The Shady Side Of JD Vance

A published author, corporate lawyer, and venture capitalist, JD Vance entered the political arena when he ran for a vacant Ohio Senate seat in the 2022 midterm elections. He won, heading to Washington, D.C. as a freshman senator. Vance hadn't even completed his first term in the Senate when, in the summer of 2024, he was tapped by former POTUS Donald Trump to be his running mate in his campaign for president. That suddenly catapulted Vance to the forefront of the news cycle, and it's fair to say he's experienced a bumpy ride as candidate for Veep; in fact, few figures in the realm of modern politics have experienced the level of scorn that's been heaped upon him.

To be fair, Vance has brought much of that upon himself, thanks to some controversial statements and cringe-worthy moments that have led his Democratic opponents to label him as "weird" — a description that's adhered to despite his efforts to shake it off. In just a few short months, Vance has been at the center of some odd rumors — including one involving his unnatural affection for a couch (which has been debunked), and another insisting that he wears more eyeliner than Alice Cooper and televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker combined (the jury's still out on that one).

As the 2024 presidential election approaches and Americans prepare to cast their votes for the next president and vice president, there's no time like the present for an in-depth look into the shady side of JD Vance.

Prior to his foray into politics, JD Vance wrote a book. Vance's 2016 memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy," recounted his impoverished childhood in Appalachia; it became an unexpected bestseller and was adapted for the screen by acclaimed director Ron Howard in a 2020 Netflix movie starring Oscar nominees Glenn Close and Amy Adams. 

Both the book and the film became mired in controversy, being criticized for leaning into Appalachian stereotypes. "'Elegy' is little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class," wrote Sarah Jones in The New Republic. In fact, the backlash to the book was severe enough to warrant a 2019 anthology, "Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to 'Hillbilly Elegy,'" in which various writers challenged Vance's one-dimensional depiction of the region's people. "It is one thing to write a personal memoir extolling the wisdom of one's personal choices but quite something else — something extraordinarily audacious to presume to write the 'memoir' of a culture," wrote University of Kentucky sociology professor Dwight B. Billings in his essay for the tome (via The New York Times).

Appalachian author Matthew Ferrence criticized Vance for heaping judgment upon Appalachia's impoverished working class rather than offering any context or solutions. "Before and after the 2016 election, way too many people turned to 'Hillbilly Elegy' as a source of insight," Ferrence told Yahoo! News. "They found, instead, the stereotypes they already expected, which made it easier for people to continue ignoring the larger issues that create and maintain rural poverty."

Once JD Vance was selected as Donald Trump's running mate, scrutiny of his past statements intensified. That led to the exhumation of a whole collection of statements Vance said in the past — some of which absolutely lambasted Trump. "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a**hole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler," Vance wrote in a private 2016 Facebook message to a former Yale classmate, as reported by Reuters.

Not all of his Trump-bashing was done in private. That same year, he very publicly dissed his future running mate during an interview with Charlie Rose. "I'm a 'Never Trump' guy," Vance said. "I never liked him." He expressed an even harsher opinion in a tweet, which, wisely, he later deleted. "My God, what an idiot," Vance wrote of Trump in that tweet, via Politico. As if that wasn't public enough, Vance even wrote about the former "Celebrity Apprentice" star in an op-ed for The New York Times. "Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation's highest office," he bluntly declared.

As for what led to Vance's dramatic change of heart about Trump, David Niven, a University of Cincinnati associate professor of politics, offered his theory to Reuters. "What you see is some really profound opportunism," said Niven, explaining how political expediency was at the heart of Vance's flip-flop on Trump.

While it's somewhat surprising that JD Vance's past criticism of Donald Trump didn't rankle the ex-president enough to kick Vance off the ticket, another of his past comments returned to haunt him with a vengeance. During a 2021 interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Vance stated, "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."

If ever a past remark came back to bite a politician in the butt, Vance's screed about "childless cat ladies" struck a nerve. That became crystal clear when wildly popular pop star Taylor Swift endorsed Trump's opponent, presidential candidate Kamala Harris, in an Instagram post. In that post, which was accompanied by a photo of Swift posing with a cat, she took a clear shot at Vance when she signed off as "Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady." 

