Editor’s Note, July 15, 2024: We are re-upping this profile of J.D. Vance—originally published on July 12, 2024—in light of the news that Donald Trump has selected the senator from Ohio to serve as his running mate. We will have more coverage of the selection—from the convention in Milwaukee—shortly.
“Never be like these f—ing losers who think the deck is stacked against them,” J.D. Vance’s grandmother often told him when he was a child. “You can do anything you want to do.”
To read Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy in 2016 was to admire Mamaw, Vance’s strong-willed and charmingly vulgar grandmother who gave him the much-needed stability he didn’t get from a drug-addicted mother who cycled…
