School Taught JD Vance to See a Divided Nation — and to Use That Division

The Washington Post / Hannah Natanson

17:30 JST, August 1, 2024

On a trip home to Ohio soon after starting at Yale Law School, JD Vance stopped for gas and noticed a woman in a Yale T-shirt. When he asked about it, she said her nephew attended the Ivy League school – and asked whether Vance did, too.

“I had to choose: Was I a Yale Law student, or was I a Middletown kid with hillbilly grandparents?” Vance recalled in his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”

If he admitted going to Yale, he and the woman “could exchange pleasantries,” Vance wrote. But if he denied his Yale ties, the woman would deem him one of “the unsophisticates of Ohio [who] clung to their guns and religion.” An unbridgeable gap would open: The woman would move to “the other side of an invisible divide,” Vance wrote.

His fear in that moment has since become a theory he often repeats: that America is a divided nation, split between liberal elites and regular, conservative people. It was a keynote theme of his best-selling book, which earned national acclaim, became a movie and paved his way to the U.S. Senate – and, this summer, helped him earn the vice-presidential nod from Donald Trump.

In a speech accepting the nomination at the Republican National Convention this month, Vance sounded the same note, lamenting the “divide between the few, with their power and comfort in Washington, and the rest of us.” Then he promised to surmount it: “I will be a vice president,” he said, “who never forgets where he came from.”

It was his years at Ohio State University and Yale Law that taught Vance to see America as divided, and how to use that division, according to a review of his public and private writings at Ohio State and Yale, as well as interviews with more than a dozen of Vance’s friends, former classmates and professors. At first, Vance pitched himself as an author who could explain the divide, people interviewed said. In later years, he became a politician who would build his appeal around it.

A spokeswoman for the Vance campaign declined to comment.

Opponents allege that Vance is drawing on skills and insight gained through his privileged education to exploit national division for personal and political gain.

“He is using his tremendous intelligence and thoughtfulness to deliberately choose contempt as a political strategy, as opposed to building the bridges he used to talk about building,” said Josh McLaurin, a Democratic state senator in Georgia who was Vance’s roommate at Yale and is an outspoken critic of his politics.

Supporters agreed that school made Vance more aware of the country’s political, cultural and socioeconomic split. He used that knowledge, and his experience with the working and wealthy classes, to reach people on either side, they said.

“He had his feet in different camps [at Ohio State and Yale], which shaped a lot of who he is,” said a friend from Vance’s college years, who has remained close to the lawmaker and who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his family from a volatile political environment. “It allowed him to develop a brand of politics tailored to what people care about.”

At 39, Vance is relatively young to reach such national prominence. His formative college and law school years have become pivotal, in his own telling, to the public figure and now vice-presidential nominee he has become.

During that gas station encounter in 2011, though, Vance had just begun to see his country as fundamentally fractured, and to figure out his place within it. He lied to the woman, telling her he didn’t go to Yale, Vance wrote in his book.

Then he drove away.

Becoming ‘the cultural alien’

At Ohio State, fresh off a four-year stint in the Marine Corps, Vance fit in, but he didn’t stand out, his classmates said.

Simon Kapenda, who said he took classes with him, recalled Vance as smart, quiet and punctual. The only reason Kapenda remembered Vance, years later, was because of the time a professor asked veterans to stand in class.

Kapenda was astonished to see Vance rise. “He was like a baby boy … clean-shaven guy, short hair,” Kapenda said. “I’m looking at him, this little boy – he looked very young then – and I’m thinking, ‘He was actually in the Marines?’”

Vance had a few nerdier habits in college, said one friend from those years, including his love for Lord of the Rings and a yen for the game “Magic: The Gathering.” But mostly, “JD was just like a very normal guy,” the friend said. He was openly Republican – sharing his strong support for John McCain in a 2008 interview with the student newspaper – but that raised no eyebrows at Ohio State, the friend said.

Vance developed a circle of close buddies, almost all from his hometown, the friend said. Vance later wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy” that “virtually all” of his Ohio State friends were from southwest Ohio, making college feel “very familiar.” Vance drank socially, but not to excess, the friend recalled.

His easygoing life was upended at Yale Law.

When Vance arrived in New Haven, Conn., he was suddenly “the cultural alien,” he wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy,” bewildered by Yale’s “bizarre … social rituals,” the elegant cocktail receptions and banquets hosted in gorgeous Gothic buildings.

McLaurin, who attended the University of Georgia as an undergraduate, said he and Vance were among a small number of students who came from state colleges. He remembered arriving at one party where nobody could figure out how to tap a keg. Finally, McLaurin said, someone called out: “Where are the state schools? Bring them over!”

