews and the Vice-Presidential debate, being very difficult to get the better of. VP Vance is Catholic, having converted in 2019, and his political views develop from this religious thinking. VP Vance can be described as a paleo-conservative, a strain of conservatism which promotes American nationalism and Christian values.
Vance rose to fame through his best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy, the book is a memoir focused on the life of Vance, growing up in a dysfunctional family which suffered with alcohol addiction and drug abuse, in Middletown, Ohio, to becoming a military journalist in the US marines, and eventually graduating from Yale Law school. The memoir studies the drug-problems and alcoholism in a poor town in Ohio. The book was said to be an influential piece in understanding the working-class vote for Trump in the 2016 election. Hillbilly Elegy was adapted into a movie and released in 2020.
Despite, the book’s success in conservative circles, at this time JD Vance himself was anti-Trump. According to CNN, Vance wrote to a friend in 2016, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.” So how did a man so staunchly opposed to Trump pivot and become the man’s understudy and prodigy. The answer, politics. Unsurprisingly, when Vance decided to run for Senate in 2022, a crowded Republican primary meant that to gain the votes, supporting Trump was a necessity. It was in 2020, that Vance showed his first support for Trump, possibly seeing a sign of the times. In his campaign in 2022, Vance hoped for a Trump endorsement, and received one, which undoubtedly helped Vance secure the votes for Senate.
In his past, Vance spent time as a venture capitalist where he invested in a startup named Appharvest which focused on developing high-tech farming. The controversial company was first advertised to bring crucial work to people in Ohio. However, workers complained over the terrible working conditions, which included long-hours, extremely high-temperatures in the greenhouses and insufficient breaks for water. Anthony Morgan, a former Appharvest worker, told CNN that he experienced a high of 53°C. Due to these terrible conditions, many of the local workers left the company and were replaced by contract workers on work visas from countries in Latin America.
Vance tried his hand at philanthropy. Vance set up a charity, ‘Our Ohio Renewal’, which aimed to help tackle drug addiction. Despite the charity’s seemingly honourable intentions, there have been multiple alarm bells over the legitimacy of the work. Business Insider found the charity had paid more for the “management services” of Jai Chabria, Vance’s political advisor, than the charity had spent on the battle against opioid use. The charity appears to no longer operate as its website has closed.
We can begin to predict what a United States under Vance would look like based on comments VP Vance has made. Vance is a possible heir to the “Make America Great Again” movement, with Trump’s age, it is vital for the MAGA movement that there is another large personality to drive their populism. Vance does not have anywhere near the same notoriety as Trump, perhaps there is a plan to keep Vance in the limelight in the coming years so the average American will become more familiar with him. Vance is fundamentally a natalist, an advocate for more American children being born. The Vice President has even suggested in the past that parents should have more voting power than non-parents, however, facing backlash, Vance retracted this suggestion. Vance believes in incentivising the American people to have more children, telling Margaret Brennan in an interview for Face the Nation, “I would love to see a child tax credit that is $5000 per child.”
Furthermore, Vance would follow in a similar vein to Trump’s foreign policy. In an interview with Kristen Welker for NBC News in October 2024 he outlined his own views on foreign policy issues. Vance said, “I do not want to be in a war with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.” Vance has been an outspoken critic over the money sent to Ukraine by the Biden administration. Vance went on to speak about NATO, echoing the sentiment of Trump, “NATO’s problem is, particularly Germany has to spend more on security, has to spend more on defence.” Vance voicing his apprehension over the spending within NATO suggests he too would promote a divergence away from NATO if the other member states do not spend more. China is always a talking point when it comes to American foreign policy, Vance outlined, “China is the biggest threat we have for the United States of America.”
The Vice President was not the name on the ticket which won the election, yet he conceivably could be the person to take the Presidency in the future. VP Vance is relatively young for a politician high up the executive ladder, being only 40, so could easily remain at the forefront of American politics for years to come. Vance’s soar has been meteoric yet marked with controversy.
