JD Vance: Jack of all trades, servant of Trump

James David (JD) Vance was thrust into the spotlight within the Republican Party after being chosen by Donald Trump as a vice-presidential running mate in July 2024.

Vance is a complex individual, one with many strands that comprise a single identity. He rose to national attention in 2016 with the publication of his reflective memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, at the age of 31.

Vance joined the US Marine Corps after high school, received a bachelor’s degree from Ohio State University, and studied at Yale Law School before joining PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s San Francisco-based Founders Fund. He then moved back to Ohio and launched a successful campaign to become a US senator.

Now, plucked by the President for the national stage, his life is marked by contradiction

In the years leading up to 2024, there was a lot of speculation about Vance’s position as a potential GOP leader. He has been heralded as the epitome of a ‘national conservative’, a term used to describe the changing nexus of the Republican Party as it moves further to the right. He had also become a seasoned translator of some of the former President’s lofty ideas into a unified and formalised policy agenda.

Now, plucked by the President for the national stage, his life is marked by contradiction. Vance places great emphasis on his rural Appalachian background, hanging his story on the rise to prominence of a kid from a deprived area of Midwest America who used the tenet of hard work to transition towards higher education and a successful career.

In his memoir, he employs a politically centrist, questioning tone. The questions are directed at the current political elite, who seem out of touch with the mindset of blue-collar America, which Vance says is currently disconnected from the rest of the country. However, in his venture into politics, Vance has been quick to align himself with the very political group that he cited in his book as part of the problem that drives inequality.

He has accepted a broad, isolationist foreign policy and a strong anti-immigration stance without much resistance. Many have argued that this concession was made to further his personal political ambitions

The JD Vance that has transitioned into the upper tier of the US political arena has allied himself with the polarising political positions that he was previously sceptical of. He has accepted a broad, isolationist foreign policy and a strong anti-immigration stance without much resistance. Many have argued that this concession was made to further his personal political ambitions, with the looming reality that there will need to be a successor to President Trump in the 2028 Presidential Election.

In his book, Vance said this: “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this, I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.” He also assigned Trump the moniker ‘America’s Hitler’ in a burning retort against his rhetoric towards immigrants in 2016.

As Vice President, he has walked back all of his previous positions, echoing and sometimes even extending Trump’s MAGA agenda, with an intellectual underpinning. The transition Vance made to a prime MAGA spokesman, one of the most effective the party had following defeat in 2020, helps to explain a rather improbable rise to the top.

In the national spotlight, he has been repeatedly cited for his incendiary and at times inflammatory rhetoric, particularly as it relates to foreign policy

After serving as a senator for just two years, from 2023 to 2025, he jumped to a far greater political platform – a sign of political savviness, though tinged with opportunism. The latter trait is one that critics lob frequently at Vance and is not without merit. Now in the national spotlight, he has been repeatedly cited for his incendiary and at times inflammatory rhetoric, particularly as it relates to foreign policy.

However, Vance is also the husband of Usha Vance, an Indian immigrant, and it is ‘his people’ in small towns across the Appalachians that are hardest hit by Trump’s signature ‘Big Beautiful Bill’. With such a stark contradiction between theory and practice, he appears to have sold out his liberal, social policies in favour of a resounding populist thrum he applies to his agenda at home and abroad.

In his current position, this is gone. He has outflanked Trump as a spokesman for the zero-tolerance immigration policy, where masked ICE immigration police agents have been deporting record numbers of people from the country and shipping them to maximum security prison camps in South American nations.

American citizens have been mistakenly caught up in the raids on several occasions, and even children with citizenship have seen threats of deportation. Alongside this, the Republican Party has removed welfare provisions such as Medicare and SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) food benefits from some of the poorest in the country.

Vance’s American isolationist agenda has seen abuse thrown at Europe, which he has argued is freeloading off decades-long defence and trade relationships

Foreign policy is the arena where Vance has pushed hardest to truly distinguish himself. He acted as the match in the already incendiary Russia-Ukraine conflict, famously accusing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of being ungrateful and asking him: “Have you said thank you once this entire meeting?”, in reference to military supplies and aid that the United States was providing to the Ukrainian defence.

Vance’s American isolationist agenda has seen abuse thrown at Europe, which he has argued is freeloading off decades-long defence and trade relationships and expecting bailouts. He has also called the working-class population in China “peasants” following an ongoing trade dispute with the country, as part of Trump’s tariff policy during his second term. These are hooks upon which hang his populist frame.

He has been one of the most active Vice Presidents in recent history, particularly on the world stage. His name now has recognition far beyond the shores of the US. The biggest nuance between Vance and his boss is this, however. Where Trump ran on a platform of upending the government establishments and institutions that the American public had grown fed up with, Vance is looking to rebuild them to suit his personal view of ‘America first’.

As the most likely heir apparent to the MAGA throne, Vance has spent years trying to understand the deep polarisation in his country. Now he is weaponising it for his advantage.