Early on, Vance drew critical feedback from a professor known for saying public school students had no place at Yale Law, which should only admit Ivy League and Stanford graduates, according to an account in his book and a friend he told at the time.

At Yale, “I can understand why anybody would feel like an outsider, coming from a state school,” McLaurin said.

Vance’s financial status also undermined his sense of belonging, he wrote in his book, calling himself “one of the poorest kids” on campus. He paid for Yale through a combination of student loans, generous financial aid and the Yellow Ribbon Program, a Department of Veterans Affairs initiative that helps veterans afford private, graduate or out-of-state schools.

But his political views left him feeling most isolated.

The majority of campus was left-leaning, several Yale attendees said. Vance soon found a half-dozen other students who were moderate or conservative and who formed a tightknit subgroup, said Sam Lim, another member.

The group didn’t spend all of their time talking politics – they played fantasy football, threw darts at a local bar, held movie nights and took a spring break road trip to Savannah, Ga. – but their right-leaning views, and lower- and middle-class upbringings, glued them together, according to Lim.

The group’s irritation with Yale’s liberal orthodoxy crested whenever students began discussing politics over a Yale Law chat group known as the Wall. Lim remembered exchanges about affirmative action, in which it was taboo to offer any criticism. Vance, he said, was especially careful to shield his political views to avoid blowback.

“We would have our own internal discussion because we knew we couldn’t say things schoolwide,” Lim said. “JD, even then, was more political about what he would say, but we would talk about how it was just a very liberal place.”

Dan Driscoll, who started at Yale a year after Vance but became a lifelong friend, recalled Vance as being frustrated by his inability to speak freely.

“Thought partnership or sparring is hard to do when it’s so weighted to one side,” said Driscoll, who now serves as a senior adviser to the Vance campaign. “He found that a bit intellectually stifling.”

Occasionally, though, Vance’s restraint cracked – as in April 2013, when he wrote to the Wall message group to complain about a bad experience with the Internal Revenue Service.

The IRS was asking to verify information on his tax return before sending him a refund, he wrote in a message obtained by The Washington Post, which proves “that my conservative political beliefs are beyond reproach.” He added, “If I don’t get my refund by the time I graduate … I’ll be left to conclude that the Obama administration targets political enemies through tax laws.”

He signed off the message: “My apologies for the spam.”

In interviews, three Yale classmates separately recalled that message as their strongest memory of Vance – and a strikingly odd and bitter use of the Wall.

Tapping into a ‘core cultural divide’

Whatever he felt about the school, Vance quickly found ways to make Yale work for him.

Other students recalled him as able to smooth and shape himself to fit any setting. He “had no trouble bridging seemingly disparate social groups,” said James Eimers, who attended Yale at the same time Vance did.

He at times espoused liberal viewpoints, classmates said. Once, Vance worked with a women’s group, now known as Yale Law Women+ – and which today describes itself as advocating for “women and traditionally underrepresented gender identities” – to recruit students to attend a conversation about making legal practice “family-friendly,” according to an email obtained by The Post.

He also invited a Marine Corps major to campus to discuss the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and “what challenges still remain,” as well as “life in the military as a woman, the military’s approach to transgendered individuals, the combat exclusion of women, and so forth,” according to another email obtained by The Post. “It should be very interesting,” Vance wrote. “Please come.”

Yale classmate Sofia Nelson, once a close friend, said Vance shared “progressive-minded” views in class and in private during their law school years – offering support for LGBTQ+ rights and voicing concern over police brutality and racial equity.

“At the time, I certainly believed it was genuine; now I suspect that he pulled a fast one on me,” said Nelson, who is transgender.

Nelson also recalled Vance waxing “vicious” in his critique of Yale’s “elite” culture, but noted he wasted no time in figuring out how to plumb the school’s vast resources, especially its well-connected professors who could provide entree to prestigious summer jobs.

Vance’s first summer, he finagled his way into a job with Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) with help from one of his professors, according to an account Vance published in a pamphlet put out by Yale Law’s Career Development Office.

“People get jobs on the Hill in a variety of ways, but the common denominator seems to be that you must know somebody,” he wrote. Vance didn’t know anybody, he wrote, but “a professor wrote me a very good letter of recommendation.”

Once in D.C., Vance was enthralled by his access to power: “It was very cool to be an ‘insider,’” he wrote in the pamphlet.

An especially important connection was with Amy Chua, a popular professor with a reputation for mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds – but who has come under fire in recent years for allegations of inappropriate socializing with students. Chua has said she did nothing wrong.

“Amy was an incredibly powerful force in JD’s life,” Driscoll said.

