Still serving · 2025–
JD Vance
Vice President
Middletown to Yale to the Senate to the second chair. First Marine to be vice president. First millennial in the job.
- On the file
- 5
- Of 13
- 2
- The building
- In
Career
Awards, firsts, the work
Enlisted. Iraq. Corporal.
After Middletown High he joined the Marine Corps. Four years, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, a tour in Iraq as a military journalist. He left a corporal with a Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal and a Good Conduct Medal. The GI Bill paid for Ohio State.
SourceWhite HouseYale Law, then the Midwest book
Ohio State, then Yale Law, class of 2013, with a stint on the Yale Law Journal. A short run in corporate law and Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital. The résumé that was supposed to stay in a firm instead became a Senate race.
SourceCongress.gov bioguideHillbilly Elegy, a New York Times bestseller
The memoir of a rust-belt childhood — addiction in the house, a grandmother who held the line — became the book a country used to explain 2016. It put a working-class Ohio voice on the bestseller list and, later, on a Netflix screen.
SourceEncyclopaedia BritannicaUnited States senator from Ohio
His first race. He won. In the Senate he pushed the border, a manufacturing floor that still exists in Ohio, and the working-class brief the book had named. Two years later he was on the ticket.
SourcePoliticoVice president — first Marine, first millennial
Sworn in at 40. The first Marine Corps veteran to sit in the job, and the first millennial. Tie-breaker, overseas brief, the face of the next bench. Middletown to the Naval Observatory is the American story he keeps telling.
SourceWhite House