One of the earliest responses to the selection came from President Biden, calling Vance a Trump “clone.” All along, political pundits speculated that Trump’s choice would be based mainly on the candidate’s loyalty to him and his policies, and Vance meets that criteria and some.
Vance, 39, began to change his opinions about Trump after he received the endorsement that quickly separated him from his opponents and put him over the threshold to victory in the 2022 Senate race. Suddenly the man who declared he was a never Trumper was on his way to being a forever Trumper, and the only disagreement between them was on the issue of abortion.
Whether Vance will bring anything of importance to Trump’s bid for the White House is debatable. Few vice presidential running mates have historically moved the political needle in a presidential race, and in this case, it may have even less impact since they have so much in common.
So, who is Vance and how does he stack up against Vice President Kamala Harris who will likely contest him in debates? He first gained public recognition from his best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy,” which chronicled his coming of age in middle America, mainly in Kentucky where he was raised by his maternal grandparents. His story is an Horatio Alger tale of overcoming poverty in backwater Appalachia, getting a college degree from Ohio State University before earning a law degree from Yale University.
Here is a sample from the book: “In our race-conscious society, our vocabulary often extends no further than the color of someone’s skin—’black people,’ ‘Asians,’ ‘white privilege.’ Sometimes these broad categories are useful, but to understand my story, you have to delve into the details. I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is the family tradition—their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”
His elegy was soon made into a film that had mixed reviews and like his book, race is only mentioned in context with Barack Obama about whom he writes “overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him.”
It was not an easy ascendance up the economic scale for Vance; there were family difficulties, most distressingly his mother’s drug addiction. When he enrolled at Ohio State, he was older than most freshmen, but his four years in the Marines gave him an experiential edge. “I was an anomaly,” he wrote. Later at Yale, he would meet his wife, Usha, who was raised by Indian immigrants in the suburbs of San Diego, and “was like my Yale spirit guide.” He confessed that her presence made him feel at home. She is a Yale graduate and a lawyer.
There is still so much to be learned about Vance and how he will blend with Trump’s dictatorial outlook, one that demands fealty, which shouldn’t be a problem for a dyed-in-the-wool acolyte like Vance. But in this volatile, topsy-turvy political terrain, who knows. He could end up like Pence.