A very American narrative: The rise of JD Vance that brought him to tonight’s vice-presidential debate

With JD Vance and Tim Walz, the US Republican and Democratic candidates for vice-president, going head-to-head tonight on Tuesday 1 October in what is likely the last debate showdown before election polling day in five weeks’ time, it is worth looking again at how JD Vance got here.

Two days after being shot during an election rally, former President Donald Trump announced that Ohio Senator Jim Vance, a 39-year-old “firebrand” pro-life Catholic convert, would be his running mate and, therefore, also his would-be vice-president and political heir.

Since Trump can only constitutionally serve one more term, if elected in November, speculation is mounting in Washington, DC’s Beltway and beyond that Vance is now the clear favourite to become the Republican nominee to run for president in 2028.

If Vance were to enter the White House, this would make Vance – who would still be under 45 – the third US Catholic president and the third youngest in US history. Theodore Roosevelt was just 42 when he became president after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901. Irish-Catholic John F. Kennedy was 43 when he was sworn in January 1961.

So what sort of Catholic is Vance? Conservative Catholics in the USA have welcomed the news of his being Trump’s running mate, given Vance is about as polar opposite a “Catholic” as can be compared to Joe Biden, the current occupant of the White House.

Biden’s re-election campaign is backed by the pro-abortion political group Planned Parenthood. Vance, by contrast, strongly supported the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the US Supreme Court and has opposed abortion rights in almost all cases (including rape or incest) with the only exception being when a pregnant mother’s life is at risk.

Shortly after Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate, the influential Catholic political fundraiser and political fixer Brian Burch, the president of CatholicVote.org, a non-profit political advocacy group based in the United States, sent out a newsletter to his multi-million strong subscription base – all of whom are potential donors – strongly endorsing Vance, whom Burch has known for some years and supported for his successful 2022 run for the Senate.

Vance’s populist political capital lies in his affinity and support from white rural farmers, and working-class voters in the Rust Belt, where he was brought up, especially in the Mid-Western swing states such as Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which Trump needs to secure – and now looks well on track to win over after he survived an assassination attempt in extraordinary circumstances – to return to the White House.

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“I’ve had the chance to spend time talking to JD about his conversion to Catholicism and his vision for a new politics for America,” Burch wrote. “Vance is solidly pro-life. He chose to become a Catholic, in part, because of Church teachings on the sanctity of all human life….In short, Vance represents the future of American politics – toward an authentic realisation of the Catholic principle of solidarity – rightly understood”.

Back in May, I sat next to Burch in Rome at the 30th anniversary Rector’s dinner of the North American Pontifical College. Amid a room packed with a veritable “Who’s Who” of Catholic America, Burch made it clear to me that he expected “JD” to get the Republican Party’s VP nomination, noting that the only other likely candidate was another Catholic, Marco Rubio, the Cuban right-wing senior senator of Florida.

What is clear from the Vance appointment is that it confirms that Trump feels comfortable being surrounded and influenced by Catholics as part of his inner circle. Above all he regards Catholics – with would-be VP contender Ron de Santis of Florida perhaps being the main exception – as loyalists.

There is an argument to be made that Trump probably wouldn’t be heading back to the White House without the loyalty of his Catholic support base. Related to this is the fact that there are six Catholics among the nine members of the Supreme Court, which recently ruled that the former president had immunity from prosecution for official acts. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor, along with Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, the last two of which were personally appointed by Trump, sit on the bench along with Justice Gorsuch, who, while his current religious position is not clear, was raised a Catholic; a Jew (Justice Kagan) and a Protestant (Justice Brown Jackson).

Those two critically important Catholic justice appointments (three if you include Gorsuch) involved the advice of the legal advisor, Leonard Leo (chairman of the Federalist Society), whom the Herald has written about in our US Catholic Leaders of Today special reports as being one of the most important Catholic power brokers in America. Leo is widely credited as being the “The Man Behind the Right’s Supreme Court Supermajority” – as the ProPublica website put it – and the legal power broker who built “a machine that remade the American legal system”.

Without the behind-the-scenes work of Leo, a much-respected member of the Order of Malta, the overturning of Roe V Wade – which Trump regards as one of the defining achievements of his presidency – would likely never have happened.

On top of all this, Trump’s Slovenian-American wife Melania is a practising Catholic who has described an audience she had with the Holy Father as one of the most important events of her life. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, Steve Bannon – admittedly now serving a prison sentence in a Connecticut jail – is an Irish-American Catholic who is now “dry” and reportedly practises the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises every day and was brought up on the Latin Mass.

