Evolution of a Cynic

JD Vance, the fiftieth vice-president of the United States and a likely Republican nominee for the 2028 presidential election, is the product of an extraordinary degree of self-creation and mythmaking, even by the standards of American political careers. He was born James Donald Bowman, the son of a single mother and a father who left when he was a toddler; at age six, having been adopted by his mother’s new husband, he became James David Hamel; graduating from law school in his late twenties, he took the last name of his beloved grandmother and became J.D. Vance. Even after he found fame with that name—as the author of the multimillion-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy (2016) and as one of the liberal media’s more prolific anti-Trump pundits—the tinkering continued, though at a more modest scale: when he ran for the Senate in 2021 he did so with a revised first name to go with his new hard-line MAGA political convictions, having dropped the periods between his initials to become JD Vance. This remains, at the time of this writing, the vice-president’s name.It is not unusual, of course, for an American political career to be built on the foundation of a life story. In 1995, when he wa...