J.D. Vance had a troubled childhood and thereafter a swift rise to becoming, first a world-renowned autobiographer, then becoming a US Senator, and now the Vice-President of the US. His father left his mother and her infant son, without leaving a penny to support them. His mother is plainly exceptional, despite her somewhat chequered past. She turned to alcohol to dull her misery, becoming an addict to the substance. As a young boy, Vance saw his mother becoming intimate with a succession of assorted men. Most of them would indulge her alcohol habit, as a way of removing her inhibitions, and she seldom refused the alcohol, at least. All this took place in the proximity of Vance, but through it all, the young boy, later lad, had more than a streak of steel in him, such that he got through his schooling and won a scholarship to study at an elite US college. While there, he met Usha, the daughter of a well-off family, and she fell in love with him and he with her. Life at the college was not easy, but with a helping hand from Usha, he overcame all such difficulties and the two married, thereafter producing a succession of children as gifted as their parents. Through the years, Vance changed his name multiple times before finally settling on J.D. Vance. And it was as J.D. Vance that he met and married Usha, graduated and wrote a modern classic, “Hillbilly Elegy”, which was later made into a movie that caught the attention of Donald J. Trump, so much that as the Republican candidate for the US Presidency in 2024, he made then Senator Vance his running mate. This time, unlike the last when he lost to Joe Biden, on November 4, 2024, Trump and Vance were elected the President and Vice-President of the United States. The gifted son of Donald Trump, Don Jr, is reputed to be the prime mover behind the effort to make Vance the Vice-Presidential candidate. Usha was praised by candidate Trump as “the smartest woman” he had met, and the description is not far from the truth. The sometime hillbilly turned celebrity and his Indian-American wife caught the attention of US voters, and helped in getting the Trump-Vance ticket well over the margin of 272 electoral college votes to emerge as victors.
Soon after January 20, 2025, when Trump took over the Presidency, an apparent metamorphosis began to occur of Vice-President Vance. Admirers of his were surprised when the Vice-President sought to transform himself into the most radical of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. In 2024, MAGA was among the principal factors behind the victory of the Trump-Vance ticket, but fast forward to November 2025, and certainly the radicals in MAGA had got the upper hand in policy, in the process making Trump increasingly unpopular. His fealty to the most radical elements in MAGA showed in policies such as his tariffs on partners and allies of the US, such as India or the EU, creating in its wake record joblessness and rising inflation. The earlier Senator J.D. Vance would have views very different from MAGA extremists, some of whom were nominated to top jobs in the US government by Trump, only to mercifully have the Senate and the Courts strike the nomination down as withdrawn. The nominee in question was an avowed hater of nonwhites, especially Black Americans, and he had publicly declared that the Martin Luther King Jr holiday and the Black Lives Matter movement should be “consigned to the seven fires of hell”. Instead, in the uproar that followed, including among white Americans, it was the nominee that got tossed into the wastepaper basket.
Should Trump continue on his present politically suicidal course, Vance may become President of the US much earlier than January 20, 2029. And he may go on to win the subsequent Presidential election, unlike Vice-Presidents Nixon, Ford and Harris, who lost. However, this will happen only if the present hyper-MAGA avatar of Vice-President Vance gets replaced by the real J.D. Vance—the lad who triumphed over adversity since childhood, secured accolades for writing his life story, got elected a US Senator and later became Vice-President Vance. None of this would have happened, had Vance been stuck to the hyper-MAGA fringe. They all were won by the real J.D. Vance, who won a scholarship to a prestigious US college despite a dirt poor background, and who met and married the love of his life, caring not a whit that she was of the ethnicity of India. The sooner the Real J.D. Vance reemerges from the hyper-MAGA Vance, the better for the US and the Republican Party. Admirers across the world await the return of Vice-President J.D. Vance to the publicly stated beliefs and habits that catapulted him into the serial success he became.
