As Ohio Sen. JD Vance described his unlikely rise, from the impoverished son of a mother with a drug addiction to the Republican nominee for vice president, he sounded every bit the boy from Appalachia. He said he is already planning his burial in the hills of Kentucky and resents the “elites” who he says have left his friends and neighbors behind.
“Never in my wildest imagination could I have believed that I’d be standing here tonight,” he said. “I grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands, and loved their God, their family, their community and their country with their whole hearts.
“But it was also a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington.”
Vance, 39, is only two years into his political career, having first been elected to the Senate in 2022. He has taken populist positions on issues like trade, immigration and foreign aid — putting him at odds with many of his fellow Republican senators, as well as many Republican voters. He says those views came from watching his friends and neighbors struggle after manufacturing plants shut down across the Midwest.
In his speech, he acknowledged he had lived the “American dream,” but said “things did not work out well for a lot of kids I grew up with.”
“Every now and then I will get a call from a relative back home who asks, did you know so and so? And I’ll remember a face from years ago, and then I’ll hear they died of an overdose,” he said. “As always, America’s ruling class wrote the checks, while communities like mine paid the price.
“For decades, that divide between the few with their power and comfort in Washington and the rest of us only widened. From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnating wages, the people who govern this country have failed and failed again,” he said. “That is, of course, until a guy named President Donald J. Trump came along.”
The Americans left behind
Vance described being raised by his grandmother, who he called “Mamaw,” and how fiercely protective she was of him, especially as Vance’s mother struggled with drug addiction.
“Now, I was lucky — despite the closing factories and the growing addiction in towns like mine, in my life I had a guardian angel by my side. She was an old woman who could barely walk, but she was tough as nails. I called her Mamaw, the name we hillbillies gave to our grandmothers,” he said.
He said his grandmother “loved the Lord,” and had “very deep Christian faith,” but was also a “woman of contradictions.”
“She once told me, when she found out that I was spending too much time with a local kid who was known for dealing drugs, that if I ever hung out with that kid again, she would run him over with her car,” he said, to laughter from the audience. “That’s true, and she said, ‘JD, no one will ever find out about it.’”
Vance’s Mamaw passed away several years ago, but Vance’s mother, Beverly, was at the convention to hear him speak, and received applause and cheers after Vance said she had been “10 years clean and sober.”
After high school, Vance joined the Marines, and from there he went to college, eventually working his way to Yale Law School, where he met his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance. He later started a venture capitalist firm, focused on investing in companies in the Midwest.
“Now, my work taught me that there is still so much talent and grit in the American heartland. There really is. But for these places to thrive, my friends, we need a leader who fights for the people who built this country,” he said.
What does JD Vance believe?
In his speech, Vance acknowledged that not every Republican agrees with his policy takes.
“Now we won’t agree on every issue, of course, not even in this room. We may disagree from time to time about how best to reinvigorate American industry and renew American family. That’s fine. In fact, it’s more than fine. It’s good. But never forget that the reason why this United Republican Party exists, why we do this, why we care about those great ideas and that great history is that we want this nation to thrive for centuries to come,” he said.
Vance champions a more isolationist foreign policy than many other Republican lawmakers, but he didn’t dwell long on those issues during his speech.
“Together, we will make sure our allies share in the burden of securing world peace. No more free rides for nations that betray the generosity of the American taxpayer,” he said. “Together, we will send our kids to war only when we must. But as President Trump showed with the elimination of ISIS and so much more, when we punch we’re going to punch hard.”
He also has backed Trump’s approach to trade, which includes tariffs and renegotiated trade agreements, frustrating some American allies.
On immigration, Vance continued his criticism of President Joe Biden’s handling of the border, saying migrants who cross the border illegally compete for jobs with working class Americans.
After his speech, members of Vance’s family, including his wife and mother, joined him on the stage.
Fallen soldiers, an American hostage and Trump’s granddaughter
Earlier in the evening, conventiongoers heard several emotional speeches, including from a group of parents and other family members of soldiers who died at Abbey Gate during the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Afghanistan in 2021.
They spoke with pain about the loss of their loved ones, and how they felt Biden did not acknowledge their sacrifice, saying he still hasn’t spoken the names of those who died that day. As a father of one of the fallen soldiers read each name of the men and women who died, the audience repeated the names back.
Later, the father and mother of an American hostage, Omer Neutra, held by Hamas in Gaza, spoke. Sporadically throughout the remarks made by Ronen and Orna Neutra, the audience chanted, “Bring them home.”
The night’s featured speakers also included Trump’s granddaughter, Kai Madison Trump, the daughter of Donald Trump Jr.
“On Saturday, I was shocked when I heard that he has been shot, and I just wanted to know if he was OK. It was heartbreaking that someone could do that to another person,” she said of the assassination attempt against Trump.
“Grandpa, you are such an inspiration, and I love you,” she added.