Swift's endorsement of his opponent did not go unnoticed by the ex-POTUS, who angrily lashed out via his Truth Social platform to share the pithy (and to be fair, more than a little petulant) statement, "I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!"

During Donald Trump's debate with Kamala Harris, among his more controversial statements was his assertion that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, had been stealing suburban pets and eating them. Even though that claim has been thoroughly debunked, JD Vance continued to spread the bogus conspiracy theory. "Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio," he tweeted. "Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country."

During a subsequent appearance on CNN's "State of the Union," host Dana Bash held Vance's feet to the fire about his comments. "[Trump] just said, 'Haitians are eating dogs and cats.' Can you affirmatively say now that that is a rumor that has no basis with evidence?" Vance responded by essentially admitting that he'd been lying — but then attempting to justify his fibs. "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 going to do," he said.

The Washington Post's Alexandra Petri relentlessly mocked Vance's bizarre rationale when she wrote, "Every time JD Vance opens his mouth, a sinkhole opens and swallows 30 people whole ... If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the volume of sinkholes opened daily by the words of JD Vance, then, by God, I will invent them."

Released by a right-wing think tank called the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 detailed plans to bring down the so-called "Deep State" if Donald Trump were to win a second term as president. The plan immediately caused alarm, especially its centerpiece: a 922-page playbook titled "Mandate for Leadership," authored by former officials in the Trump administration, that lays the groundwork for establishing authoritarian control in the White House, highlighted by mass deportations, extreme crackdowns on women's reproductive rights, and outright fascism.

Project 2025 has been so wildly unpopular with mainstream American voters that Trump has taken great pains to distance himself from it. Trump, in fact, has claimed that he'd never heard of it and had no idea who was behind it, even though it was authored by more than 140 people from his former administration — kind of like Martha Stewart claiming to have never seen a muffin. "I don't know what the hell it is," Trump declared during a campaign rally, even describing the project's agenda as "seriously extreme."

However, his running mate's fingerprints are all over Project 2025; not only does Vance have close connections to many of the people behind the plan, but he's also particularly close to the Heritage Foundation's president, Kevin Roberts, described by the New Republic as the project's "architect." Vance even wrote the forward to Roberts' book, "Dawn's Early Light," which initially was subtitled "Burning Down Washington to Save America." In that foreword, published by the New Republic, Vance declared himself all-in on Project 2025, utilizing some incendiary language. "We are now all realizing that it's time to circle the wagons and load the muskets," Vance wrote.

Once JD Vance was selected as Donald Trump's running mate, Kamala Harris' presidential campaign wasted little time in drawing attention to Vance's draconian record when it came to women's reproductive rights. "JD Vance's obsession with controlling women's most personal health care decisions, from voting against protecting access to IVF, to advocating for tracking women's menstrual cycles, to calling for a national abortion ban to bar women from traveling to access the care they need, isn't just bad policy — it's creepy, it's unacceptable, and voters won't stand for it," declared a press release from the Harris campaign, which underlined that message by tweeting, "JD Vance is weird and creepy."

When Harris and her vice president pick, Tim Walz, held their first rally together, Walz doubled down on characterizing both Vance and Trump as weirdos. "These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell," Walz said, as reported by BBC News.

Being called "weird" clearly rankled Trump, who responded with the time-honored I'm-rubber-you're-glue strategy, commonly utilized in elementary school playgrounds. "They're the weird ones," Trump said during an appearance on a radio talk show (via Politico), insisting that Harris and Walz were the oddballs, not him and his running mate. "JD and I are extremely normal people," he reiterated during a campaign rally.

Despite Donald Trump's protestations of non-weirdness, JD Vance has made some other statements that definitely fall into that category — particularly his remarks about those who don't have children. During his 2021 Senate run, he offered something of a follow-up to his infamous "childless cat ladies" rant when he declared (via NBC News), "So many leaders of the left ... are people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children." He took aim at Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers — who has no biological children but has described herself as "a mother by marriage" — when he added, "If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone."

Leaning further in that direction, Vance has also expressed the controversial opinion that the votes of those without children should count less than those of parents. "When you go to the polls in this country as a parent," Vance stated in a speech, "you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don't have kids ... If you don't have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn't get nearly the same voice."

