Upbringings don’t come much tougher than the one poor JD Vance had. One of the dispossessed in a rundown neighbourhood, violence round every corner, no father to speak of, a drunken, druggie mother who had at least five husbands and once asked her son for a cup of his urine she could submit for a drug test at work that day.
And zero prospects. Vance is the first to admit that by the time he was 30, statistically the chances were: ‘I’d be in jail or fathering my fourth illegitimate child.’
Odds were near certain that he’d be immune to hard work, spend his welfare payments on a huge television and junk food, lounge around all day on street corners and in bars and constantly blame everyone else for the terrible state he was in.
That was the grim fate decreed for white, male, working-class youngsters growing up in the economic and cultural poverty of the so-called Rust Belt, where the factories that once powered America have been shuttered, leaving behind a residual population of wastrels and welfare-junkies hooked on divorce, drugs, despair and decay.
JD Vance shakes hands with Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention, two days after the former president was shot in the ear
It was what happened to most of the ‘hillbillies, rednecks and white trash’ that Vance called neighbours, friends and family.
But not to him. He is no longer stuck in that hillbilly rut. By his own diligence, dedication and eye-watering hard work, he shrugged off his backwoods background, joined the Marines, put himself through the elite Yale University, became a lawyer and struck gold as an investor in Silicon Valley. He then turned to politics and was elected a senator for Ohio just two years ago.
Vance’s life story, pulling himself up by his boot straps, is the embodiment of the great American Dream that still retains huge traction in 21st-century America with its promise of opportunity and upward mobility.
And with his adoption two days ago as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate in November’s election, the very top of the ladder is now within reach.
If 78-year-old Trump returns to the White House, which now seems a racing certainty, it is no mere platitude — not given the events in Pennsylvania on Saturday — to say that 39-year-old Vance is one heartbeat from becoming president and the most powerful leader in the Western world. Assassination attempts apart, he must also be favourite to succeed Trump in 2029.
It all adds up to as rapid a rise from relative obscurity as any politician to emerge since Barack Obama — from ‘well-regarded, category-defying young conservative intellectual to Right-wing firebrand and Trump VP pick’, in the words of the New Yorker magazine.
That he will go into this year’s election alongside Trump represents a U-turn on Vance’s part, a full 180-degree swing. Until fairly recently he was no fan of The Donald, calling himself a ‘never Trump guy’ and dismissing him in 2016 as an ‘idiot’, ‘cultural heroin’ and even wondering if he might become America’s Hitler.
Then he changed his mind, praised Trump as ‘the best president in my lifetime’ and regretted ‘being wrong about the guy’. Trump endorsed him for the Ohio Senate race in 2022.
Vance, who was born in an Ohio steel town, pulls a face next to his no-nonsense grandmother
‘He shares Trump’s hostility to the welfare state and globalisation,’ according to the Mail’s U.S. correspondent Tom Leonard, ‘complaining during his Ohio election campaign that free trade has enriched China and impoverished the US.’
He has also echoed Trump’s determination to stand up to political correctness, an issue which clearly matters deeply to many voters.
They are, though, an unlikely couple. Trump was born into vast wealth whereas Vance has come a long, long way in his desperate struggle to beat the odds stacked against him and his kind, as he recounts in his 2016 best-selling autobiography Hillbilly Elegy, later turned into a film directed by Ron Howard and starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.
This rare insider’s account of how it really feels to grow up in a dysfunctional, impoverished, white, working-class family — as opposed to how a middle-class liberal might imagine it to be — summed up what, in his eyes and those of Trump and his supporters, is at stake: the whole, historic American way, the good life they felt entitled to but were being denied.
Vance’s vivid and honest account of his own experiences shows clearly how the prosperous half of American society, doing well out of globalisation and the automation of jobs, seems completely blind to how hard life has become for the other half.
‘The white poor are rapidly growing in numbers,’ he declared, ‘but America’s wealthiest and most powerful residents seem unaware of it.’
Judging by Vance’s memoir, life for people like him, an underclass in what is still vaunted as the greatest nation in the world, can’t get any worse.
‘Very few of America’s political or financial classes understood what was happening in towns like mine,’ he says. And that’s the nub of the matter.
He was born in 1984 in Middletown, Ohio — a steel town on the slide, once prosperous but subsequently home to deserted warehouses and factories and boarded-up shops. His personal circumstances were harrowing: ‘The abandoned son of a man I hardly knew and a woman I wish I didn’t.’
He was named James Donald at one time and James David at another, an example of the domestic upheaval that would dog and depress him. The initials JD stuck.
His ‘Mom’, Bev, was a nurse with a short, violent temper and a liking for the bottle, all-night partying and men, who came in and out of Vance’s young life with such revolving-door regularity that he collected no fewer than 15 ‘stepdads’. He had four different homes in two years.
The senator alongside his wife Usha, a lawyer and Yale graduate, and one of their children
He describes witnessing his mother’s relationship with one of her fleeting partners as ‘like having a front-row seat to the end of the world’.