Chua – who did not respond to requests for comment – convinced Vance that he should write a book about his upbringing, according to a joint interview that Vance and Chua gave to the Atlantic in 2017.

He would soon follow her advice, turning his life story into career jet fuel.

In Vance’s final year at Yale, he convened a reading group about “social decline in white America,” meant to dissect why the White working class had become “the least socially and economically mobile group” in the United States, according to emails obtained by The Post. He sent attendees a reading schedule that included “The White Underclass,” “Appalachia’s Path to Dependency” and “The Hill-Billies Come to Detroit.”

At the group’s first gathering, Vance said he was thinking about writing a book, said John James “J.J.” Snidow, a member of the group. In subsequent meetings, Vance raised a lot of the topics he talks about in “Hillbilly Elegy,” using the reading group – which included conservative and liberal students, Snidow said – to test out his ideas.

“We got a very early peek at what the rest of the country was eventually going to see” in the book, Snidow said. “He really wanted to see what people would think.”

Some saw hypocrisy in Vance’s use of what Yale had to give.

“He was simultaneously finding resources for his own advancement at the school while criticizing or being skeptical of many other aspects of it,” said McLaurin, his former roommate. “He fancied himself an outsider but ended up using resources at the school … to get his book deal.”

In the years after graduation, Vance drew partly on his Yale-fueled book success to ascend traditional rungs of power, winning a U.S. Senate seat representing Ohio in 2022. He also began to hone his message about two warring Americas, testing its political efficacy, according to his public and private writings and people who knew him.

By the 2016 presidential election, Vance was closely watching Trump’s success and pondering what drove it, according to an email he sent to his classmate Nelson in November of that year – which Nelson provided to The Post – as part of a years-long conversation first reported by the New York Times. Trump had tapped into a “feeling of alienation from mainstream culture,” Vance wrote to Nelson. “If there’s a feeling of resentment that drives Trumpism, it’s the resentment of other white people who think they’re better than you.”

He added: “There’s a core cultural divide … that is driving the ship. That’s my guess.”

A year later, when Vance returned to Yale in 2017 to give a talk about “Hillbilly Elegy,” he spent much of the half-hour speech discussing how the university introduced him to America’s ruling upper class, said Christopher Cappello, a student who attended. Cappello was jarred, he said, by the way Vance distanced himself from so-called elites, while adopting their mannerisms and dress. The talk was held in a snazzy ballroom, and most everyone was wearing boat shoes and blazers, Cappello said.

“The ease with which Vance presented himself in that setting made clear, despite the difficulties he was describing, that he had very successfully assimilated,” Cappello said. “He gave off this impression: He wanted to be everything to everybody.”

In more recent years, Vance has called higher education “the enemy,” proposed legislation targeting colleges and urged fellow Republicans to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” He wrote on the social media platform X in January that “elite universities … give credentials that signal fake merit rather than rely on real excellence.”

In the same post, Vance exhorted so-called normal Americans to “ignore,” “mock” and “scorn” “our entire elite,” from public health experts to economists to doctors to attorneys. “You are ruled by thousands of people who are … mediocre,” Vance wrote, before urging his audience to throw off the yoke.

Most recently, he wrote the foreword to a forthcoming book by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that led publication of Project 2025, a 900-plus-page plan for the next Republican administration that Trump called “ridiculous and abysmal.” (On Tuesday, leaders of Project 2025 announced they were shuttering operations after facing fury from Trump advisers and critical news coverage, The Post reported.)

Roberts’s book argues that institutions including the Education Department and Ivy League colleges are “too corrupt to save” and must be “dissolved,” according to publishing materials. In a review, Vance wrote that Roberts is articulating “a genuinely new future for conservatism,” adding that “it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

George L. Priest, a Yale professor who taught Vance, said the candidate he sees onstage, and the policies Vance advances, do not resemble the student he knew. In Priest’s course on antitrust law, the professor recalled, Vance seemed to accept what Priest had to say in favor of a free market.

But now, “the basic lessons of the course he doesn’t seem to have remembered, as he describes his support for tariffs and opposition to immigration,” Priest said.

Nelson, Vance’s Yale classmate, said they are disgusted to see Vance discard his support for LGBTQ+ rights: “He’s willing to adopt whatever positions to amass money and power. … His only real core value is advancing his career.”

A former classmate and good friend at Yale, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his career, said he saw no hypocrisy.

Asked whether Vance had changed since law school, the classmate said Vance is now savvy enough to “maintain MAGA credibility and still work with people from the other side of the aisle.” He added, “The thing I see in him, he’s gotten to a point where he’s learned, he knows – he’s learned how politics works.”