Former U.S. President, Donald Trump had on Monday announced Senator James David Vance, popularly known as JD Vance as his running mate for the November presidential election.
Not many know who Vance is?
1. Vance, born August 2, 1984, is an American politician serving as the junior United States senator from Ohio since 2023.
2. He is the first millennial to be on a presidential ticket of a major party in the United States.
3. Vance served in the Marine Corps before studying political science and philosophy at Ohio State University and earning a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School.
4. He came to prominence with his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which described his upbringing in Middletown and his family’s Appalachian values. The memoir became a New York Times bestseller and attracted significant press attention during the 2016 United States presidential election.
5. He launched his first political campaign for Ohio’s Senate seat in 2021 and won the Republican nomination after being endorsed by Trump.
6. In January 2017, Vance became a CNN contributor.
7. In April 2017, Ron Howard signed on to direct a film version of Hillbilly Elegy, which Netflix released in 2020, starring Owen Asztalos and Gabriel Basso as Vance.
8. In 2019, he co-founded Narya Capital in Cincinnati with financial backing from Thiel, Eric Schmidt, and Marc Andreessen.
9. In 2020, he raised $93 million for the firm. With Thiel and former Trump adviser Darren Blanton, Vance had invested in Rumble, a Canadian online video platform popular with the political right.
10. Vance was sworn in to the U.S. Senate on January 3, 2023, as a member of the 118th United States Congress. He is the first U.S. senator from Ohio without previous government experience since John Glenn, who took office in 1974.
11. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Vance was an outspoken critic of Republican nominee Donald Trump.
12. Vance had called Trump “cultural heroin” and “an opioid of the masses.” In October 2016, he called Trump “reprehensible” in a post on Twitter, and called himself a “never-Trump guy.” In a private message on Facebook he called Trump “America’s Hitler”.
13. Vance supported Trump in 2020. In July 2021, he apologized for calling Trump “reprehensible” and deleted posts from 2016 from his Twitter account that were critical of him.
14. Vance is married to a former law school classmate, Usha Chilukuri, since 2014. They have three children.
15. In August 2019, Vance, a former Protestant, was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church in a ceremony at St. Gertrude Priory in Cincinnati, Ohio.