Like many an elder millennial, JD Vance once had a blog. Two, actually. The lawyer turned writer turned senator turned venture capitalist turned Donald Trump’s running mate launched his first blog during his 2005 deployment to Iraq. It was called The Ruminations of JD Hamel, because that was the name he was ruminating under at the time. Vance has gone by a few names. He has also gone through a hell of a lot of political opinions.
His second blog, called The Hillbilly Elite, was launched in 2010, when he was a 26-year-old at Yale Law School. It was meant to help him parse his feelings about being an “Appalachian white boy … training at the world’s premier center for elites”. When I say “feelings”, I don’t mean silly little girly feelings. This was serious stuff. “So it’s like a diary,” his first entry explained, “only far more masculine.”
Vance may soon become one of the most powerful people in the world, so there is widespread interest in figuring out exactly who he is and what, if anything, he truly believes. His handful of blog posts have been picked through for clues. Do they tell us anything? Well, they certainly suggest that the man who has gone viral for railing against “childless cat ladies” has always had weird views about gender. In a 2005 post about leaving his family to go to Iraq, for example, Vance wrote the following: “Yesterday was incredibly emotional for me. I honestly can say that I felt more like a female than I think I ever have or will.” Females, eh? They are always so darn emotional!
Despite him being so tough and masculine, you have to wonder if Vance may be feeling a tad emotional at the moment. Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, has called the senator a weirdo and a bunch of his party colleagues have gleefully followed suit. His debut as Trump’s running mate has been a disaster and polls suggest nobody really likes him. His own party is second-guessing him and there have even been rumours Trump might dump Vance in favour of Nikki Haley. If politics is a bust, perhaps he can start blogging again.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
