JD Vance, Man of Multiple Identities

For quite a while, it looked almost like a shoo-in that JD Vance would become the Republican Party’s 2028 presidential candidate.

There has even been speculation that he might have to take over the office if, given increasing signs of Donald Trump’s deteriorating mental and physical health, Trump becomes incapable of performing his duties.

Iran as a dampener of Vance’s high hopes

But then, Trump’s launch of the the war against Iran appeared to throw a spanner into the plans of Vance and all those who support him.  After all, Vance is an ardent non-interventionist. Even Trump’s favorable sentiments toward Vance have cooled off considerably.

No wonder then that the comparative political fortunes of Marco Rubio, the U.S. Secretary of State, seem to be on the rise.

Or does one have to say that Rubio’s fortunes seemed to be on the rise?  The news that JD Vance has been commissioned to focus on reaching an agreement with Iran to end the war could either be a test that gives him an opportunity to show his skills — or it could be a poison pill.

We will not know for quite some time which of the two options it will be. What is for sure, though, is that the move of effectively pitting Vance against Rubio is a classic Trump move with which the U.S. general public has been familiar ever since the early episodes of Trump’s reality TV show The Apprentice were broadcast back in early 2004.

A youngster in the White House?

If things pan out for him, JD Vance would certainly be a youthful presence in the White House after two octogenarians occupying the Oval Office. He is currently just 41 years old.

Some political observers believe that it was perhaps to conceal his baby face and apple cheeks that he grew a beard — a rather unusual occurrence among U.S. politicians — before running for the U.S. Senate in 2022.

What do we really know about Vance?

It is a rather ominous sign that the fact that he was born in 1984, echoing George Orwell’s famous novel, is the only thing we know for sure about the current Vice President of the United States.

Whatever Donald Trump’s many downsides, and there are many, the man does have an identifiable core of convictions, problematic though they are.

JD Vance lacks any identifiable core.  Even his name is a bit of an enigma. The man currently known as James David Vance was actually born James Donald Bowman. While Vance was his mother’s maiden name, by the time JD was born she had become Beverly Carol Aikins.

When she remarried yet again, her third husband adopted the boy and he was renamed James David Homel. But then, around the time he graduated from Yale Law school in 2013, he changed his last name a second time, this time to Vance.

One other change took place when Vance entered politics. Prior to his Senate run, he removed the period marks after his initials, going from J.D. Vance to JD Vance.

Vance, the Liberal!

The kaleidoscopic range of name changes somehow foreshadowed Vance’s extreme ideological flexibility. This well-recorded feature of his makes it actually impossible to figure out how he is going to govern if he were to move to the White House.

JD Vance was never one of the MAGA crowd to start with. On the contrary, at first he was even a darling of the U.S.’s bicoastal liberal(!) intelligentsia.

He gained their attention as the author of a nationwide 2016 bestseller, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” The book, which has strong autobiographical elements, also became the basis for a Hollywood movie.

For the U.S.’s liberal elites, Vance’s story provided a peek into the soul of the white South. It provided them with a gripping explanation why the poorly educated in the country’s inland areas voted for a New York City real estate tycoon in that year’s U.S. presidential election.

Vance, the global elitist

For a while, Vance himself even joined those elites.  He wrote a column for the New York Times, appeared on CNN and contributed to a neocon website run by former Bush speechwriter David Frum.

There is more. In 2014, Vance married a fellow Yale Law School graduate Usha Bala Chilukuri, the daughter of Indian immigrants. In a true global-minded spirit, they had two wedding ceremonies, one Christian and the other Hindu. One of their three kids is named Vivek. And a fourth child is on its way.

Vance, the Libertarian: The Peter Thiel connection

Vance’s shift toward libertarian — and then far-right MAGA — views probably dates from the time he met Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who became his mentor and then patron, setting him up as a venture capitalist.

Thiel funded Vance’s successful 2022 run for the Senate, to the tune of more than $15 million, essentially buying him a seat. Thiel, Elon Musk and other tech bros were also instrumental in getting Vance on Trump’s presidential ticket.

From “Never Trumper” to faithful foot soldier

Vance’s early views on Trump were far from complimentary. He was a “Never Trumper,” even going so far as calling Trump an idiot and America’s Hitler.

That didn’t’t stop Vance, ever the eager careerist, to reinvent himself with extreme rapidity and ease for the next career move. That opening was to become Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate.

Obviously, to earn his boss’s goodwill, he had to become a useful political tool for Trump and his

Vance, the attack dog

The MAGA movement, of course, is a personality cult focused exclusively on Trump as its Great Leader. But since joining the Trump team, Vance has shown no shame whatsoever in regularly sidling up to white supremacists and acting as the vicious attack dog of the Trump administration.

And speaking of dogs, it was Vance who, during the later stages of the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign, promoted the despicable lie about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH eating domestic pets — an item which Trump used in his debate with Kamala Harris.

Vance’s Munich moment

In an international relations context, Vance then made a name for himself in Munich, Germany, during the Munich Security Conference held in February 2025. There, he attacked America’s European allies and, even more stunningly, expressed his support for far-right parties in Europe.

Over the past year, Vance has continued in the same vein, for example, by reposting Steven Miller’s tweet which characterized Alex Pretti, who was executed by ICE agents in Minneapolis, as an assassin.

Despite it all, Vance being Vance, there is no way of knowing whether this shift to the far right represents a genuine conversion to the Trump brand or merely a performative act to advance his political career.

Vance and Trump: A shared resentment

It is important to note that there is one element that makes Vance very similar to Trump. That is the deep-seated resentment that drives both men.

Even to this day, Trump seems traumatized by the disdain that the Manhattan real estate establishment expressed for the loud-mouthed, vulgar young man from Queens.

While he holds the top political job in the Western world, Trump is still complaining at every turn about being slighted and insufficiently appreciated. He craves adulation, flattery and all sorts of shallow accolades, starting with the FIFA Peace Prize.

Listening to Trump whine, one would be forgiven to think these are the sounds of some elderly loser on a bar stool shedding tears of self-pity into his whiskey.

Vance, too, has a chip on his shoulder, probably stemming from his attempt to fit in with the overly educated elites on the East Coast and computer geniuses in Silicon Valley.

Inheriting the Trump mantle?

Outwardly, Vance masks his sense of being resented by often complaining about the supposed liberal condescension toward the heartland, to which he claims he belongs despite his work for in the venture capital industry, personal wealth and Yale law degree.

In reality, what Vance can’t face is the clear-cut sense of most people, including one must surmise in the MAGA camp, that he is one of the most disingenuous people and biggest political and personal turncoats of our time.

Will the Trump method of rising to the top work yet again for Vance?

In some mysterious way, Trump has been able to tap into the deep resentment felt by many white Americans to catapult himself into the Oval Office not once, but twice.

Even though he lives in gilded environments that are the very opposite of the standards of living and quality of life of many of his MAGA supporters, he has managed to establish a near-umbilical cord to them.

In this sense, Vance who is so full of resentments of his own, is well-suited to assume Trump’s mantle as a MAGA leader. The only difference is that he is younger, better organized and smarter. As to their respective level of morality, it seems to be an open race.

And with regard to his own social class, JD Vance could credibly claim that, completely unlike Donald Trump, he is one of them.

Conclusion

For now, it seems improbable that JD Vance will rise to the top, given the chaos that Donald Trump and his Republicans in the U.S. Congress have brought over their nation.

But then again, things could change literally in a heartbeat, if Donald Trump’s health deteriorates severely.