As a child of a drug-addicted mother in southern Ohio, J.D. Vance learned how to accommodate a string of husbands and boyfriends she brought into his life.
Steve wore an earring, so a young J.D. pretended that earrings were cool, Mr. Vance wrote in his memoir. Then he got his own ear pierced. With Chip, an alcoholic police officer who viewed his earring as a sign of “girliness,” he pretended he loved police cars. With Ken, he tried to be a good brother to Ken’s two children, even though he knew that Ken would vanish by the following year.
The lack of a steady father figure — along with a mother he characterized as mostly unfit — are the dominant features of the childhood that Mr. Vance detailed in his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” Mr. Vance’s father, a former machinist and self-employed construction contractor who died in November at 64, gave him up for adoption when he was 6. After picking him up from kindergarten one day, his mother said his father “didn’t want me anymore,” Mr. Vance wrote.
As an adult, friends say, Mr. Vance tried to fill the gap with a variety of mentors, including a former White House speechwriter, two law professors and a Silicon Valley billionaire.
At Yale Law School, Mr. Vance quickly grew close to Amy Chua and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, both law professors. Ms. Chua, author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” — a memoir known for its portrayal of tough parenting — helped guide Mr. Vance’s own memoir toward publication. The couple remains friendly with Mr. Vance.
Mr. Vance met Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and two other companies, when Mr. Thiel spoke at Yale in 2011. Mr. Vance has described Mr. Thiel’s talk about the negative impact of cutthroat competition among elites as the most significant moment of his Yale education. Luke Thompson, a political consultant and a close friend of Mr. Vance, described Mr. Thiel as Mr. Vance’s most important mentor, adding that the two men talk frequently. Mr. Vance has called Mr. Thiel an important sounding board.
Mr. Thiel paved Mr. Vance’s way in the world of venture capitalism, and bankrolled Mr. Vance’s campaign for Ohio’s open Senate seat in 2022, which he won. He provided $15 million in financing, a large sum for an individual donor, and went with Mr. Vance to Mar-a-Lago to ask for Mr. Trump’s endorsement.
Some of Mr. Vance’s relationships have frayed as his politics have shifted to the right. When he was in his late 20s, he was close to David Frum, a prominent anti-Trump conservative and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush who writes for The Atlantic magazine. Mr. Vance wrote a half-dozen articles that Mr. Frum published on a website devoted to ideas about reforming the Republican Party.
About a week after Mr. Trump was inaugurated in January 2021, Mr. Frum wrote in an article the following year, Mr. Vance invited him and a dozen other anti-Trump conservatives to a private meeting in a conference room in Washington to discuss how to oppose the new president. The unspoken but widely understood agenda, Mr. Frum wrote, was Mr. Vance’s own presidential ambitions.
Mr. Vance’s friendship with Mr. Frum was severed once Mr. Vance, embarking on his political career, switched from a critic to an admirer of Mr. Trump. Mr. Frum wrote that he underestimated what Mr. Vance “was willing to do for political advancement.”
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