Trump is also widely supported by a swath of Catholic media and cultural commentators including Candace Owens, the outspoken bestselling author and Fox News pundit.

Vance is part of this ever-growing Trump-leaning Conservative Catholic media landscape.

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It’s worth recalling that Trump has described surviving his assassination attempt as a “miracle”. Much of his appeal now to US voters – helped by the iconic photos of a defiant and blood-splattered Trump punching the air almost shrouded in the American flag (some have compared the image to the famous flag lift at the Battle of Iwo Jima) – is as a modern political “martyr” for standing up for working class families, his gospel of MAGA and embracing the lost political voice of “deplorables” as Hillary Clinton once referred to his popular base.

Like Trump, Vance is known for his charisma with the cliched epithet “rock star” politician often being adopted by pundits in the last 24 hours to describe the Catholic convert and former Marine who is almost half Trump’s age.

As a Combat Correspondent, he was attached to the Public Affairs section of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. He has written that this tour of Iraq in 2015 was “the defining chapter of his life”; where he first realised the importance of living his life with a sense of moral purpose.

Although coming from a very different sort of economic background from Trump, they have plenty in common, including Scottish ancestry, and a journey that has seen them writing best selling autobiographies that have propelled them into the media limelight.

Vance’s political and media capital owes much to a New York Times bestselling 2016 memoir, with the memorable title of Hillbilly Elegy, of his “tough” blue-collar childhood in southern Ohio, along with writing about the Kentucky family values of his “Appalachian” roots (some critics claimed this was stretching the truth as he was never raised in Appalachia). His all-American story, from son of the Rust Belt to Republican senator, was later turned into a 2020 Netflix movie directed by Ron Howard.

This brilliant and moving working-class My-American-Dream memoir includes a brutally candid account of his mother’s battle with drug addiction, his reflections of serving with the Marine Corps in Iraq and a determined journey of re-invention, going from Ohio State to ending up with a degree from Yale Law School after winning GI funding and then becoming a successful financier and venture capitalist before entering the Senate.

Whilst much has been made of his previous unflattering remarks about Trump – likening him to “cultural heroin” in his memoir – more important is the underlying narrative of determined self-reinvention. He was originally born James Donald Bowman. At school in Middletown Ohio he adopted the surname of his mother’s third husband and called himself James “Jim” Hamel. It wasn’t until he was 33 – only six years ago – that he began to call himself J.D. Vance. So, like Trump, he is no stranger to writing his own script.

And, like Trump, he isn’t shy of making a bold statement or of taking the US’s usual allies – such as the UK – to task. At a conference last week, Vance said that the UK could, as a result of Labour’s landslide election victory, become “the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon”, reports the Spectator.

For Catholics, though, it is probably his religious journey that is the most interesting element of this story of personal questing and reinvention. After being brought up in a “conservative, evangelical” branch of Protestantism, by the time his memoir came out in 2016 – the full title was Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis – he was “thinking very seriously about converting to Catholicism”. Three years later, he was received into the Catholic Church at St. Gertrude Priory in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he lives with his wife – whom he met at Yale – and three children.

In his memoir, he says he converted because he “became persuaded over time that Catholicism was true” and “St Augustine [whom he chose as his confirmation saint] gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way”.

Vance is going to be a useful Catholic moralist antidote to Trump’s need to take a practical and “realpolitik” stance on hot-button voter issues like abortion and Ukraine (Vance is hawkish and voted against the aid package to Ukraine). Expect Vance to take up the fight to placate the evangelist Right whilst Trump takes a less radical stance to keep swing voters on side.

Also, don’t underestimate the usefulness of Vance given the importance of Trump’s support with the military and their families, many of whom will likely warm to Vance. On top of that, Vance getting selected as a Combat Correspondent in Iraq required carrying out the Marine’s Corps’ basic training as well as the 56-day Basic Public Affairs Specialist Course at the Defence Information School (DINFOS) at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland. Vance very much understands public relations and how to write his own and very American narrative, one which has now taken him to potentially becoming vice-president of the United States.

“It’s important to note that he is not running for President himself and understands he must work with President Trump to both win the election and then govern in a way that actually achieves real results for the unborn, given the political realities of our moment,” Brian Burch says. “Vance not only fits the bill, he also represents a vision of the country that we have long embraced – a vision that proudly prioritises American workers, families, and children.”

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Photo: The entrance to the CBS Broadcast Center undergoes repairs the day before the television network will host the vice presidential debate, New York, USA, 30 September 2024. Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) and Democratic vice presidential candidate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will hold their only debate of the 2024 general election on Tuesday night, 1 October. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

This article appears in the September 2024 edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

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