In his 2016 memoir Senator JD Vance she wrote admiringly of her older sister who, despite a trauma-filled upbringing, broke the cycle of abandonment and dysfunction that defined their childhood.
“There was something heroic about Lindsay’s marriage — after everything she’d been through, she met someone who treated her well and had a decent job,” Vance said. now the Republican vice presidential nomineeobservation on the pagesHillbilly Elegy.”
Her sister, in Vance’s words, “has built a life almost unlike the one she left behind—she’ll be a good mother, she’ll have a successful marriage (and only one).” Her husband, she wrote, “never mistreated her,” adding that “that was all I wanted in a husband for my sister.”
The passage is now full of new meaning. Those close to Vance say his relationships with the women who raised him are key to understanding his outlook on difficult cultural issues. has been known In his first month as Donald Trump’s running mate. He took the episodes of abuse and other hard lessons of his youth as his own and idealized the more normal family dynamics he had never known, forming strong views about marriage, children and families that became the basis of the Democrats’ case against him as a national candidate.
Vans mocking the comments “childless cat ladies“Recently resurfaced in politics, he is the son of a single mother who struggled with drug addiction and, according to her book, once took out her car to beat him to a ‘s—‘. Having parents in abusive marriages is the result of Vance children can do addition damage by divorce Mainly informed by her grandparents’ fiery but tenacious marriage.
“Everyone has problems. Everybody has some kind of dysfunction in their family,” Lori Meibers, one of the women who took in Vance’s aunt and mother when he couldn’t, told NBC News in an interview. “He saw what it was like to be a struggling kid.”
“My sister had five husbands, and that’s not to mention the men in and out of her life that she didn’t get married before she got together,” she said. Meibers, whom Vance calls Aunt Vi. “He saw this side of life and living.”
Vance admitted in a recent interview on a campaign plane that his upbringing shaped his sharp views. He also defended his more provocative comments, describing them as a starting point for discussions about public policies that could help young families. “Broad criticism of women,” as the Democrats claim.
“I was raised by strong women in many ways, everyone from my grandmother to my mother to my aunt and sister played a big role,” Vance said as he sat next to his wife, Usha. “Of course, I see a lot of the struggles in the country through the eyes of a single mother because I was raised partly by a single mother or grandmother.”
Vance’s socially conservative views are well known in Ohio, where he won his Senate seat two years ago with his strong anti-abortion stance. Although he expressed his support he for national abortion restrictions in the past more recently He deferred to Trump, who said he wanted to leave the issue up to the states.
Vance’s 2022 Senate race, where Trump and Republicans are vying for the attention of Republican voters in a crowded primary, is the source of many of the old comments made by his opponents. labeling him “weird”. Democrats are still rolling April 2021 social media post Vance, who has three young children here, called universal day care initiatives “class warfare against normal people.”
Vance questioned the value of “childless cat ladies” — a comment aimed at Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democratic leaders — 2021 speech where he suggested that people with children deserved more voting rights. (O said since then (the note was intended as a “thought experiment” rather than a policy proposal.)
That same year, Vance cited his grandparents’ “incredibly chaotic marriage” as an example to a younger generation of men who shied away from fatherly responsibilities. In Hillbilly Elegy, he wrote about how his grandmother once doused his grandfather in gasoline and briefly set him on fire after he came home from a night of heavy drinking.
“That’s one of the big tricks I think the sexual revolution has pulled on the American people,” Vance said forum at Pacifica Christian High School in Newport Beach, California, “Maybe even violent, but they were definitely unhappy” attacks the idea that couples in their marriages can solve their problems by divorcing.
“Maybe it worked for the mothers and fathers, although I doubt it,” Vance added, “but it really didn’t work for the children of these marriages.”
a final interview Usha Vance was asked on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” about her husband’s emphasis on the role of families.
“It comes from the fact that he knows he wouldn’t be anywhere near where he is today without family members looking out for him at every turn.” “I think it comes from seeing my family and knowing that the stability and calmness that I have in our family life comes from, you know, all the support that I have — I just had faith that everything was going to be okay. the people behind me.”
Past comments become part of the national campaign
Democrats continue to attack Vance for his position and past comments.