During that same speech, Vance also blamed journalists without children for the negative press coverage his opinions generated. "And what you find consistently is that many of the most unhappy, most miserable, and most angry people in our media are childless adults," he said (via Mother Jones).

Anyone wondering what Donald Trump's second term as president might look like could draw their own conclusions from some hints that JD Vance dropped during an interview with podcaster Jack Murphy. As Mother Jones reported, Vance shared his belief that the new administration should "seize the institutions of the left. And turn them against the left." He then added, "We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program," he added, referring to Iraq's purge of all state-run institutions after the fall of dictator Saddam Hussein. That program, however, has hardly been successful; news organization Al Jazeera described Iraq's de-Baathification "debacle" as "a dysfunctional, counterproductive process that intensified social, sectarian and political divisions."

Vance also suggested that Trump should "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say — quoting Andrew Jackson — 'the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'"

That actually dovetails with the plans set forth in Project 2025, which could potentially see up to a half-million federal employees fired, with more than 50,000 of those positions reclassified as political appointees that would be filled by loyalists committed to carrying out the Project 2025 agenda.

Alex Jones is arguably America's most vocal conspiracy theorist. Recently, a jury found Jones guilty of defaming the parents of children slain in the horrific Sandy Hook school shooting and was ordered to pay more than $1 billion in damages over his false claims that the shooting was a hoax and that the victims were "crisis actors." On his "InfoWars" podcast, Jones has made even more extreme claims than that, including his belief that Lady Gaga's 2017 Super Bowl halftime show was a Satanic ritual and that the government is lacing drinking water with chemicals that have made the majority of America's frogs gay.

JD Vance, however, confirmed he was apparently all in on Jones' unsubstantiated conspiracy theories when, in 2021, he tweeted, "Alex Jones is a far more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow."

He doubled down on that claim during a subsequent speech. "If you listen to Rachel Maddow every night, the basic worldview that you have is that MAGA grandmas who have family dinners on Sunday and bake apple pies for their family are about to start a violent insurrection against this country," Vance said, as reported by ProPublica. "But if you listen to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts too." 

To be fair, JD Vance doesn't need Alex Jones to come up with unfounded conspiracy theories. In addition to his bogus claims about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats, he also made an even wilder claim about President Joe Biden.

Interviewed by right-leaning online outlet Gateway Pundit (via Ron Filipkowski's X account), Vance spread a completely baseless rumor that Biden was intentionally allowing lethal fentanyl to cross the border illegally, just so the drug would wind up in the hands of those who support Vance and running mate Donald Trump. "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?" Vance said. "It does look intentional. It's like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn't vote for him and opening up the floodgates to the border is one way to do it."

Commenting on Vance's remarks, journalist Helen Kennedy pointed to the implication at the center of his conspiracy theory. "So maga voters are all drug addicts?" she tweeted.

If there's one moment that crystallized JD Vance's inability to meaningfully interact with average folks, it was his campaign stop at a Georgia donut shop. The video of the visit immediately went viral, with commenters comparing Vance's strained conversation with the shop's staff to an episode of "The Office." Things began on an awkward note — when one of the staffers announced that she didn't want to appear on camera — and went downhill when Vance introduced himself to a woman behind the cash register, announcing that he was running for vice president. "Um, okay," the woman responded. He then asked staffers how long they'd worked at the place; when they told him, he offered zero follow-up conversation. "Good," he responded, nodding awkwardly.

Things went from bad to worse when he attempted to buy some donuts, coming across as ridiculously out of touch when asked which donuts he wanted. "I see a lot of glazed here, some sprinkle stuff, some of these cinnamon rolls," he muttered to the confused employee behind the counter. "Just whatever makes sense." Vance later implied that the disastrous debacle was his staff's fault for not informing the workers at the shop that he'd be accompanied by a camera crew, Secret Service officers, and a considerable entourage.

"Jimmy Kimmel Live!" had a field day with Vance's embarrassing stunt. In a spoof of the incident, Haley Joel Osment portrays Vance, wearing thickly applied eyeliner as he punches through the glass container to triumphantly pluck out a "dor-nut" encrusted with broken glass.