Vance will become the nation’s youngest vice president since 1953, when Richard M. Nixon, who celebrated his 40th birthday just days before his inauguration, was sworn in as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president
JD Vance, a 40-year-old senator who went from being a critic of Donald J. Trump to one of his staunchest defenders, was elected the next vice president of the United States on Wednesday, making one of the most experienced politicians and most polarizing to ever hold office. The nation’s 50th vice president will be sworn in just two years after taking his first public office as a senator from Ohio. Vance is unlike any other vice president before him in the modern era: No one has entered the job with such an extensive public history of impeaching his or her boss. He rose to prominence with his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, a bestseller that liberal voters bought into to better understand Trump’s victory and the frustrations of the white working class that put him in the White House.
But Vance then began to change his mind about his party leader as he prepared his initial run for office. Trump not only pardoned the young convert, but also rewarded him with a game-changing endorsement in a tight, four-way Senate primary race and then, in the general election, helped carry Vance’s campaign at the finish line.
Now, Vance is more politically indebted to Trump than any other vice president, said Joel Goldstein, a professor at St. Louis University School of Law. Louis, who has spent decades studying the vice president. “When you have someone whose entire political career owes to Donald Trump, it really raises the question of whether JD Vance is someone who’s able to tell him when he’s wrong,” Goldstein said. Raised by his grandmother in a working-class Ohio town while his mother struggled with drug addiction, Vance will soon be first in the presidential line of succession. His education against the odds was a key component of his campaign speeches as he pitched to voters and sought common ground with Trump’s base of supporters.
But Vance also has strong ties to major donors in Silicon Valley, including Peter Thiel, the tech pioneer and billionaire investor. Thiel, who hired Vance at his investment firm in 2017, spent $15 million on a super PAC that supported the Ohioan’s 2022 Senate bid.
Now, Vance has been declared by Trump as the successor to the MAGA movement, driven by blue-collar voters who helped fuel two successful presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2024. Vance will become the nation’s youngest vice president since 1953, when Richard M. Nixon, who celebrated his 40th birthday just days before his inauguration, was sworn in as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president. John C. Breckinridge, who was 36 when he took office in 1857 as James Buchanan’s vice president, holds the record for the nation’s youngest vice president.
