Biography

A vocal opponent of Donald Trump in 2016, he later changed his tune after launching his campaign for the U.S. Senate from Ohio. The first month of his campaign was built on taking back his anti-Trump sentiments as well as deleting all previous posts in which he warned his followers against a Trump presidency. Vance had been trailing in the polls for the Republican nomination before Trump endorsed him.

Sworn in as the 50th vice president of the United States on January 20, 2025.

He was named James Donald Bowman at birth, after his father Donald Bowman. His parents divorced when he was young and his mother remarried to Bob Hamel, who adopted JD, and his name was changed to James David Hamel (David after a great-uncle, replacing his estranged father's name). He continued using Hamel as his last name after his mother and stepfather divorced. He changed his last name to Vance, his maternal grandparents' last name, shortly before he graduated from Yale in 2013.

He is the first person with prominent facial hair to appear on a major American party's presidential ticket since Thomas E. Dewey (mustache) in 1948, and the first with a full beard since Charles Evans Hughes in 1916.

On July 15, 2024, he was announced as Donald Trump's vice presidential running mate.

If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm gonna do.

[in 2016] I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler.

[in 2022] I gotta be honest with you, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.

[3/3/25, on plans for European peacekeeping forces in Ukraine] If you want real security guarantees, if you want to actually ensure that Vladimir Putin does not invade Ukraine again, the very best security guarantee is to give America [an] economic upside in the future of Ukraine. That is a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years.

We're effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. It's just a basic fact: You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people that don't have a direct stake in it.