As he dodged hurled plates, he learned the ‘rules’ of hillbilly marital life: ‘Never speak at a reasonable volume when screaming will do; always express your feelings in a way that’s hurtful and insulting to your partner; slapping and punching is okay so long as the man doesn’t hit first.’
He took that as the norm. ‘After a while you didn’t notice it.’ His mother was always angry about something. She beat up other parents in the playground over some imagined slight, fought with the police and once floored the accelerator and threatened to crash the car with him in it so they would both die.
She made suicide attempts, was in and out of rehab, swallowed pills like sweets, stole drugs from patients at the hospital where she worked and was eventually fired after rollerblading through A&E.
The stress for Vance was immense. ‘When I watched her succumb again and again to addiction, I hated her and wished sometimes that she would take enough narcotics to rid me and my sister of her for good.
‘When she lay sobbing in bed after another failed relationship, I felt a rage that could have driven me to kill.
‘Kids like me become hard-wired for conflict. By almost any measure, American working-class families experience a level of instability unseen elsewhere in the world.’
Vance needed rescuing from all this, and it came in the unlikeliest form — from his bad-ass, foul-mouthed, pistol-packing grandmother, a fearsome woman neighbours avoided and who was renowned for once pouring a can of petrol over her drunken, passed-out husband and setting him alight.
Nobody messed with ‘Mamaw’ (as Vance called her) in her baggy jeans and T-shirt, a fag permanently hanging from her lips.
Vance grew up in the economic and cultural poverty of the so-called Rust Belt, where the factories that once powered America have been shuttered
She was mean and nasty, but her saving grace was her fierce belief in family. She hated the chaos and self-destruction of her own daughter’s life but even more what this was doing to JD.
He was going the same way — getting into trouble, skipping school, growing fat on a diet of pop-tarts and takeaways after his mother started him on Pepsi at just nine months old.
She feared he was stuck in that deadly rut of ‘loser’ America and heading along the same self-pitying, down-and-out route.
Mamaw took charge and gave him a home for the next three teenage years, with three strict rules: ‘Get good grades, get a job and get off your ass and help me.’
He discovered what could be achieved by hard work at home, at school and in the part-time jobs he took on.
Encouraged by Mamaw, he looked around him in the local community and was horrified how people had slipped into the ‘dole’ mentality where they lived on state handouts and would do nothing for themselves.
They bought convenience food rather than cook and spent what other money they had on booze and mobile phones.
They let their bodies, their minds and their relationships go to seed. They were consumed by rage until rage consumed them.
And, he observed, they were their own worst enemies. Yes, circumstances were against them, but they didn’t need to wallow in the hopelessness of it all, they didn’t need to self-destruct. He decided not to be like them.
Haley Bennett, Gabriel Basso and Amy Adams star in Hillbilly Elegy, the film based on Vance’s 2016 best-selling autobiography
Under his grandmother’s regime of self-respect and self-reliance and her constant cries of ‘Quit your whining’, he began to turn his life round.
She was strict to a frightening degree. When she discovered his friends at school were smoking hash, she threatened to run them down in her car if she saw him with them.
He believed her.
He believed her, too, when she told him to be proud to be an American. ‘Mamaw always had two gods — Jesus Christ and the USA. I was no different, and neither was anyone else I knew.’
On leaving school, Vance joined the Marines, survived the harsh indignities of boot camp, didn’t drop out, persevered and became a soldier, serving in Iraq. He grew in confidence. ‘The Marine Corps taught me to live like an adult.’
From the Marines he went to college and got a first-class degree in less than two years, while holding down two part-time jobs to pay his way and often sleeping less than four hours a night.
The effort paid off. ‘I wasn’t supposed to make it but I was doing just fine.
‘After years of worrying that I’d end up addicted to drugs or alcohol, in prison, or with kids I couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of, I felt an incredible momentum.’
That same momentum pushed him on to a place at Yale, summer jobs as aide to a senator in Washington, graduation as a lawyer and a job in a leading law firm.
He married a fellow lawyer, Usha, had three children and two dogs and now lives a life he once believed so far out of his reach he couldn’t even imagine it.
But he was left, he writes in his memoir, with an ache in his heart about all those un-achievers back home, still mired in an America that had moved on without them and left them stranded.
Vance’s is a revealing analysis of the split in the United States that swept Trump into power in the 2016 election and could well do so again this year.
It’s not Rednecks v Liberals, as some would have it. It’s the Outsiders against the Establishment, the Have-Nots against the Haves, Them v Us.
What he disdains, however, is those who retreat into playing the ‘victim card’ — content to sit back and point the finger of blame at others rather than do something about it. Not good enough, is Vance’s underlying message.
‘We hillbillies, the toughest goddamned people on this earth, must wake the hell up.’
If they want their country and their lost prosperity back, they need to get up off their own backsides, show some gumption and be more pro-active and involved in finding solutions to their decline.
End the violence, the addiction, the broken homes. Cut through the circle of despair and helplessness that almost dragged him down.
It can be done. He proved it.
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir Of A Family And Culture In Crisis, by JD Vance, is published by William Collins.