After Donald Trump’s victory in the American elections, JD Vance is officially Trump’s heir apparent as vice president-elect.

When he was chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate in July, JD Vance’s rise in the Republican ranks was confirmed. Many experts see him as the heir apparent to Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ movement and the favorite to become the Republican presidential candidate in 2028.

While Trump’s brash political actions are a natural extension of the larger-than-life persona he has built over the past forty years in the public eye, Vance, a forty-year-old father of three, comes from another side of America, and his The Rise to vice presidency has been unconventional by Republican standards.

Vance was born James David Bowman and raised primarily by his maternal grandparents – whose last name he later adopted – in an Ohio steel-making town, while his mother struggled with drug and alcohol use.

After graduating high school, Vance joined the United States Marines and served for four years, including a six-month deployment to Iraq in a non-combat role as a military journalist in 2005. After leaving the Marines, he studied from Ohio State University and Yale Law. School. He later moved from law to technology investing in California, where he founded his own venture capital firm.

At Yale he also met his wife Usha Chilukuri. The couple married in 2014 and have two sons and a daughter.

‘Never Trumper’ becomes MAGA senator

It was in May 2016 that Vance entered the public spotlight with the publication of his critically acclaimed “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” The bestseller reflected on Vance’s upbringing in Appalachia and was considered a window into the lives of people in the declining manufacturing region known as the Rust Belt, just months before Trump’s victories in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2016 came to power. .

In a 2016 interview on NPR, Vance said he “couldn’t stomach Trump” and would consider voting for Hillary Clinton, but also suggested, somewhat prophetically, that the Trump phenomenon was buoyed by the support of white working-class voters which “are ‘I’m not necessarily economically destitute, but in some ways I feel very culturally isolated and very pessimistic about the future.’

Among those praising the book was PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. The New York Times reported in July that Thiel — a longtime mentor of Vance and one of the first high-profile Silicon Valley figures to endorse Trump in 2016 — brokered an initial meeting between the former president and his future vice president in 2021.

Vance would rescind his position as “a Never Trump man” when he successfully ran in the 2022 Republican primary to represent Ohio in the U.S. Senate.

Campaign controversies and polished achievements

Shortly after his selection as running mate, another 2021 interview surfaced in which Vance described the United States as a country run by “childless cat ladies” — a comment that was rebuked by Democrats, as well as Taylor Swift and other celebrities.

Vance later drew the ire of communities in his home state of Ohio after he shared false claims on social media that Haitian immigrants were eating dogs in Springfield. Trump amplified these false claims in his debate against Kamala Harris.

Vance’s own debate performance against Tim Walz saw him come away with a narrow victory in the eyes of critics. His disciplined effort was summarized by the press as “polished” (Politico), “sharp” and “dominant” (The New York Times) and “smooth” (CNN). But the elephant in the room was his inability to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, something his opponent certainly took advantage of.

Is Vance a window into the future of Republicans?

While Trump will dominate headlines as president, Vance’s approach to key policy issues such as abortion, immigration and foreign policy will be closely watched — and how his positions could shape the post-Trump era of the Republican Party.

While the vice presidential position is rarely in the spotlight as Trump returns to office at age 78, there is a better than normal chance that Vance will end up in the Oval Office sometime in the next four years.

Edited by: Sean M. Sinico