JD Vance ‘almost failed’ high school due to heroin-addict mom

JD Vance’s life story reflects the experience of American ‘left-behinds’, particularly Generation X, who grew up witnessing the decline of the once-lucrative steel industry and rampant job losses.

To get a glimpse of his fascinating evolution – from leading an unremarkable life for much of his adulthood to becoming a fierce Trump critic and then doing an about-face to become Trump’s nomination for the Vice President post – one must get hold of his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

The book starts with then 31-year-old Vance writing the “coolest thing” he’d done in his otherwise unremarkable life was to graduate from law school.

It means something extraordinary must’ve transpired in the intervening eight years that catapulted a nobody from a forgotten corner of the US into the national limelight.

As the running mate of Donald Trump, Vance will be one heartbeat away from the US presidency at age 40 if the Republican ticket wins the November election.

Elected as a US senator in 2022, Vance has come a long way from the little-known town of Ohio where his father put him up for adoption when he was six. He “almost failed” high school as his heroin-addict mother—who married no less than five times—dragged him from one house to another amid frequent run-ins with police and child services departments.

Vance came out the other end despite heavy odds like generational poverty and a broken home. But his incredible rise from a hardscrabble, post-industrial town in ruins to the top echelon of American politics seems to have come at a steep personal price.

Vance is no more the man he was—or pretended to be—eight years ago.

He’s demonstrably changed himself presumably to become acceptable in the Republican Party that’s been cast in the image of Donald Trump.

Until recently, Vance was a “Never Trump” politician who believed the former president was “reprehensible”, “idiot”, “cultural heroin”, “cynical asshole” and even a “Hitler” leading the white working class to a “very dark place”.

But Vance has gone full chameleon since then, shifting his politics to perfectly align with that of Trump—a move that experts say is aimed at moulding himself to the times rather than any genuine change of heart.

Even though Vance never identified himself as a Democrat, nowhere in his book does he come across as an ultra-conservative of 2024 who frequently features in far-right, extremist conspiracy theories to work up a crowd.

After all, he was raised by grandparents who were “committed” Democrats and who believed their party “protected the working people”.

Vance heaped praises on President Barack Obama in his book, which is remarkable given that no mainstream Republican leader would likely risk their reputation by praising Trump’s predecessor publicly in 2024.

Vance wonders in his memoir why folks in his hometown of Middletown viewed Obama “suspiciously” even though he was the “most admired man in America”.

In page after page, Vance elaborated how the Republican view of Obama—“Muslim”, “foreign-born” and “traitor”—was unfounded. Calling the Democratic president “brilliant”, Vance said Obama’s credentials were “so impressive that they’re frightening”.

Yet Vance ended up joining forces with the same Trump who famously led the vicious “birther” movement: a years-long concerted campaign by the US right-wing casting doubts on the citizenship status of Obama.

In the same vein, Vance recently reprimanded Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro for “talking like Barack Obama”. “It’s like if I really tried to do a bad impression of Barack Obama, that's what it would sound like,” he said.

His comment was widely interpreted as an “insult” hurled at Shapiro, who’s among the potential vice-presidential candidates for the Democratic Party.

Insulting his opponent for “talking like Obama” is surprising given Vance wrote so admiringly about the oratorical skills of the first Black US president in his book eight years ago.

Obama “speaks like a constitutional law professor… His accent—clean, perfect, neutral”.

Hillbilly Elegy is an inward-looking account of a predominantly white community spread across America’s so-called Rust-Belt states that suffer from a steady decline in well-paying manufacturing jobs.

In his book, Vance makes it a point to repeatedly remind his community to not blame their problems on the “Obama economy”, job-stealing Chinese or the Latino and Black immigrants who already suffer “unthinkable poverty” and whose “material prospects continue to lag behind those of whites”.

“There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day,” he wrote, in complete contrast to the anti-immigrant rhetoric of his Republican Party.

As a clear-sighted observer, Vance also acknowledges the existence of an “industry of conspiracy-mongers and fringe lunatics” who propagate “all manner of idiocy” in the US.

Yet he’s used his newfound public megaphone to endorse the same conspiracy theories that he identified as such in his book just eight years ago.

For example, he has claimed President Biden is letting opioid drugs cross into the US southern border as part of a grand strategy to get Republican voters out of the way.

“If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl… It does look intentional. It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him.”

The increasingly partisan nature of US politics has pushed once-moderate Vance so far right of centre that pundits have dubbed him the “heir apparent” to MAGA, the Make America Great Again movement—spearheaded by Trump—that champions right-wing positions on issues like immigration, multiculturalism and globalisation.

Analysts warn that there’s cause for concern if Trump passes over the MAGA baton to Vance in the coming years.

After all, Trump is only a “moderate” within the MAGA movement, and Vance is considered even more right-leaning than Trump.