“If he went through some of these situations in his childhood, I’m sorry he did,” said Elizabeth Walters, who has watched Vance’s rapid rise in politics as chairwoman of the Ohio Democratic Party. “In the campaign, we’re treating JD Vance like an adult, not a child, and JD has told us time and time again who he is as an adult—so why shouldn’t we believe him? His views are extreme, out of touch and dangerous for women.”
Sarafina Chitika, a spokeswoman for Harris’ presidential campaign, accused Vance of pursuing an anti-women agenda to “control her most personal health decisions and take away her basic freedoms.” “Women across America know that a vote for Harris-Walz is a vote for freedom,” Chitika added in an emailed statement.
Some right-wingers also expressed their concerns. On it Fox News program last month, former RSC representative Trey Gowdy said he had heard from conservative women who were “frustrated” by the “cat lady” remarks before asking Vance for an explanation.
Vance’s aunt, Meibers, accused the media of painting an incomplete picture of his character.
“I think in some ways it’s almost demonized,” Meibers said. “But I understand. It’s part of the game with politics. But I think JD stands firm on his foundation.
“Let’s be honest,” he added. “Our family history is there for all to see. And when he originally wrote the book, I think a lot of people in the family said, “Oh, maybe it’s not such a good idea to air all this dirty laundry.” But like anything, when you shine a light on something … I think it helps.”
Besides Vance himself, the main character in Hillbilly Elegy is his grandmother Bonnie Blanton VanceKnown as Mamaw. She’s portrayed in the book — and in Glenn Close’s Academy Award-nominated film adaptation — as a foul-mouthed but loving matriarch and “crazy-crazy” who presides over a family that’s often in crisis.
In the book, Vance recalled the time Mamaw begged him to give his mother a clean urine sample so she wouldn’t fail a drug test and lose her nursing license. She also wrote about the child Mamaw lost in infancy and the eight miscarriages she suffered between the births of her son and two daughters: “Mamaw carried the emotional scars of nine lost children throughout her life.”
Meibers also frames his nephew’s story around Mamaw.
“You know, she wasn’t a traditional grandmother. He carried a gun; smoked; she wore big, baggy, comfortable clothes,” Meibers said. “He was unconventional, and to be honest, I was sometimes ashamed of it as a child. But as I grew up, I realized that he was just showing his strength. He was determined and we all know how much we are loved. I mean, to me, that’s the foundation of our family — the love that he taught us.”
Meibers recalled a summer trip to Kentucky when Vance was young. A motorcyclist traveling southbound on Interstate 75 stopped next to a family car and exposed himself.
“My mother very cautiously said, ‘Somebody give me my wallet.’ So one of the guys handed him this huge wallet and he reached over to him and pulled out a .45 and he just hit the window,” Meibers said. “The guy saw it and he took off. … JD has been exposed to this his whole life. : this crazy woman who doesn’t take anything from anyone.”
Vance’s relationship with his mother, Beverly Aikins, was rougher – from the time he lied about an abusive car incident to the time she helped him pass a drug test to avoid prosecution. (He’s been sober for about 10 years, Vance said in a speech at the Republican National Convention last month.)
In her book, she described Aikins as “more of a roommate than a parent” and wrote that the “revolving door of father figures” he would bring was one of the things she hated as a child. Vance also recalled how his mother nurtured his love of soccer and reading and made sure he and his sister met people from “all walks of life.”
“His friend Scott, he later told me, died unexpectedly,” Vance wrote. “He got me to watch a movie about Ryan White, not much older than me, who got HIV through a blood transfusion and had to start a legal battle to go back to school. Every time I would complain about school, my mother would remind me of Ryan White and tell me what a blessing it was to have an education.”
Vance was born James Donald Bowman, named after his father, who wrote in his memoirs that Vance left his mother “when I started walking.” His mother later named him James David Hamel, using his uncle’s name along with his adoptive father’s surname. When he and Usha married, they both took the last name Vance.
His aunt’s and sister’s marriages became a model for his own marriage. Meibers attributed Vance’s 2019 conversion to Catholicism to her husband, Dan, who is a devout Catholic.
“Now he has Usha and a wonderful family,” Meibers said. “I think now she’s seeing the other side…life and a happy marriage.”