A few nights ago as I watched the vice-presidential debate while simultaneously trying to figure out child care for an upcoming school break, I found myself idly wondering: WWJDD? What would JD do?
Column by Monica Hesse
Day care?
“‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people,” Vance tweeted back in 2021. In the same thread, he declared that “Normal Americans...want a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap daycare.” So presumably he wouldn’t use or recommend that.
Family?
Last month, when Vance was asked what could be done about lowering the cost of child care, he said: “Maybe grandma and grandpa [want] to help out a little bit more.” But Vance’s mom lives in Ohio, and his wife’s parents are professors in California, and Vance splits time between Cincinnati and a suburb of Washington. So I don’t know that grandparents could be his personal solution, either — even as he recommends it for others.
Quitting my job?
Vance works, of course. And, despite penning the Fairness for Stay-at-Home Parents Act, in which he described “mothers who choose to prioritize their child’s early development,” his own wife works as a corporate litigator. I can’t imagine her job comes with gobs of freedom and flexibility.
Someone’s got to watch the kids. (Secret nannies? Golden retrievers?) What’s the “Pleasantville” messaging he’s conveying, and how does that square with the modern juggling act he actually appears to be living?
WWJDD?
Vance, best-selling author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” has spent a good part of his literary and political career talking about how he thinks Americans should handle very personal matters of family. Not just what parents should do with their children but also what women should do with their uteruses and what couples should do with their marriages. With Vance vying to be Trump’s No. 2, his opinions about other people’s families now have national implications. And I have spent a good part of the campaign trying to figure out what he has in mind for us.
During Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, Vance was asked to explain his position on abortion. He launched into a story of personal experience: He knew multiple women growing up who had terminated their pregnancies. “One of them is actually very dear to me. And I know she’s watching tonight, and I love you. And she told me something a couple years ago that she felt like if she hadn’t had that abortion, that it would have destroyed her life because she was in an abusive relationship.”
It seemed like the perfect setup for Vance to acknowledge that sometimes abortion is the right choice — a lifesaving choice — for a desperate pregnant woman. But what next came out of his mouth was gobbledygook.
“What I take from that,” he went on, “as a Republican who proudly wants to protect innocent life in this country, who proudly wants to protect the vulnerable is that my party, we’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue where they frankly just don’t trust us.”
Vance next said that he and Donald Trump wanted to be “pro-family in every sense of the word.” He mentioned making it “easier for young families to afford a home so they can afford a place to raise that family” and supporting fertility treatments. (Note: In September, Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have protected IVF, and Vance skipped the vote.)
All well and good, but was it lack of trust in the Republican Party that caused his loved one to feel that an abortion saved her from a ruined life? Would the fertility treatments that Vance couldn’t even be bothered to vote to protect have made it easier for his loved one to birth a child she didn’t want — one that was, presumably, naturally conceived? Would any of these positions solve what appeared to be the real problem: This woman’s partner was abusing her and she didn’t want to trap herself in a dangerous lifelong relationship (even as divorced co-parents, maybe) with a violent man?
“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live,” he said in a 2021 interview, offering that the abortion debate needed to be reframed. But, of course, an unwanted pregnancy allowed to continue is, in fact, forcing a woman to bring the pregnancy to term.
So in this instance, the one that actually happened to his loved one, WWJDD?
There is a chasm between the idyllic family portrait that Vance says he would like to see play out in America — one where abortions are unnecessary and grandmas are child care — and the messy realities he has described encountering in his own life. There is a disconnect between the derivative cruelty he seems to now spout (see: “childless cat ladies”) and in the human experiences that apparently led him to these beliefs. It’s incoherent.
In 2023, Vance introduced legislation prohibiting the use of nonbinary “X” on U.S. passports because, in his words, there were only two genders. In 2022 while campaigning for Senate, he said he would vote against the Respect for Marriage Act, which provided federal protections for same-sex marriages. But earlier this year, a former friend and classmate — who identified as “gender queer” — released old correspondence between the two, in which Vance apologized for referring to his friend as a lesbian in “Hillbilly Elegy.”
“I recognize now that this may not accurately reflect how you think of yourself, and for that I am really sorry,” Vance wrote in emails published by the New York Times in July. He later added, “I hope you recognize that the description came from a place of ignorance, when I first started writing years ago.”
So, did he emerge from ignorance only to travel back into ignorance again? Was the original emergence a feint? Is this new relocated ignorance a ploy, to get in good with Trump’s base?
WWJDD? IDK!
A 2021 appearance Vance made at a Christian high school made news this summer when an unearthed video clip of Vance said that staying in “even violent” marriages was best for children. Aside from the fact that exposing children to violence seems like a terrible idea — find me a family therapist who disagrees — it’s hard to reconcile this statement with even Vance’s own famous origin story. Yes, his grandmother never divorced his grandfather — a “violent drunk,” according to Vance’s memoir — and yes, they raised him. But how well did that work out for their kids? Vance’s aunt entered an abusive relationship of her own, Vance writes in “Hillbilly Elegy.” His mom, he shares, became addicted to drugs, exposed her son to a series of unstable father figures and failed him repeatedly throughout his childhood.
There’s never a way to predict cause and effect, of course. Vance, raised by those same people, became a Yale-trained lawyer. But your heart breaks for all of the children of that family.
When I listen to the fantasy narratives Vance tells about family in America — how he thinks they should live, who he thinks they should be composed of, how he thinks they should come to be — this is what so often comes to mind: a brokenhearted child. A boy who grew up in chaos, abandonment, violence and poverty and who spent it all dreaming of the opposite.
And then, somehow, through determination, luck and natural intelligence clawed his way into the sort of Norman Rockwell existence he’d always wanted. A happy marriage. A lucrative career. Beautiful children. “For both of my kids, they didn’t grow up with a positive family unit,” Vance’s mother, Beverly Aikins, recently told the New York Times. “I know that they seemed to gravitate towards that in their adulthood.”
Analyzing “Hillbilly Elegy” for the New Yorker, Jessica Winter unpacked Vance’s preoccupation with “traditional” family — mom, dad, kids, every child exclusively cared for by loving mothers rather than “crap daycare” — and describes it as such: “It is clear, on a primal, emotional level, why Vance sees this as the better deal than what he got. But what results is a blinkered, grotesquely narcissistic vision of the social contract — an identity politics of one grown child.” Is Vance, in other words, trying to legislate the country into the family dynamic he wished he’d been born into?
Maybe that’s partly right. Maybe it’s even mostly right. But what continually baffles me about JD Vance is the fact that sometimes it’s not clear whether even he believes in the vision he’s selling. He doesn’t even appear to be living the vision he’s selling.
I keep asking WWJDD, and honestly, I wonder if he wakes up every morning not knowing the answer himself.
