From being a ‘never Trump’ guy to now being his running mate in the upcoming election as Vice President. J.D. Vance is ready to support the former 45th president’s campaign of “Make America Great Again.”

James David Vance was born in Middletown, Ohio on August 2, 1984. The 39-year-old joined the U.S. Marine Corps shortly after graduating high school and took on the role of a combat correspondent. J.D. has grown in a family that faced poverty, low-paying jobs, and drug abuse, he noted this all in his memoir,
H​illbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

The politician gave readers a glimpse into his life growing up, and how he had to witness many issues. “I was like a lot of kids who grew up in this environment. I was not doing especially well in school, I was starting to experiment with drugs and alcohol,” he said during an interview with Hoover Instituion in 2016.

He noted in his memoir, “We didn’t live a peaceful life in a small nuclear family. We lived in a chaotic life in big groups of aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins.”

James recalled that the reason as to why his culture may have an addiction with opioid is because of the economy. He told Channel 4 News in 2016, “The economy in this area [Kentucky] has been really hard hit, you know, these are areas that depended on coal mines, on steel mills, on another manufacture industries that just don’t exist anymore or atleast don’t exist in quite the volume needed to support a local economy. So what’s happened is that as people have lost jobs, people have lost hope. They’ve really, I think in some ways, turned over to other habits, or other things to try to dull that pain.” 

“That’s a big part of where this opioid crisis comes from, it’s not just people who like drugs or want to be addicted to drugs. It’s that they’re really trying to find something to do, something to dull that pain that comes from living in areas that are really struggling.”